Opinion | How to buy eco-friendly activewear and help alleviate the environmental costs of the fashion industry
The ‘performance’ technology in yoga pants is the result of an environmentally hazardous textile production process, but some brands are stepping up their eco games
Try as I might to be a conscientious consumer and avoid accumulating clothing, there are a few pieces I cannot avoid replacing every so often. Leggings, aka the much-maligned yoga pant, are one of them. In my defence, I use them for all types of exercise, and I love compression for air travel.
My favourite leggings have been lovingly washed and gently air dried, had their unravelled seams restitched, and been mended after tearing on overfamiliar branches on our beautiful hiking trails. Now though, as they begin to reveal as much as the controversially recalled Lululemon pants of 2013, I fear I must replace them. But with what?
It may seem silly to obsess over such an apparently small thing, but the impact of our athleisure purchases is greater than you’d think. Activewear now represents about 24 per cent of the total apparel industry according to the NPD Group’s 2018 Future of Apparel study. Another statistic from the same group estimates activewear leggings and bottoms to be a US$1 billion-a-year industry. Now consider the environmental impact of all those clothes. Fashion manufacturing pollutes our air, water and land on a massive scale. The clever moisture-wicking and “performance” technology in our sportswear is often created with seriously unhealthy chemicals.
Hong Kong-based non-governmental organisation Redress offers some sobering facts about what happens next. Apparently 92 million tonnes of textile waste is generated by the fashion industry a year. Globally, the equivalent of one rubbish truck full of textiles is burned or sent to landfills every second of the day. That’s not all. The Lycra, spandex or elastane that makes our leggings so nice and form-fitting is a non-biodegradable, synthetic fibre, often made using toxic chemicals.
Washing such textiles releases half a million tonnes of plastic microfibres into the ocean annually, which is the equivalent of more than 50 billion plastic bottles. Armed with all that information, a simple leggings purchase becomes a minefield. Natural fibres just don’t offer the same comfortable, dry sportswear, and their production can be terribly wasteful and polluting, too. And we haven’t even got into fair conditions for the workers making our clothes.