Are European brands and retailers serious about their sustainability plans? Because quadrupling your carbon emissions is a pretty odd way of showing it.
Europe's apparel importers inexplicably airfreighted 28% more clothing in the first ten months of 2010 than a year earlier, though total apparel imports from outside the EU grew just 1.4%
As a result, airfreight, which had been falling since 2005 as retailers adopted "ethical" sourcing policies, accounted for its highest share of imported clothes since the EU's statistical agency began publishing the information in 2001.
The environmental impact is extraordinary. Studies by the UK agriculture ministry DEFRA show that a kilogramme transported 10,000 km by air emits 44 times as much carbon as the same kilogramme seafreighted. With surface intercontinental transport accounting for just 7% of garments' energy use, the abrupt switch to airfreight means Europe's garment importers almost quadrupled their total carbon emissions between 2009 and 2010 – more than wiping out any beneficial effect of their widely promoted and booming sustainability programmes.
The apparent lack of interest – by both retailers and by environmental activists - in the apparent ineffectiveness of these sustainability programmes highlights an odd paradox. Activists continue to publicise minor shreds of evidence of growing public concern, such as the 2009 35% growth in use of organic cotton (though it still accounts for less than 1% of cotton use). But opinion surveys show quite the opposite: the UK's Ipsos MORI, for example, has tracked people agreeing they are "extremely worried" about global warming falling from 44% of the UK population in 2005 to 29% in 2010.
Europe's apparel retailers might be destroying the planet – but they may well be in closer agreement with their customers than the environmental lobby is prepared to admit
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