Burberry Announced The Abandoning Of Plastics, And Has Made New Progress In Sustainable Fashion.

The sustainability agenda for fashion is continuing.

According to the latest report issued by charity Ellen MacArthur Foundation, entitled "new global commitments on plastics economics", the British luxury brand Burberry plans to replace all plastic packaging materials in 2025 with reusable, reusable or compostable materials, and completely abolish the use of ordinary plastic materials. Up to now, the company has cancelled plastic lamination from its polyethylene bags and retail bags. It is expected to reduce the use of plastic by about 29 tons. In addition, Burberry has announced plans to replace all the clothes hangers, shields and plastic bags with environmentally-friendly materials, and has launched a clothes rack recycling plan to recycle and recycle the disused retail hangers.

At the same time, the signing of the undertaking includes the L Or al Al, the Johnson group (Johnson & Johnson) and Unilever (Unilever), the fashion industry Burberry, Stella McCartney, H&M, Zara parent company and other garment enterprises. It also includes food and beverage giants such as (Danone Group), Pepsi (Pepsi Cola), Coca Cola Co and so on, and the plastic packaging consumes about 20% of the world's plastic packaging.

Despite the sustainability issues highlighted by the fashion industry today, the prohibition of animal fur is a massive victory for environmentalism in recent years. Burberry said last year that it would phase out the existing fur products and start using the first series of Tisci. The fur in the series is all made of artificial fur.

However, it is hard to say whether the momentum will extend to plastic packaging after animal fur.

Tracing to the source, the first fully synthetic plastic in human history was the phenol formaldehyde resin made by Baekeland, American, in 1909, also known as Baekeland plastic.

In 1965, the Swedish Celloplast company applied for a patent for an integrated polyethylene shopping bag. Soon, this plastic bag designed by engineer Sten Gustaf Thuli took the place of cloth bags and paper bags in Europe. In 1979, the plastic bags which had successfully occupied 80% of the bags market went further towards internationalization. Some companies producing plastic bags began to sell their products vigorously.

However, convenience brings hidden disasters at the same time.

A report released by Ellen MacArthur Foundation in November 2017 shows that less than one percent of the clothing industry is recycled. The clothing industry has exported 500 thousand tons of microfiber to the global ocean every year, equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles. According to this trend, the plastic content in the ocean may exceed that of fish in 2050.

In spite of the fact that plastic packaging is not the only source of plastic pollution, plastic packaging accounts for 1/3 of the total plastic industry.

To this end, in recent years, the fashion industry also has a frequent brand of recycling and reuse of plastics as one of the direction of product innovation.

Timberland, an outdoor sports brand, once pushed out a set of shoes and bags made of recycled plastic bottles, which were recovered from the streets of Haiti and Honduras. 75% of the materials in the Air Max 720 of the new air cushion shoes introduced by Nike were also recovered from the manufacturing industry. As early as 2015, Adidas announced that it would gradually stop using plastic bags in its 2900 shops and produce its own products from the raw materials extracted from marine plastic waste.

However, when Chanel brought the PVC material to the spring and summer show in 2018, the application of plastics returned to the fashion field in a completely new form.

For these luxury brands, their PVC materials can often be processed through scientific and technological means, thereby reducing the harm to the environment. Yet another group of cheap PVC materials that are popular with the world once again challenge the environment.

On the other hand, compared with the artificial fur, the research and development of degradable plastics is still in the exploratory stage. Due to the restriction of capital and technology level, environmental plastics still need to spend a lot of money. In view of the depth and universality of plastics in the retail field, the retail industry is far away from the day of total prohibition of plastics.