The fashion industry’s extractive model, coupled with the throwaway attitudes it encourages, is driving the planet’s resources to the brink while exacerbating global poverty by depriving poorer nations of the materials, energy, and labor they need to thrive, a new, no-holds-barred report claims.
With the world continuing to barrel toward irreversible climate breakdown, War on Want said it’s time to come to terms with the fact that no amount of sustainability indexing or materials switching alone can address the “root cause” of the current crisis: that the industry is designed to accrue profits for big businesses in the global North at the expense of social and ecological concerns.
It’s a radical point of view, to be sure, but the U.K. charity’s conclusions are data-driven, said Ruth Ogier, its head of international programs. Using numbers crunched from the global environmental database known as the Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output database, or Exiobase for short, War on Want was able to quantify what it describes as the “mechanics of extraction,” adding greater context to the potential 100 billion pieces of clothing and 24.4 billion pairs of shoes that are churned out every year.
In 2021, for instance, the amount of land used to create fashion for the European Union amounted to nearly 226,930 square kilometers across the globe, or the equivalent of “every inch” of Great Britain. In the United Kingdom, fashion consumption utilized 30,258 square kilometers of land, or roughly the same size as Belgium, in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The same year, the EU consumed 5.45 billion cubic meters of freshwater worldwide to dress the world’s largest single market, while fashion for the United Kingdom soaked up almost 817 million cubic meters.
Equally damning are the quantities of fossil fuels used to produce synthetic garments made from polyester, nylon or acrylic. In 2021, the report said, a total of 40,976 kilotons of fossil fuels went into fashion for EU consumption and 6,625 kilotons for that of the United Kingdom.
Ogier said that War on Want’s findings dovetail with research by economist Jason Hickel, who in 2024 concluded that the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labor with a wage value of 16.9 trillion euros ($19.7 trillion) from the global South in 2021.
The top three sources of human labor for producing fashion consumed in the EU and United Kingdom, War on Want found, were China, India and what’s listed as the “rest of Asia,” with workers in these three regions contributing some 57 percent of the total labor embedded in the EU’s fashion and 70.5 percent for the United Kingdom’s.
“We wanted to basically have new credible data with which we can talk about fashion’s footprint and make this connection that it’s not just the scale, it’s the origin,” Ogier said. “And that takes us into the conversation that these countries are not poor in terms of resources, and how that wealth is moved out from the global South to the global North.”
Hickel for the win, again: Using data from 2015, he estimated a $10.8 trillion annual drain from the global South to the global North, enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.
In short, it’s the capitalism, stupid.
“It’s not really about the clothes,” she said. “And because fashion production is about profit, it’s, in our view, structurally incapable of providing a substantive, deep response to those environmental and social economic justice issues.”
And not just production but overproduction, said War on Want, which worked with Research & Degrowth International, a think tank based in Barcelona, on the study. Degrowth may be a taboo word in the world of business, the report argued, but the principles of degrowth economics could fundamentally reshape the fashion industry by valuing quality and longevity over quantity and planned obsolescence.
As an example of a sector organized around what War on Want characterized as “socially unnecessary production,” it’s a prime candidate for an industry that can be degrown while still being able to meet the need for high-quality clothing that is “neither resource-intensive nor boring.” It’s also how a “just transition” for workers can truly manifest, Ogier added.
“We know that the term is difficult in that it presents the idea that we should just all shrink back; it’s obviously a fundamental challenge to the idea that more and more profit is good,” she said. Even so, there are other ways to “degrow” without sacrificing the bottom line: making fewer but higher-margin clothes, for example, or selling services such as rental, reuse and repair.
Ogier said that without being able to envision a different world, people will be unable to find pathways to achieving it. That’s what the report is trying to accomplish.
“I don’t think this is necessarily going to be taken up by fashion corporations, because it’s a direct challenge to the model that they’re in,” she said. “But it’s important to have that big picture about the type of paradigm shift in thinking about how we can connect solutions and raise the bar about what is going to be on that policy and decision-maker map in terms of standards.”