Attention - Fake News: Which textile sustainability information sources should you trust?

Textile sustainability is an incredibly complex subject. For somebody new to it, it can be intimidating to start out. Even for people with extensive expertise, the sheer amount of information and data, the constant flood of new studies or position papers provided by all types of stakeholders can be overwhelming.

Many times in recent months I was asked the question: “Which information sources are the best and most reliable?”

Today, I will try to give an answer, based on a few years of writing, researching and discussing textile sustainability issues with countless experts across Europe and beyond.

To do that, I will use a wonderful thinking framework for approaching any non-obvious problem in life that has been described and fantastically illustrated by Tim Urban in his highly recommended book “What’s our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies”

The 4 types of textile sustainability thinkers

In essence, Tim explains that you want to approach complex problems like a scientist, carefully building a hypothesis based on a wide range of broadly collected data and information and then trying to challenge your hypothesis with conflicting information until you arrive at a solid position that approaches the truth as much as possible and doesn’t clash with reality.

Emotions and preconceived opinions should be kept out of the process as much as possible. Because if you don’t, you will step down what Tim Urban calls the thinking ladder. Its lower rungs are occupied by folks that are much less clear-headed thinkers than the scientist and are prone to arrive at all sorts of misconceptions and reality-distorting views.

When it comes to sustainability, keeping emotions and preconceptions out isn’t easy because most people consider sustainability as something intrinsically positive which it is worth rooting for. In Tim Urban’s terminology, many people act like sports fans wishing for team Sustainability to win, but based on a fair game with clear rules and objective referees (aka regulations). Sports fans live one rung below scientists on the thinking ladder, but as long as they remain aware of their biases they can still arrive at sound insights.

What you want to avoid is to step further down on the thinking ladder into a zone called ‘Unconvincable Land’ which in Tim Urban’s words “is a world of green grass, blue sky, and a bunch of people whose beliefs can’t be swayed by any amount of evidence.” Here on rung 3 of the ladder the attorneys live. Attorneys defend theirs (or their client’s) position skilfully and tenaciously, not by lying or misrepresenting information, but by only selectively considering and presenting information that confirms their preconceived opinions and omitting or obfuscating conflicting data. This is definitely not a good strategy to obtain unbiased insights and only one rung away from the zealot who inhabits the bottom rung of the thinking ladder.

Zealots view their ideas and opinions like parents their newborn babies. Just all-round loveable and flawless and impossible to be questioned or criticised by anybody under any circumstance. For any true knowledge seeker this is obviously the worst approach to adopt.

Now let’s have a look where the scientists, sports fans, attorneys and zealots of the textile sustainability world live and how you can spot them.

For some quick fun, we’ll reverse the ladder and start with the lowest rung - the zealots.

The sustainability zealots

Textile sustainability information provided by zealots can be usually recognised by highly emotional or provocative headlines, stark images of all sorts of calamities that the textile industry is accused of causing and by highly simplistic and promotional messages about quick fixes to these problems. Documentation provided is usually image-rich and data-poor. The obvious candidates are certain types of activists and NGO’s but maybe less obviously also many tech and green brand start-ups touting their disruptive solutions to address textile sustainability challenges. What unites them is the need to constantly keep (potential) customers, supporters and funding providers engaged. Now I’m not saying that there is anything intrinsically wrong with these organisations (I’m a big supporter of start-ups and some activists have done admirable work exposing corporate wrong-doing), it is just not the place where you want get your unfiltered information from.

The attorneys of textile sustainability

Next up are the attorneys, individuals and organisations that have a very clear agenda and usually shareholders, customers or members that provide the funding for them to present data and information selectively and construct narratives in the service of furthering the economic interests of their funding providers. Obvious candidates are large corporates and their sustainability reports. Industry interest groups such as associations, industry-funded NGO’s and global consulting groups also mostly fall into this category. Especially the latter have discovered sustainability as a major business opportunity worth many billions of both public and private assignments, but their professionally designed reports and slide decks often lack depth and only present anecdotal data and therefore have to be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately also reports and articles funded and published by different UN bodies such as UNEP are often painted with a big bias brush and found to be selectively presenting and at occasions misrepresenting data.

