It is true that measures to alleviate poverty will be an integral part of any national or international green transition. And some economic growth will be required in areas such as renewable energy, housing, care and education. But overall growth is not, as many of its advocates seem to presuppose, essential to any effective economy. And the evidence, carefully reviewed in recent reports by the European Environmental Bureau and the European Environment Agency, does not support the claim that green technologies will allow for the uncoupling of growth from increased carbon emissions.Sustainable production and consumption must therefore replace undifferentiated economic growth as the goal of 21st-century political economy. And making the case for this means challenging the belief that sustainable consumption will always involve sacrifice, rather than improve wellbeing.

Our so-called “good life” is, after all, a major cause of stress and ill health. It is noisy, polluting and wasteful. Its commercial priorities have forced people to gear everything to jobseeking and career development, but still leave many people facing chronically unfulfilling and precarious jobs and lives. Consumer culture, formerly seen as a vehicle of self-expression, is better viewed at this stage in its evolution as a means of extending the global reach and command of corporate power at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the planet and most of its inhabitants. Conversely, there is much to recommend a slower-paced, less work-centred and more community-oriented way of living. A work culture less dominated by profit-driven ideas of efficiency would free time for other activities. Slower and more hybrid modes of working (making use, for example, of artisanal methods alongside smart technologies) could enhance job fulfilment and allow more job sharing. Ecologically benign methods of production would exclude built-in obsolescence and radically reduce waste. People would have the gratification of knowing they were no longer contributing to environmental breakdown and threatening the very survival of their children and grandchildren.....read on      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/nov/23/consumerism-planetary-ruin-life-community

The Online Shopping Boom Comes at a Price—and Some New Yorkers Pay More Than Their Fair Share. More diesel trucks are on the streets, and their destinations are often warehouses located in historically disadvantaged areas. Inside Climate NewsLauren Dalban March 30, 2025 Package deliveries in New York City are booming, bolstered by the pandemic and online shopping, with 80 percent of households in New York City receiving a package a week, according to the Office of the Mayor. Almost 90 percent of goods are transported into or around the city by trucks, which emit fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, and nitrogen oxides, which can help form PM2.5. Many of them are older, heavy-duty diesel vehicles, which contribute a substantial amount of  PM2.5 pollution in urban areas. Fine particulate matter is among the most harmful pollutants, with health impacts like childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and premature mortality. According to city data, long-term exposure to the pollutant contributes to an estimated 2,000 excess deaths a year, or 1 in 25 deaths, in the city. Around 14 percent of PM2.5 pollution in the city comes from traffic, and this pollution is far from evenly distributed. The poorest neighborhoods often suffer the most in this equation—the PM2.5 levels from traffic are often higher in high-poverty neighborhoods, as well as the number of hospitalizations related to this pollutant. 

To facilitate the explosion of e-commerce, more and more facilities called last-mile warehouses are going up in neighborhoods already overburdened by air pollution from traffic. These facilities take in goods from trucks coming in from across the country and sort them before they are transported to their final destination, which is usually not too far—often the “last mile” on their journey. Today, these warehouses can be constructed without the need for a permit or environmental review in eight commercial or manufacturing districts. As a result, they are clustered in neighborhoods around Newtown Creek, a small canal that separates Queens and Brooklyn, as well as Sunset Park and Red Hook in Brooklyn and Hunts Point in the Bronx. These neighborhoods are, or encompass, environmental justice areas—places that have experienced a disproportionate amount of negative impacts from environmental issues due to historical disinvestment and social inequities. The clustering of these facilities, and the subsequent increase in truck traffic, only increases the air pollution burden. But a City Council bill, a zoning amendment, and other new city initiatives may finally start to address this issue. Ultimately, however, the electrification of medium and heavy-duty trucks may be the only way to markedly reduce the air pollution levels from traffic in these areas. The city, and the country as a whole, is far from achieving that goal.

