Climate breakdown will hit global growth by a third, say central banks. New modelling finds risk to global economies much worse than previously thought, but group of central banks says even this may be an underestimate. Guardian Sandra Laville 8 Nov 2024 The physical shocks caused by climate breakdown will hit global economic growth by a third, according to a risk assessment by a network of central banks. The rise in the estimated hit to the world’s economies as a result of the shocks from flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and mitigating and adapting to extreme weather was the result of new climate modelling published this year. The Network for Greening the Financial System, a membership body of global banks and financial organisations, said in a report this week that the huge increase in the risk from physical shocks to the economy marked a considerable change in the overall severity of the damage caused. The report was published as the business losses alone from the devastating floods in Valencia, which killed more than 200 people, were calculated at well over €10bn (£8.3bn). 

“The fundamental question is: is the advertising industry going to help or hinder society in its attempt to reach net zero?” said Jonathan Wise, a co-founder of the nonprofit group Purpose Disruptors, which aims to shift the industry away from high-consumption advertising. “At the moment, on balance of evidence, the decision is to hinder. It’s advertising driving consumption upward.”The industry disputes this. “Our research shows the goal of most advertising is to help brands, products, and services grow sales at the expense of their competitors,” a spokesperson for the Advertising Association said. “This leads to substitution rather than increased consumption overall.”Unsurprisingly, the sector knows the importance of sending out encouraging messages about the work they are doing. In 2020 the Advertising Association, along with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers created Ad Net Zero, and billed it as the global advertising industry’s response to climate change. The action plan, however, focuses primarily on reducing the emissions of agencies’ own operations as opposed to those associated with the products they sell. There has been a push within the industry to get advertising to shift towards more sustainable products, for example electric vehicles rather than combustion engine cars, or plant-based foods as opposed to beef. This is seen by the industry as one of the critical ways they can have an impact, and such shifts do deliver reductions in emissions. But Wise worries that simply replacing emissions-intensive consumption with a lower-emissions version isn’t enough to decarbonise the economy.

And while a handful of agencies are looking to sell greener options, the actions of the industry as a whole seem to show a resistance to considering such things as their responsibility. The transportation sector, identified as probably the most significant area of consumption for the top 10% by Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and the author of a 2020 paper on the topic, is a good example. “The categories of consumption that the wealthiest people over consume or overspend on and that constitute the big difference in their emissions is really flying longer distances, and driving bigger cars longer distances, so transportation is really the big one,” Steinberger said'''''read on   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/21/ad-industry-grapples-with-role-selling-consumption-in-climate-crisis

We’re in the Golden Age of Garbage Clothing. Pilling sweaters, stretched-out socks, flimsy denim. What happened to good garments? Walrus Monika Warzech Illustration by Kagan McLeod Oct. 24, 2024 As the $100 billion fast fashion industry has flooded the world with cheap, trendy items, shopping has become a crapshoot. Across social media, you’ll see frustrations over garments’ meagre lifespans. Studies have backed up my irritation with increasingly flimsy T-shirts: University of Kentucky textile researchers have found that they’ve become thinner over the years, as have fabrics. Denim, known for its hard-wearing history, hasn’t fared much better. Experts point to a decline in quality when comparing jeans made in the past five years or so to their counterparts from, say, the ’80s.

Mid-market shops, once a bastion of higher standards, have become hit or miss. Complaints are easy to find on Reddit: “Aritzia is starting to feel like that boyfriend that was once good to us and the letting go process has been difficult to accept.” J. Crew comes up often, with one user grumbling that a $125-plus cashmere sweater “just got a hole in it after one single year of use.” Buyers on YouTube lament the deteriorating craftsmanship in luxury brands too, hoisting up $1,000 bags that come up short. One study found that recently made designer jeans were less durable than a new pair from Walmart. It’s starting to feel like quality has become price and label agnostic. It’s difficult to consume less when items fall apart so quickly. According to the World Economic Forum, the production of clothing has about doubled since 2000, but the average garment is worn just seven to ten times. A 2021 report says Canadians are dumping 500,000 tonnes of clothes each year. Even when we donate to charities for reuse, a lot of it ends up getting exported and becoming other countries’ problems. A mountain of cast-offs in the desert of Chile is literally visible from space. A clothing landfill in Ghana exploded, burning for days. 

It took years for us to get to our current mode of shop and toss. You can’t have fast fashion without synthetics, some of which were first engineered more than a century ago, when researchers invented dupes for more expensive or scarce textiles. Rayon or viscose is a semi synthetic made from chemically treated wood pulp that became popular during the Great Depression as a cheaper alternative to silk. Polyurethane, created in Nazi Germany, was a rubber replacement that was later used to create what’s now called elastane, spandex, or Lycra. Acrylic, often used as a substitute for wool, is a plastic-based product first mass produced in the US in the mid-1940s. Nylon, a petroleum-based fabric, was created in the 1930s and became popular for its affordability and durability alongside the wartime shortages of silk and cotton. Then there’s polyester, first developed between the 1930s and ’40s by the same inventors of nylon.

As the price of the petroleum-based polyester dropped in the 1960s, shoppers flocked to it. In the US, cotton was eclipsed by polyester within a decade. Polyester was low maintenance. It didn’t need much ironing. It dried quickly. It kept the pleating in skirts and creases in trousers and easily lent itself to bold colours that didn’t fade in the wash. It was lighter than wool. Today, polyester, nylon, acrylic, and other synthetic fibres account for around 65 percent of the material that makes up our clothes worldwide. They’re blended into cotton T-shirts and underwear, used as performance material in hiking and workout wear, and sometimes rebranded as the fancier-sounding “vegan silk.” Even fashion houses rely on synthetics. They’re in $6,000 Oscar de la Renta gowns and some of Chanel’s iconic jackets.In other words, our clothes are made using huge amounts of petrochemicals and fossil fuels. When you wash the clothes, they keep polluting by shedding microplastics. Polyester comprises about 80 percent of all synthetic fibre use. Some consumers are frustrated by this synthetic creep, often holding up polyester as a sign of cost-cutting measures—it’s about half as much per kilogram as cotton and cheaper than wool. There’s also a contradiction at the heart of polyester. It’s both functionally indestructible—synthetic fabrics take forever to break down and decompose—and can sometimes pill easily, which tends to lead to garments having shorter lifespans.

“Not all polyester is created equal,” //www.tiktok.com/@wangjenniferr>" rel="noopener" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent;">Jennifer Wang, a pharmacist and fashion content creator. With a scientist’s rigour and an influencer’s charm, she breaks down what makes a good garment, and her videos have netted her nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok. In one video, she says her favourite dress pants are made from polyester. But the polyester fabric used in fast fashion is terrible and prone to wrinkling, defeating its versatile purpose. Different grades perform differently, making it tricky for consumers to live by hard-and-fast shopping rules like “no polyester.” Wang refuses to generalize by fabric type, or even brand, given the variations in quality. She broke out online with a TikTok called “Stop Wasting Your Money at Aritzia” and similar videos assessing clothes from Lululemon, Reformation, Frank and Oak, and many more. She sometimes films from the shop floor, pointing out messy seams and scrunching fabric to show how quickly it wrinkles. Based in Toronto, she’s become a kind of guerilla quality-control officer, stepping into the role just as many companies have shirked the responsibility. Synthetics are inextricable from clothing getting crappier. But there’s so much more to good clothes than just fabric......read on   https://thewalrus.ca/the-golden-age-of-garbage-clothing/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=It%20s%20Your%20Business&utm_campaign=special-black-friday