How to Recognise and Avoid Greenwashing

Serena Mckenzie 

While statistics from Fashion Discounts.com '28 Eye Opening Sustainable Fashion Statistics for 2022', show that 75% of Gen Z respondents opt for second hand clothing in order to reduce their consumption, the fast fashion market continues to flourish. Adopting new tactics to lure consumers into what they advertise as “sustainable fashion”, greenwashing has become one of the most popular methods brands have turned to. We can observe some brands starting to shift towards more sustainable production, namely UNIQLO which is ranked above other fast fashion brands by various sources. However, we must keep in mind that UNIQLO’s efforts are by no means perfect and that they have been accused of greenwashing, like many other clothing brands, who continue to sugar-coat their eco-friendly claims. 

 Let’s take for example fast fashion clothing brand Boohoo and their recently appointed Sustainability Ambassador, Kourtney Kardashian. Given her lavish lifestyle of private jets and her family’s excessive consumption of water during Californian droughts in 2022, her representation of the brand’s sustainability project appears illogical. It is a crafty move from Boohoo to capitalise upon the celebrity’s image, using her influence to tempt younger generations towards their capsule collections. Emily Chan, Senior Sustainability & Features Editor for British Vogue, labelled the partnership as “another blatant attempt at greenwashing in the fashion industry”. The first 45-piece capsule collection is hardly a breakthrough for sustainability when considering the approximate 40,000 styles which are sold on the site every year. Their shocking humanitarian and environmental standards, exposed through investigations in 2020, revealed that workers in Boohoo’s Leicester factory were being paid an hourly rate as low as £3.507. As a result the 2023 Fashion Transparency Index scored Boohoo 24 percent transparent which marked a regression from the calculated 28 percent in 2022 .

So, how can we avoid falling into these traps? 

Ethy, an online platform dedicated to verifying the sustainability levels of brands, advises looking beyond buzzwords like ‘sustainable’, ‘ethical’, ‘eco-friendly’, and ‘green’ and instead looking for genuine scientific evidence to back up brand’s claims. An example of this is H&M’s ‘Conscious Collection’ which includes clothes created from more sustainable materials such as organic cotton, recycled polyester and Tencel. However, the issue with the release of this collection was that H&M did not provide any information to demonstrate how their new range was in fact more environmentally friendly. In addition, using the website Good on You, can assist in finding the truth as it rates and compares thousands of brands making it a fast way to find out just how ethical and sustainable their standards are. The Fashion Transparency Index which is published annually by Fashion Revolution - the world’s largest fashion activism movement and the charity that our society supports - provides an in-depth ranking of “250 of the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers based on their public disclosure of human rights and environmental policies, practices, and impacts, across their operations and supply chains.” This index is a very reliable source for verifying the transparency of clothing brands and avoiding being tricked by greenwashing.

Ultimately, the culpability must be placed on the fast fashion companies themselves for their detrimental impact on the environment and human rights violations but that is not to say that we as consumers can’t change our ways to avoid falling into greenwashing traps. Being sceptical and critical, checking the scientific evidence of a brand’s sustainability claims, and researching eco-friendly alternatives are all steps that we can take to lead a more sustainable lifestyle.