“Antiquated Zoning Regulations”.......In Sunset Park and Red Hook, neighborhoods in the Western part of Brooklyn close to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a major highway, there are at least six last-mile facilities, according to the Last Mile Coalition—an advocacy group that brings together multiple community organizations fighting for better regulation of these warehouses.“At these intersections along Third Avenue—which is a really, really dangerous avenue in Sunset Park—you have an increase in truck traffic,” said Nebraska Hernandez, the climate justice hub advocate at UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino advocacy group. “These trucks are coming in and out of the industrial waterfront where the facilities are located, and it’s endangering the pedestrians.” Because these facilities often include concrete structures and large parking lots for trucks, they can also increase the urban heat island effect—where highly urbanized areas experience higher temperatures—according to Willis Elkins, the executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance. The delivery of goods to businesses and homes is complicated in a city like New York, which has so little empty space. Not only are city residents ordering more online than ever before, but local businesses rarely have storage spaces, which means they receive deliveries multiple times a week to keep up with sales. 

In May 2024, the deputy mayor for housing, economic development and workforce Maria Torres-Springer, made a commitment to regulate last-mile warehouses by requiring a special permit through the City Planning Commission. “It can get at the clustering of these facilities due to antiquated zoning regulations,” said Kevin Garcia, the senior transportation planner at the Environmental Justice Alliance. “[Communities] only find out about these facilities once they’re up and operating, once they see this increase in truck traffic.” Garcia’s organization is also a member of the Last Mile Coalition, which drafted its own zoning amendment in 2022. It included a request for buffer zones around schools, parks, public housing developments and other last-mile warehouses. Currently, some of these facilities are located in Red Hook, near the largest public housing development in Brooklyn. “These trucks are coming in and out of the industrial waterfront where the facilities are located, and it’s endangering the pedestrians.” City government seeks to regulate not only the siting of new last-mile facilities, but also the indirect pollution coming from present and future warehouses. If City Council Bill 1130—which was introduced in December by Council Member Alexa Alvilés, who represents parts of Sunset Park and Red Hook—passes, then these facilities and the trucks that come and go from them would be required to make efforts to reduce their emissions. 

“The number of trucks that are coming to and from that facility would have to be accounted for, and then the warehouse operator would have to work with the city… to come up with an emissions reduction plan,” said Garcia, who supports the bill. “What we want is for these companies, these warehouse operators, to be good neighbors.” The bill could also require warehouse operators to regulate the times and methods of their deliveries—encouraging the use of already-established pollution mitigation measures like night delivery or smaller electric vans for deliveries from the facility to people’s homes.  A similar bill, dubbed the “Clean Deliveries Act,” is also working through the state legislature. But these bills are received with some skepticism by trucking companies, according to the Trucking Association of New York. Pre-2007 diesel trucks are the most polluting, and harmful to people’s health because they were sold prior to the Environmental Protection Agency’s more stringent rules on emissions, which required diesel particulate filters. Evolving EPA guidance has reduced emissions from trucks to the point that, if a business replaces a pre-2010 model year truck with a contemporary one, they can reduce negative health impacts by up to 96 percent. 

Truck Electrification—a Live Issue in New York......Though these bills offer a potential for more community input in the siting of last-mile facilities, and for pollution mitigation for trucking to these warehouses, the electrification of heavy-duty vehicles is needed to truly reduce the air pollution from trucks that burdens many New York City communities. New York has been leading the charge on incentives for this switch with policies like the Truck Voucher Incentive Program, which offers financial help for trucking businesses looking to transition to zero-emission vehicles, and the city’s Clean Trucks Program, which offers incentives for replacing the oldest and most polluting diesel trucks with less polluting, hybrid, or electric vehicles.       https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30032025/the-online-shopping-boom-comes-at-a-price-and-some-new-yorkers-pay-more-than-their-fair-share/

