ASOS has recently launched both a new ‘Responsible’ filter to show you items made of recycled and sustainable materials, and a whole Responsible Edit, which features more than 8000 clothing pieces.
Since attending the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2017, ASOS has been committed to improving their sustainable fashion practices and reducing their environmental footprint. This has involved increasing the transparency of their raw material supply chains, (they’ve successfully completed transparency pilots with their Indian and Turkish suppliers), and lowering the environmental impact of these raw materials: they aimed to use 80% more sustainable cotton in 2018, and managed to hit 72%, with a new target of 95% by 2020 – quite impressive considering cotton is their most widely used fibre.
ASOS also invests in local craftsmanship – now in its 18th season, the ASOS Made in Kenya brand manufactures all its pieces in a Kenyan workshop which provides employment and training to some of Kenya’s poorest communities, and so far the fabric off-cuts from the workshop have been made into sanitary kits for 900 Kenyan girls! The newly-launched sustainability features only add to ASOS’s arsenal of methods to increase our accessibility to more eco-friendly fashion. In this world of sustainable or ‘slow’ fashion, the famous 5 R’s are to reduce your consumption; repair your torn garments; recycle old clothes; repurpose your own pieces into something else (aka ‘upcycling’); and reinvent – use your creativity to style your current wardrobe in new ways.
But what happens when you need a new item? Then it’s easy to fall back into the vortex of fast fashion with its low prices and pages of choices. But with the fashion industry being a major global contributor to greenhouse gas emissions – about equivalent to the entire aviation sector (that’s all the planes in the world!), it is vital to be as eco-friendly when it comes to our clothes, as we possibly can. So ASOS’s new tools helping us find more sustainable pieces when we’re browsing, are a huge step to making our retail therapy less damaging to the environment, and will hopefully set a precedent for the rest of the online fashion industry.
And how does one use these new features, you may ask?
Available both on the ASOS app and the mobile/desktop websites, the ‘Responsible’ filter appears alongside the other ‘Colour’ and ‘Price Range’ filters, allowing you to only view products made from recycled or sustainable materials, and by typing ‘Responsible Edit’ into the search tab, you can browse thousands of pieces that also follow ASOS’s sustainable fashion practices.
These pieces include some of our favourite brands such as Nike, Adidas Originals, Ellesse, Pull&Bear, Weekday and Converse, amongst many many more, as well as many of ASOS’s own brands such as ASOS Design and ASOS White.
So next time you’re scrolling through ASOS well into the night, turn on these new sustainability features, and feel a little less guilty about shopping – now the only damage you’re doing is to your bank balance and your sleep! Browsing in this way is a trend that will hopefully become the norm. There is no need to trail the internet or the local high street for clothes with a sustainable heritage, a simple search is all it takes.
Image Credit: asos.com via Wikipedia