Developing a toolkit to incorporate environmental improvements into the fashion design process

Abstract

The fashion industry plays a vital role in the development of the global economy while creating significant stress on the environment throughout its supply chains, due to high resource consumption, waste generation, and carbon emissions. The mass-market is the major market segment that creates sustainability concerns due to high volumes of production and low product prices that motivate consumers to buy more and throw away often. Consumer awareness and governmental concern regarding the sustainability of the fashion industry have increased and the industry is now being urged to take steps to mitigate environmental concerns. The literature reports many initiatives by various parties to address the environmental challenges in the fashion industry, but little success has been achieved to date. To address the sustainability issues of fashion products, environmental impacts need to be taken into consideration during the early stages of the product development process, and not once the product is being made. Most of the decisions of a fashion product are made in the product development stage, yet a comprehensive tool that supports making environmentally conscious decisions is lacking. This study describes the development of a user-friendly toolkit for mass-market fashion designers, that facilitates environmentally responsible decision-making during the product development process. The toolkit is expected to provide a simple, timeefficient

and inexpensive method that integrates sustainability into the design of apparel products. This study employed a mixed-method approach which used both quantitative and qualitative investigations. A systematic literature review was conducted with a meta-analysis to investigate the environmental impact of the life cycle of the fashion product to develop a database which comprises impact data across the clothing lifecycle Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mass-market fashion designers and sustainable design practitioners to investigate the key activities and decisions of the mass-market design process and to explore views concerning the impact of those decisions on the environment. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data. Later the interconnections of both quantitative and qualitative aspects were made and those interconnections were composed into a comprehensive structure to develop the toolkit. The model is simulated as a simple web-based application that can be used as a toolkit to facilitate sustainable decision-making in the product development process. The toolkit structure includes data processing and visualisation methods, decision support protocols to improve the sustainability of the design, and a user interface of the toolkit: data inputs, decision making, presenting results and a bridge to link each interface. Finally, the simulated IT-based toolkit was validated by the fashion designers, during which the toolkit was proven to be successful in facilitating a user-friendly sustainable decision-making process.