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Good morning! This week, fashion researchers published a review of literature on fashion's environmental effects in @NatRevEarthEnv. It is riddled with errors. A FASHION THREAD (pun intended)
The authors are @kirsiniinimaki, Greg M. Peters at @chalmersuniv, @HelenaDahlbo, @drpatsyperry, @trissanen & Alison Gwilt at @unsw. Here are the statistics cited on page 1 that are pulled from demonstrably bad data:
"The fashion industry is the 2nd largest industrial polluter after aviation” No, it’s not. (I originally reported this but NYT is the paper of record so maybe you'll believe it over Vox) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/fashion/fashion-second-biggest-polluter-fake-news.html
"the industry produces up to 10% of global CO2 emissions," attributed to Department of Design, @AaltoUniversity, @ChalmersUniv, @sykeint. This actually comes from the UN, who has so far refused to provide me or anyone else the basis for this calculation.
(Later the authors go into the wide variation in calculated emissions, but at this point they leave this one naked.)
"The fashion industry is 2nd largest consumer of water (1.5 trillion litres per year) responsible for ~20% of industrial water pollution from textile treatment and dyeing” attributed to Department of Materials at @officialUoM. Also completely made up. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/27/21080107/fashion-environment-facts-statistics-impact
"Global per-capita textile production has increased from 5.9 kg to 13 kg per year over the period 1975–2018." attributed to a paper by one of the authors of this paper, Greg M. Peters at @chalmersuniv. I paid $40 so I could see the paper. He attributed that figure to Statista.
Statista is not a primary source and I’ve never used it as such. It’s an aggregator of whatever information the internet has coughed up: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-data-available-from-Statista-reliable
"fashion brands are now producing almost twice the amount of clothing today compared with before the year 2000." Attributed to McKinsey, which won’t provide its data, only saying it analyzed proprietary data provided by market research firms. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/27/21080107/fashion-environment-facts-statistics-impact
Look, I could keep going, but you get the point. Many of the attributions are solipsistic references to the authors’ own departments at their universities. So is this, like, peer-reviewed, or what?
@trissanen says the second most polluting was introduced by the editors at @NatRevEarthEnv, but that doesn’t account for everything that comes after. Can we trust anything in this entire paper?
Now that the above statistics and the rest of the avalanche of numbers in this report have been released to the internet, they will spread under the cover of an academic citation of " @kirsiniinimaki et al."
I’m not an academic, so maybe I’m just being naive. But can #AcademicTwitter tell me if this is normal? Or is it exclusive to fashion academia to be like, “This is full of errors but great work!” as a faculty member of @RMIT_CUR tweeted?