The fans of team Sustainability

As we climb up the knowledge ladder, we find the sports fans, organisations and individuals that are incentivised to do deeper knowledge work even if their clients or funding providers have a bias towards a certain orientation of the outcomes. Here we start to enter the territory where solid data and knowledge can be found. Examples are non-profit organisations that have been set up to study and communicate specific textile sustainability topics such as Textile Exchange (for textile material data and usage trends), Apparel Impact Institute (for GHG emissions and energy-related issues), ZDHC (for textile chemicals and pollution issues) or FashionForGood (for recycling and other fashion green-tech innovations). I would also include most academic researchers in this category, which may be surprising as they are by definition scientists. However I have seen too many papers which started on very biased premises, probably based on assumed (political) expectations of the funding bodies to which these research projects were submitted. Also scientific papers often suffer from too weak or narrow primary data sources and an incomplete understanding of industrial realities. Finally, studies and reports on textile sustainability and circularity by the European Environmental Agency (EEA), while certainly not lacking in scientific rigour often present conclusions and summaries that have a too preconceived bent to my taste and I also found them somewhat lacking in transparency on the data sources used or methodologies applied.

The guardians of textile sustainability knowledge

Now what is left for the true scientist rung of the thinking ladder? The deepest and most unbiased research work on different textile sustainability topics I have found coming from public research organisations or those with some public oversight. Examples include the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, which in recent years has published some outstanding reports on textile circularity and recycling and is currently working on a deep investigation on a broad range of sustainability parameters of textile products in preparation of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). Another organisation with outstanding research work on all matters textile waste and recycling is Re_Fashion, the French Extended Producer Responsibility Organisation for textiles and footwear. Also the unfortunately discontinued Mistra Future Fashion programme in Sweden published some ground-breaking research work. Other sources of interesting and rather unbiased research work are EU funded research projects that involve multidisciplinary consortia of research and industry partners. Not all this work is easy to find or professionally presented, which makes it a bit of a detective work to piece it together, but the ECOSYSTEX network is a good starting point. Finally, there are some highly specialised consulting and research companies, often with deep knowledge and excellent access to primary industry/market data. Since their information is proprietary and closely guarded, you will have to pay up for access.

Second hand information sellers

All the above mentioned organisations carry out their own primary or secondary/desk research, formulate and test hypotheses, structure and creatively present their data. Not all write for a non-expert audience and in many cases really well-presented and illustrated summaries are missing. Therefore it is sometimes tempting to go for general media sources such as newspapers, TV or the Internet. Unfortunately, the quality there is generally the lowest, because of the compounding of two problems. Journalists or bloggers have a tendency to pick their information from the most vocal sources, such as those qualified as zealots or attorneys, and then add their own spin to them in an attempt to catch the most eyeballs. Oh the non-sense I have already read on textile sustainability in leading global newspapers, which always makes me think of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect – you read a poorly researched or misrepresented article about a subject you deeply understand and shake your head, then you turn the page and read another article in a field you don’t understand well und you believe they write about it with great authority.

Collective and artificial textile sustainability intelligence

Among social networks, only LinkedIn is a good source of textile sustainability knowledge, if used intelligently. You need to amplify the signal-to-noise ratio here by curating your feed through engagement with content of people with consistently great insights (the algorithm will then serve you more of their content), while disregarding or even unfollowing accounts that publish shallow, biased or corporate green-washed stuff. Sometimes the comment section of a post is more insightful than the post itself, never skip it.

Finally generative AI, such as ChatGPT and its competitors, is unfortunately also a hit and miss source for textile sustainability information. It is a good help for structuring a topic and developing a basic understanding, but as soon as you start to dig deeper into technical aspects, its limitations become obvious. My experience is that it has a special preference for accessing authoritative sounding information published by organisations that I would classify into the attorney category. I recently asked 3 generative AI tools for the global GHG emissions of the textile industry and got 3 widely different answers.

In summary, the world of textile production and consumption is highly diversified, fragmented, ?globally distributed and doesn’t lend itself well to easy data collection and simple concepts. Somebody who wishes to understand the problem of textile sustainability deeply and wants to derive action points that are truly impactful must be prepared to dig deep, to look at problems from many angles and always keep on open mind for new and conflicting information, just like a good scientist even if your interest is highly practically oriented.

Disclaimer: The views, information and opinions expressed are my own and do not represent those of the European Technology Platform for the Future of Textiles and Clothing or any other organisation I may be affiliated with.