Abstract
When thinking about lowering or changing consumption to lower carbon footprints, the obvious offenders come easily to mine: petroleum and petroleum products, paper and plastic, even food. But not clothes. Although the clothing industry is the second largest polluter after agriculture, most consumers do not think of clothes as a source of environmental damage.
In the Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society, author Nikolay Anguelov exposed the ecological damage from the fast-fashion business model. In this book, The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy the author takes this one step further by focusing on solutions. This book would use the familiar (yet complex) industry of fashion as a lens to examine how business pressures and national and international policies can have both positive and negative social and ecological impacts. It would provide an analysis of extant and emerging policies to address this divergence in the ongoing quest to maximize economic development and minimize the social costs of the industrialization process. It would also examine emerging technologies and innovative business models that have the potential to revolutionize how fashion is perceived, manufactured, and consumed.
The book begins with an introductory letter that outlines the social and environmental issues facing the fashion industry, as well as emphasize the seriousness and urgency of addressing them. Each chapter would then focus on a major topic facing the industry, with an increasing emphasis on policy and the impact of global-level and business-level decisions on the industry's success, its social and environmental impact, and its relationship to consumers. The goal of the book is to define that transition, explain its challenges, and educate readers on the possibilities to become powerful drivers of change through their professional actions and their personal behavior as consumers.
While the book would specifically analyze the fashion industry, the aim is to link the storyline to other sectors as it uses a product everyone is familiar with (we all buy clothes, after all) to examine the decisions, impacts, and policies shaping the industry behind the scenes. The linkages are applicable to other fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business sectors, such as consumer electronics, that are starting to face sustainability criticism for relying on a business model of promoting a high frequency of repeat purchasing.