ICAC 79th Plenary Meeting
Online: 06 December 2021 – 09 December 2021
Fortifying the Cotton Supply Chain: New Approaches to New Challenges
Ingun speaks about labelling at The International Cotton Advisory Commitee’s 79th Plenary Meeting.
Responsible Fashion: How do we make our ideas a reality?
Symposium hosted by Instituto Maragoni, London
24th November 2021, 9:30 am – 4:30 pm GMT
This online symposium offers a space to propose and discuss radical new ways to envisage fashion and how these may be implemented.
About this event
The pandemic has provided space to step back and to reflect, to ask questions about the meaning, value and potential of fashion in a post-Covid world. How can the industry move forward in a responsible way? How must it change? What does responsible fashion really mean? What is it that we actually want to sustain? We know the problems, so let’s find solutions.
We will present our work with wool during the symposium.
Click here to see the recordings from the event (researchiml.com).
Fossil Fashion: How Green Growth is Undermining the Circular Economy
Why the fashion industry, driven by the green growth notion, cannot recycle its way out of the climate crisis
By Tone Skårdal Tobiasson
Tone is co-editor of “Local, Slow and Sustainable Fashion Fibres: Wool as a Fabric For Change”, from Palgrave Macmillan, out on December 18, 2021.
As the world comes to terms with the climate crisis and the environmental devastation of our over-consumption, we are increasingly being told that switching to greener products will not only save us, but be good for the economy. This is the principle behind “green growth”, which encourages us to continue consuming as long as the products we buy are more sustainable. But could it be that someone is pulling wool over our eyes?
The fashion industry has become one of the main culprits in the blaming-and-shaming for carbon-emissions, and numbers have been thrown around at a rate that rivals fast fashion. One of the most used statistics is that textiles in 2015 emitted 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent or more than maritime shipping and international flights combined, a number that has since been challenged. However, the fashion industry is far from off the hook.
Make the Label Count
Wednesday the 13th October, Ingun Grimstad Klepp participated in the panel discussion at the launch of the Make the Label Count campaign – an international coalition of organisations that want to ensure that the EU’s new labelling system for sustainable clothing is credible and valid. They are critical of the EU commission’s proposed use of Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), because it does not account for important environmental impacts and does not correspond with the EU’s sustainability goals. The standard does not either present a complete picture of a product’s environmental footprint.
The event was opened by Livia Firth, as a keynote speaker, and the other participants in the debate were Paola Miliorini form the EU commission and Pascal Morand from the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode.
You can watch the full event here (youtube).
Click here to read more about the campaign and how to join it (maketelabelcount.org).
Out of the Wardrobe
Webinar: 21st of October 2021, 10:45 – 14:00 CEST
An international panel discuss how wardrobe studies can help us to understand how what we wear can make a sustainable future
About this event
The remit of wardrobe studies is not limited to actual garments or textile objects, although it often starts there, but to consider the way clothes communicate notions of self, emotion, place, connectivity and relationships that hitherto would be unspoken and/or rendered mute. Wardrobe studies offer a way in which these relationships or clothing experiences can be recorded, interpreted and also utilized outside of the realms of academia to understand the ways in which clothing is selected, used, kept, discarded and so on, in order to change or challenge clothing consumption, to empower the user, to improve clothing manufacture or indeed to revitalize or instigate it. Wardrobe studies are concerned with clothing behaviours in everyday life, from start to finish, birth to death and everything in-between.
Schedule
9.45 – opening welcome and introduction ( Dr Jo Turney)
10.00 – Keynote speaker – Dr Ingun Grimstad Klepp (Oslo Metropolitan University) Professor in Clothing and sustainability The presentation will provide a short overview of the history of wardrobe studies and how the method was developed through collaboration between clothing, design and fashion researchers the last 20 years. It will then look at what characterizes the method and why it is so useful when working towards sustainable development. Ingun will provide examples from ongoing projects where the method is being used in very different ways, from improving LCA for clothing to understanding wardrobe dynamics. This includes using the method for quantitative as well as qualitative purposes. Examples of ongoing studies at SIFO are CHANGE and Wasted Textiles. In CHANGE the main objective is occasions and variety in couples’ wardrobes. You can read more about the study here: CHANGE: Environmental systems shift in clothing consumption – OsloMet. Wasted Textiles will map textiles that is going out of use in households to increase knowledge about the ways this waste is generated and disposed of, and its fibre composition. You can read more about the study here: Wasted Textiles – OsloMet. Currently, the researchers are re-analyzing material from two earlier wardrobe studies conducted at SIFO for potential use in both CHANGE and Wasted Textiles. Although most studies that use the method have an environmental viewpoint, it can also be used to examine other perspectives. One example is the project BELONG, which examines children’s sense of belonging through their relationship to people, places and to their possessions. You can read more about the project here: Practices and policies of belonging among minority and majority children of low-income families (BELONG) – OsloMet. Overall, this presentation will give you an insight into the method and its rich potential in gathering knowledge about clothing and us, their wearers.
11.00 – Dr Anna-Mari Almila (independent scholar) – Older Men’s Wardrobes
11.20 – Dr Else Skjold, (Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Head of Fashion, Clothing and Textile; New Landscapes for Change) – Wardrobe Studies and Pedagogy
11.40 – Dr Liudmila Alebieva (Editor Russian Fashion Theory, Higher School of Economics, Moscow) – Curating Wardrobes
12.00 – Dr Valerie Wilson Trower (London College of Fashion) – Expatriate western women’s wardrobes: Hong Kong, 1960 – 1997.