Can we enjoy fast fashion without destroying the planet? The global fashion industry is in desperate need of an ecological plan, but London fashion week proved there still isn’t one – yet Guardian Lucy Siegle Fri 25 Feb 2022 How do you solve a problem like the global fashion industry? From the declining lifespan of clothes to the lightning metabolism of fashion consumerism and the increased reliance on petroleum-based synthetic fibres, this is one industry desperate for an ecological plan. London fashion week – which ended this week – showed there still isn’t one. Coverage was dominated by the launch of a new collection from one of the fastest models of production and e-retail, Pretty Little Thing, owned by the Boohoo group. It didn’t seem to matter that this show was not officially part of fashion week – it had all the ingredients of a smash hit, including a social media superstar turned creative director, Molly-Mae Hague. And, in something of a plot twist, alongside the brand’s runway show came the announcement that it will launch a pre-owned resale marketplace later this year “in a bid to encourage its shoppers to embrace sustainability”. Of course reselling, reusing and extending the lifespan of garments is critical in the fight to bring some sanity into the fashion cycle. But to push out more fast fashion and then recircu te it later seems like the fashion equivalent of carbon capture storage. It may help soothe investors, but it is unlikely to decarbonise fashion.    

Room for rent.....Meanwhile, around the same time as PLT’s announcement a genuinely important fashion industry innovator – rental platform Onloan – announced that it was pressing pause, leaving a gap in the sustainable fashion ecosystem.Fashion rental platforms all have slightly different business models. Byrotation is a peer to peer lending app, charging a borrower per loan and taking a percentage from lender and renter. There’s MyWardrobe – from former Whistles CEO Jane Shepherdson, who has said she wants renting clothes to be as commonplace as renting a car; HURR, who have teamed up with Selfridges and Hirestreet, which aims to take things mainstream, providing rental for M&S. Onloan, meanwhile, offered a subscription model. Users could rent two or four pieces a month for £69 or £99. Unusually, the company bought and held stock. For co-founder Tamsin Chislett, who has a background running a fairtrade cotton project in Uganda, this is key to re-engineering the industry. “The fashion supply chain is riven with underpayment. For us it was important to pay for actual, finished garments to allow the manufacturing part of the supply chain to work,” she says. Onloan was prepared to invest in buying wholesale, offering a royalty fee every time the piece was rented and winning the trust and partnership of prestigious yet traditional designers, such as Joseph. The theory is that getting access to these brands at a fraction of the cost is part of the alchemy that can turn consumers to renters and take the heat (and carbon) out of the system.

‘Risky’ business..... Not everyone is convinced, though. In particular, a report published in May 2021 by respected Finnish academics put the boot in, concluding that renting clothes was less green than other options, including throwing them away. It got a lot of coverage....read on.     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/25/rent-clothes-fashion-sustainable-climate

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion.....According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union. The industrydries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 50 0,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.The Quantis International 2018 report found that the three main drivers of the industry’s global pollution impacts are dyeing and finishing (36%), yarn preparation (28%) and fibre production (15%). The report also established that fibre production has the largest impact on freshwater withdrawal (water diverted or withdrawn from a surface water or groundwater source) and ecosystem quality due to cotton cultivation, while the dyeing and finishing, yarn preparation and fibre production stages have the highest impacts on resource depletion, due to the energy-intensive processes based on fossil fuel energy. According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, emissions from textile manufacturing alone are projected to skyrocket by 60% by 2030. The time it takes for a product to go through the supply chain, from design to purchase, is called lead time. In 2012, Zara was able to design, produce and deliver a new garment in two weeks; Forever 21 in six weeks and H&M in eight weeks. Newer industry player Shein, a major Chinese fast fashion company, has garments ready to be sold in just 10 days. This results in the fashion industry producing obscene amounts of waste. 

2. Microplastics - Furthermore, brands use synthetic fibres like polyester, nylon and acrylic which take hundreds of years to biodegrade. A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics – tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic – found in the ocean come from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester.......read on https://earth.org/fast-fashions-detrimental-effect-on-the-environment/