来源：《新科学家》
原文见刊日期：2022年2月12日
The number of garments produced worldwide doubled in the 15 years to 2015, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which works towards a more circular economy. That was driven by more people wearing more clothes, but also by the rise of cheap “fast fashion”, which has led to the average garment being worn fewer times before being discarded.
艾伦·麦克阿瑟基金会的一份报告显示，截至2015年的15年里，全球生产的服装数量翻了一番。该基金会致力于实现更循环经济的发展。这是由于越来越多的人穿了更多的衣服，同时也是由于廉价的“快时尚”的兴起，这导致衣服在被丢弃之前被穿的次数越来越少。
Some 73 per cent of the materials used to make them end up being sent to landfill or incinerated – a truckload of clothes every second. And making them is resource-intensive, whether they are artificial fibres derived largely from hydrocarbons, or cotton, which takes a lot of land, water and fertiliser to grow. In 2015, the equivalent of 1.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide came from producing fibres and turning them into clothes, more than 2 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
大约73%制造衣服的材料最终被送到垃圾填埋场或被焚烧——平均每秒钟有一卡车那么多。而且，生产衣物是资源密集型的，无论是主要从碳氢化合物中提取的人造纤维，还是需要大量土地、水和化肥种植的棉花。2015年，生产纤维并将其制成衣服所产生的二氧化碳相当于12亿吨，占全球温室气体排放量的2%以上。
How can we slow fast fashion down? One way is to view clothes not as a one-off purchase, but as a service you draw on as needed. A few years ago, Reima, a Finnish children’s clothing company, launched an initiative called Reima Kit in which families return clothes when they are outgrown. Reima sells them again, and the parents got some money back. While this scheme is no longer open to new subscribers, similar rental models are springing up elsewhere.
我们怎样才能让快时尚慢下来？一种方法是，不要将衣服视为一次性购买物品，而是将其视为一种你需要的服务。几年前，芬兰儿童服装公司Reima推出了一项名为“Reima-Kit”的计划，在该计划中，孩子长大穿不下后会退还衣服。Reima把旧衣服再次出售，孩子的父母可以拿回一些钱。虽然这项计划不再向新用户开放，但类似的租赁模式正在其他地方涌现。
Even rented clothes eventually wear out though, and recycling clothes is no cakewalk, particularly those made of cotton. Old garments can be shredded to give threads of cotton, but these are shorter than the original ones, making clothing spun from them lower quality. Infinited Fiber, a company based near Helsinki in Finland, uses a chemical process to break down cotton fibres into a solution of cellulose that can be crystallised into new ones. Clothing firm H&M is an investor, and the company behind the Tommy Hilfiger brand is a customer. “We estimate that we can be 20 per cent cheaper than cotton grown in the conventional way,” says Petri Alava, the firm’s co-founder.
即使是租来的衣服最终也会穿坏，回收利用衣服可不是件容易的事，尤其是那些棉质的衣服。旧衣服可以被撕成棉线，但这些棉线比原来的短，使得用它们纺成的衣服质量较低。Infinited-Fiber是一家位于芬兰赫尔辛基附近的公司，该公司利用化学方法将棉纤维分解成一种纤维素溶液，这种溶液可以结晶成新的棉纤维。服装公司H&M是投资者之一，汤米·希尔菲格品牌背后的公司是客户。Infinited-Fiber联合创始人佩特里•阿拉瓦表示：“我们估计，与传统方式种植棉花相比，我们的成本可以低20%。”
Scaling it up, though, would require much better-organised systems for collecting used textiles. This is beginning to happen: in 2018, for example, the European Union ruled that member states will have to separate textiles from other waste by 2025.
然而，要想扩大规模，就需要更好地组织收集废旧纺织品的系统。这种情况正在发生：例如，2018年，欧盟(eu)规定，到2025年，成员国必须将纺织品与其他废物分开。
A longer-term solution might be not to use cotton or hydrocarbon-derived materials for clothes at all, but bio-based polymers grown by lots of microbes. One UK-based company called Spintex has developed proteins that can be extruded from a gel into a silk-like fibre.
一个长期的解决方案可能是根本不使用棉花或碳氢化合物衍生材料制作衣服，而是使用由大量微生物培养的生物聚合物。英国一家名为Spintex的公司已经开发出可以从凝胶中挤压成丝状纤维的蛋白质。