BUS602: Marketing Management

The high resource intensity of clothing production makes it the primary source of environmental degradation in the clothing life cycle, with particularly heavy environmental impacts from voluminous use of energy, water, and chemicals. The production of one pair of jeans, for instance, requires 3625 liters of water, 3 kilograms of chemicals, 400 MJ of energy, and 16 m2 of harvested land. The clothing industry is thus high on energy consumption but low on energy use efficiency, with most energy in clothing production consumed during weaving, spinning, and chemical processing. During 2008, for example, textile and clothing production used 1074 billion kWh of electricity (or 132 million tons of coal).

Clothing production also consumes vast amounts of water, a resource that is becoming increasingly scarce across the globe because of climate change, pollution, and overuse. The primary source of water usage is in the production of cotton, a water-intensive crop that may need as much as 8.5 tons per kilogram. The fabric preparation process of desizing, scouring, and bleaching also depends on water throughout, and nearly all textile dying and application of specialty or finishing chemicals occurs in water baths. Even worse, following each process, the fabrics are washed to remove used chemicals and the water is returned to the ecosystem, often without any purification efforts, which leads to water pollution. Hence, in addition to an estimated nine trillion liters of water per year, textile processing also uses about 25% of the chemicals employed in production globally. Even synthetic fibers, such as polyester, although developed in factories independent of water, have a negative impact because of their derivation from fossil hydrocarbons.

Naturally, the environmental concerns arising from the production phase are highly interconnected with those from the purchase phase, although in this latter phase, consumers, through their purchasing power, have the volitional capacity to choose items made of more environmentally friendly and higher quality materials (e.g., lyocell fibers such as Tencel®) than are conventional. Consumers also decide when new clothing items are needed and how many should be purchased. Hence, the purchase phase is critically important to clothing's environmental impact through its strong interaction with the other life cycle phases. For example, whereas garment quality inherently influences maintenance and eventual necessity for disposal, the sheer volume of clothing items sold has profound implications for the environmental impact of the production phase. Over recent decades, this volume has been rising, with private consumption of clothing and shoes in Sweden increasing by 53% from 1999 to 2009, including an average purchase of nine t-shirts per year. In America, as of 2013, the average consumer purchased 64 clothing items per year with an associated expenditure of $907, approximately $14.17 per item. However, most consumers still do not link their clothing consumption patterns with environmental degradation.

In fact, this increasing consumption comes at a high environmental cost, one that Roos et al. suggested can be most efficiently reduced by increasing the service life of clothing items whenever feasible to lower overall consumption rates. Another possible solution is to use more environmentally friendly materials, which, although increasingly more available in clothing stores, still represent only a niche on the global market. Even when such materials are relatively plentiful - for example, organic cotton with a market value of $15.7 billion for an annual production of 112,488 tons of fiber - it is unclear to what extent consumers are willing to pay an additional cost for clothing made from these materials. The empirical evidence on this issue is inconclusive: whereas over half of Ha-Brookshire and Norum's respondents were willing to pay a premium for t-shirts made from U.S.-grown organic cotton, participants in a study by Ellis et al. reported that when purchasing clothes for themselves, they were unwilling to pay a premium for an organic cotton t-shirt.

Another important aspect is clothing acquisition, alternative forms of which have slowly become more popular (particularly in urban areas) in the form of clothing libraries, swap markets, fashion rentals, and second-hand stores. Although these alternative business models may represent a more environmentally friendly approach to clothing acquisition, their ability to lower clothing's environmental impact may be highly dependent on the consumer's transportation mode to and from the store. That is, if using alternative models involves increased consumer transportation (e.g., more driving), the environmental benefits are likely to evaporate.