12.20 – Sharon Williams (WSA) –Wardrobes at WSA
12.40 – questions and round-up
#WSAFashionTalks
#ClothingCultures
Klick here to watch the recording of the event (donkeydave.co.uk).
Make the Label Count campaign virtual launch event
Webinar: 12th of October 2021, 11:00-13:00 CEST
The campaign
Textiles are a priority sector in the EU’s plans to shift to a climate-neutral, circular economy, where products are designed to be more durable, reusable, repairable, recyclable, and energy-efficient.
As part of these efforts, the European Commission is planning to introduce new sustainability labelling for clothing. This aims to empower consumers when making purchasing decisions and positively influence the drive for a sustainable economy.
But what if the labelling system being proposed doesn’t account for key environmental impacts?
Event program
11:00 AM – 11:05 AM – Welcome and Keynote
Livia Firth, Founder and Creative Director, Eco-Age
11:05 AM – 11:55 AM – Panel Discussion: How to Make the Label Count
- Paul Adamson (Moderator), Chairman, Forum Europe
- Paola Migliorini, Deputy Head of Unit, European Commission, DG Environment, Sustainable Production, Products and Consumption
- Carlo Calenda, Member, European Parliament
- Pascal Morand, Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode
- Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Professor in Clothing and Sustainability, Oslo Metropolitan University
11:55 AM – 12:00 PM – Closing Remarks
Dalena White, Secretary General of the International Wool Textile Organisation (IWTO)
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – Networking Lunch
Watch the recording from the official Make the Label Count campaign virtual launch event using this link: http://makethelabelcount.eu/
You can follow the campaign at the Make The Label Count campaign website (makethelabelcount.org) and social media: LinkedIn and Twitter.
Local, Slow and Sustainable Wool: System Change in the Fashion Sector with Wool as the Red Thread
Webinar: 8 September 2021 12:15–1:00 PM
University of Oslo
The lecture by professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp and journalist Tone Skårdal Tobiasson invites the audience into the world of textiles, where currently an important environmental battle about how “sustainability” should be defined and understood is being fought. The presenters guide the audience through the sad fate of wool in Europe, both quite concretely (about 80% is thrown away) and in the comparison tools where wool is designated as an even bigger environmental loser. They will showcase the role of the small and local in the inevitable transformation ahead and how green-washing is flooding not only marketing but also in policy strategies with a circular focus.
Product lifetime in European and Norwegian policies
Nina Heidenstrøm, Pål Strandbakken, Vilde Haugrønning and Kirsi Laitala
Abstract
The objective in this report is to better understand how the increased product lifetime option has been positioned in policies over
the past twenty years. By means of policy document analysis, we explore product lifetime positioning in the EU’s circular economy
policies, Norwegian political party programs and official documents, environmental NGO documents, consumer organisation policies
and product policies. Overall, we find little focus on product lifetime between 2000-2015, however, there has been a massive
increase over the past five years. There is still a long way to go in developing appropriate policy instruments to address product
lifetime.
WOOLUME: Mapping the market for acoustic and sound absorbing products made of wool
Anna Schytte Sigaard and Vilde Haugrønning
Abstract
This report is the first deliverable from work package 2 of the WOOLUME project. The main goal of WOOLUME is to explore different ways of using wool from Polish Mountain Sheep to achieve better utilisation of resources and value creation. The aim of the report has been to map the market for acoustic and sound absorbing products made of wool to examine the potential to introduce coarse wool as a material. This has been done through desktop research and interviews with a focus on the qualities of wool as a natural product. Findings show that though man-made materials dominate the market for acoustic products due to lower prices, wool is preferred as a material due to its natural properties as well as aesthetics. Producers using wool consider their products to be high-end, intended for people who want very good quality products and who are willing to pay a higher price to achieve this. However, few producers use coarse wool in these products, and many are made of pure Merino wool. Using Merino wool which is often considered of very fine quality due to the low micron-count does not correspond with the ideal of good utilisation of resources. Therefore, we are proposing to utilise coarse wool which today is discarded as a mere by-product to meat-production.
Merino could instead be used for products where fineness and softness are important factors such as for clothing. In addition, we argue for the rawness and uniqueness of the look of coarse wool as positive in terms of aesthetics and as something that adds to the position of acoustic products made of wool as high-end.
Clothing longevity: the relationship between the number of users, how long and how many times garments are used
Kirsi Laitala & Ingun Grimstad Klepp
Abstract
Reuse of clothing is a central strategy in circular economy for keeping the resources and materials in the loop longer. This paper studies the correlation between clothing service lifespans measured in years, number of wears and number of users, and whether there is a difference in length of lifespans between new and preowned garments. The analysis is based on an international quantitative wardrobe survey conducted in China, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA with 53 461 registered garments. Results show that newer garments are used more actively than the older garments. Garments that are less than two years old are used about 30 times per year, while garments that are over 15 years old are only used about 3 times a year. Second-hand garments are worn on average 30% times less by the current user than garments that were acquired as new. Garments that the user anticipates donating or selling are worn 22% times less than garments that are planned to be discarded. The results show that reuse is beneficial for increasing the clothing lifespans, but it does not increase the active wear as much as expected. These findings have theoretical, managerial and political implications on which measures contribute to the longest garment lifespans with the least environmental impact and which kind of measures could help to implement these changes. This should be considered in life cycle assessments where various disposal methods are compared, as well as in policy development where in increasing the lifespan with first user should be focused more on.