Partnership for the Goals
Canada is the only G7 country in the world that does not have a sustainability plan for the multi-trillion dollar fashion industry. Forget the oil, gas, mining and logging industries, fashion pollutes the environmental at a rate ten times more than all three of these sectors put together. Despite this, we continue to see Indigenous peoples all across Canada pushing back against the natural resource extraction industries and almost nothing when it comes to the fashion industry. Since early European contact, the fashion industry began to boom in what was then known as the "Fur Trade Era." And it continued to grow and make billions - if not, trillions of dollars. With the exception of the exchange of goods, the Aboriginal populations who helped trap the furs received very little of the wealth. Today, the industry continues to make billions of dollars in revenue and simply ships all its discarded clothing overseas - where it seemingly ends up in landfills and waterways. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/05/yvette-yaa-konadu-tetteh-how-ghana-became-fast-fashions-dumping-ground. We cannot allow fast fashion companies in Canada to continue to make their billions while at the same time doing next to nothing to help the environment. It is clear that the fashion industry isn't going anywhere anytime soon. This was made abundantly clear while even amidst the most volatile pandemics the world ever experienced, the fashion industry continued to make its way into North American closets. How could this be? According to Science Direct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666784322000109,North Americans and arguably other Westernized countries simply turned from in person to internet shopping. Focusing on more comfortable attire and that to impress the upper half of their bodies during zoom work meetings. Still millions more found time to clean out their closets and in doing so, created more textile waste that was donated to goodwills. And thus, eventually put on large ships because thrift stores were unable to resell their goods. And then eventually shipped overseas to underdeveloped countries - like Ghana. For these reasons and so many more, SDNR's 2023 Fashion, Environment and Entrepreneurship Series in Ottawa, Canada focused on all of these topics and much more. And the SDNR team looks forward to continuing this discussion in the years to follow at their upcoming fashion events which will take place in major Canadian cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
