Other System: Between Waste and Appropriation An Analysis of a Different Scenario for the Fashion System
From Firenze University Press Journal: Fashion Highlight
Sandra Coppola, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
Nowadays the fashion market demand seems to be on continual growth, even though the fashion industry is a sector with a high environmental impact. As a matter of fact, the current consumer society imposes that everything old needs to be thrown away, consequently, these mechanisms of rejection create the distinctions between the productive and unproductive, the included and excluded, causing a new reality made of waste (Bourriaud, 2016). What Bourriaud calls “the exform” is a sign or form seized by exclusionary stakes, cultural, social, or political: the exformal appears as a moving territory in which the exform exists and it is suffused by centrifugal forces, the unwanted and the official, mechanisms of rejection and rehabilitation. This duality Bourriaud talks about can be identified in some new territories of exploration in the fashion world, especially in newborn fashion brands and industries. The fusion of power and toxicity that the fashion industry must face nowadays can find his origins in the organosphere, the ecologies of humans and their entanglements with the environment. Wasteocene is the term Marco Armiero uses to identify the contemporary society, characterized by the imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities that implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives (Armiero, 2021).An analysis conducted by the author aims to identify the waste of the fashion system, dividing it in pre-consumption and post-consumption: while the first one is linked to the fashion industry; the latter is connected to the fashion consume. With regards to the pre-consumption, there are two main division into primary and secondary waste. The primary waste of a textile manufacturing are production residues, sewing wastes, ends sides of bobbins, discarded fabrics, cloths and fabrics, fibres and yarns, damaged fabrics, chemical wastes; while the secondary ones are distaff, cones, pallets, containers and drums, dyes and chemicals, plastic wrap, cardboards, paper, and intangible resources of energy. Furthermore, for clothing companies, the primary waste category includes fabrics and scraps, sewing threads, trimmings, patterns, and fragments, while secondary waste includes cones, pallets, shipping packaging, wrapping paper, sacks, bags, and plastic wraps (Tartaglione & Corradini, 2013).
Even though multiple studies are trying to optimize re-use techniques, the complex production model of the fashion industry is still generating tons of wastes that could be used again in the production cycle. All things considered, reusing fashion pre-consumption wastes could be considered as a “stage transition”, as also claimed by the cradle-to-cradle method (Braungart & McDonough, 2002). The C2C theory implies a waste free create system and investigates a regenerative design. As a result, everything that is born can be born again, remaining in its cradle, therefore the materials used by the supply chains are reinserted in the subsequent production cycles.Currently, the Italian fashion and textile sector offers three main trends to the use of waste: to extend the end-of-life of textile products, to reuse the textile product as a secondary raw material for other production cycles, to address the waste in material and energy recovery processes. Secondary raw materials, also called MPS, consist of waste material from the processing of raw materials or materials derived from waste recovery and recycling. Properly processed, it is possible to obtain a material that is practically the same as the one to be extracted, while respecting the environment and avoiding the withdraw of now-limited raw materials. However, there are still few initiatives aimed at revaluing pre-consumer wastes. In fact, considering the amount of material, there seems to be a gap between supply and demand: brands tend to prefer the new, addressing to companies that produce under demand. Choosing the perfect fabric, the exact colour and pattern, still turns out to be the most efficient way to make a collection, giving the possibility to have unlimited length, reduced time set aside for research, and it makes the risk of unforeseen problems smaller. This may seem the best choice, on the other hand it is feeding a system that has been showing its flaws in recent years. In fact, the dominant production system in recent decades has been characterized by a “linear” type of economic model, causing mass-producing fashion products, stimulating enormous waste production, including the waste of raw materials and energy. It is estimated that most Italian companies have an overproduction of 20 percent.While some types of post-industrial waste can be recovered through upcycling projects, others remain as new untouched materials. There could be several reasons of their disuse, such as a flawed tint, a misprinting or just the production of too many fabrics and textiles compared to the demand. The real problem seems to lie in the system itself, if the surplus materials are not used at the time they are produced, no industry will ever buy and use them. Specifically, fashion has an inner contradiction: each fashion is sold as eternal, on the contrary it will easily be replaced by the next one. Fashion’s only constant is its inherent change (Simmel, 1996). The succession of collections generates unused or unsold material, as a result this is stored until the stock costs became so high that the only solution is getting rid of it, also if it is unused.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-2269
Read Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh/article/view/2269
