What are the most sustainable fabrics you can buy? Which fabrics should you avoid? Here’s what you need to know…

There are two sides to fashion sustainability: the ethical conduct of the manufacturers/sellers, and the fabric itself.

The leading cause of industry unsustainability is fast fashion. That is the trend toward inexpensive, rapidly produced clothing for a mass market by retailers responding to the latest trends – sometimes every two weeks.

The emphasis is on quantity over quality and rapid turnover rather than championing classic styles, quality fabric and construction. To achieve this, companies chose to manufacture oversees where labor is cheap and environmental regulations can be ignored.

Fifty years ago, 95% of the clothing sold in the US was manufactured here; today that figure is 2%. The average household spent the equivalent of $4,000 on 25 garments; today $1,800 is spent on 70 garments. That buying statistic translates to 80 billion pieces of clothing consumed worldwide every year.

The bottom line of fast fashion is disposable clothing. 12.8 million tons or 70 pounds per person ends up in landfills. Only a fraction of that clothing can decompose, the rest will remain intact for centuries.

The starting point of this unsustainable story is that huge amounts of natural resources that go into creating clothing through water, power and arable land use requiring increased pesticide and fertilizer use, CO2 emissions, chemical pollution and desertification of land.

Even though the ethical business practices of companies is important, this article will focus on the starting point – the different levels of fabric sustainability, before, during and after manufacture.

This is only one part of the overall industry, but does have the greatest impact in protecting the planet. In terms of the greatest polluters, the fashion industry is second only to the oil industry.