Nature Positive Sector Transitions

In Fashion: Turning the Needle on Fashion’s Planetary Footprint

Fashion is an industry of global importance, essential to human welfare, providing sources of foreign exchange for producing countries, and employing over 75 million people. Rates of production and consumption of textiles is higher than ever before, but the industry as it currently operates has a high ecological footprint.

The fashion industry accounts for a staggering 8-10 per cent of global carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. In growing textile crops, the industry uses an estimated 24% of insecticides and 11% of pesticides, and in the production and processing of fabrics, it is the world’s second largest user of water, generating 20% of the world’s wastewater. In addition, while the industry is worth an estimated US$2.4 trillion, it wastes about US$500 billion due to the lack of recycling and clothes that are thrown into landfill before ever being sold. It is clearly an industry in need of transformation.

The fashion industry currently operates predominantly on an assumption of disposability, including on the part of consumers. Even when garments are fabricated to be long-lasting, recycling and repurposing rates are very low. Much textile and garment production occurs in countries where labour is cheap and environmental and workplace regulation is relatively weak. Transitioning to an industry with a low ecological footprint brings with it many challenges, including:

Redefining the fashion value chain to include recycling and repurposing, creating a circular sector, and modifying business models to suit the reconstructed chain.
Developing technologies and processes for recycling and repurposing textiles, as well as to improve water, energy, and resource consumption over the fashion value chain.
Innovation to produce more sustainable materials, and to switch to less hazardous substances in processing.
The need to establish policy and legislation to provide for sustainability in the fashion industry at a national level
International cooperation on monitoring, accounting, and reporting practices and standards, as well as communication technology, to bring transparency on sustainability across supply chains. Raw resource producers, textile manufacturers, garment makers, and distributors and retailers are typically separate entities. Recycling and repurposing entities will add further length to the fashion value chain. Means of communication between them is vital to sustainability.
Changing consumer expectations regarding pricing and cycles of fashion.

This session will explore:

Innovative business models tailored to a sustainable fashion industry.
Technologies for communicating sustainability parameters across a circular fashion value chain.
Opportunities to reclaim value while introducing resource and energy efficiencies into the value chain.
The opportunity to use technology to improve product offerings, reintroducing tailoring as a common feature of garment fabrication, while moving to less waste through garments-on-demand.

Extractives, Mining, Tailing: The Full Cycle

The extractive industries are some of the headwaters of the global economy, but it comes with a considerable footprint, including water resource stresses, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction and ecosystem pollution.

Mining is expected to play an oversized role in the future effort to mitigate climate change and limit global average surface temperature rises in accordance with the aims of the Paris Agreement. Copper is essential to electricity grids, renewable power generation components, electrified mobility, and energy efficiency measures – without it, there can be no clean energy transition, and decarbonization goals will fail. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, iron, aluminium are also critical metals, while rare earth minerals will also feature heavily in the clean energy transition, and uranium is likely to play a highly important role too, as are platinum and palladium. Meanwhile, coal mining will need to diminish in importance, and a reduction in coal mining would help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from mining to a large extent.

Mining – the extraction of metals and minerals – currently accounts for some 4-7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, 1% coming from operations, and the other 3-6% from fugitive methane emissions from coal mining. An estimated 30-50% of the production of copper, gold, iron ore, and zinc occurs in areas where water stress is already high. Mining tailings dam failures have resulted in severe damage to local ecosystems and hundreds of human casualties, for instance from the Brumadinho dam disaster in Brazil in 2019, which released 12 million cubic meters of iron waste and killed at least 134 people.

Continuous improvement in the extractive industries has already been reducing their ecological footprints, but creating a less impactful and more circular mining sector that spurs the transition to net-zero economies carries significant challenges. These include:

Better integration of sustainable development goals into operations.
Permitting processes that can take several years, delaying the extraction of essential materials and increasing the cost of the net-zero transition.
Improved reporting on operations and sustainability performance indicators.
Devising and implementing practical means of further reducing the ecological footprint of operations, including the use of zero-emissions plant and fleet, and zero-emissions electricity, while also improving energy and water efficiency.
Becoming a key player in recycling as a means of sourcing feedstocks for materials processing.
Heightening demand for low/zero-carbon extracted resources.
In coal mining, implementing practices to capture the vast majority of fugitive methane emissions.

This session will explore:

Setting global decarbonization roadmap for each sector of the extractive industries.
Policy environments that will reward clean extraction and recycling.
Improving permitting processes to ensure social equity while not delaying projects essential to the delivery of raw resources critical to the net-zero transition.
Pathways to highly circular metals and minerals economies.