Sustainable and stylish: meet the brands looking to attract consumers away from fast fashion

The fashion industry is a €2.8 trillion behemoth that includes everything from clothing to bags, shoes to sportswear. But the big moneymaker is fast fashion: the rapid production of clothes sold at rock bottom prices.

The market is flooded daily with thousands of new designs, making it a lucrative segment. But it all comes at a high environmental cost.

Common fast fashion brands include Zara, H&M, UNIQLO, GAP, Forever 21, and TopShop. The equivalent of one garbage truck of clothes is dumped in landfills or burned every second in the U.S., according to a 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K.-based charity working towards a circular economy. According to the report, an estimated €475 billion is lost annually because of clothing that’s hardly worn or not recycled. 

In total, the industry dumps 92 million tonnes of textile waste each year. And it consumes 93 billion cubic metres of water - enough to meet the needs of five million people.

One of the most effective ways of creating ethical clothing is by sourcing eco-friendly fabric, and one company that’s been in the fibre and textile business for more than 50 years is Lenzing Group. You may have noticed while buying a piece of clothing, that it comes with a TENCEL tag. That’s Lenzing’s main fabric brand, produced with circularity in mind to minimize impact on the environment.

Stephan Sielaff, the CEO of Lenzing Group, believes there is a long road ahead for the industry to become sustainable.

“I think it's always good to think in numbers and zero is, of course, a target: when you talk about being carbon-neutral, zero carbon…” he says. “But think about where we are today. We are today in an industry which has a recycling rate of one percent one, right?  We as an