Kestävä kehitys globaalissa muotiteollisuudessa

Sustainable development is a phenomenon that interest a growing number of consumers. De-spite this, the implementation of its central ideas has been vastly unsuccessful in the field of fashion industry, which remains one of the biggest polluters in the world (Niinimäki et al 2020). This paper takes a look at the central challenges of the implementation of the sustainable development in the fashion industry. The challenges are discussed with the help of a few terms that can be seen as important to the sustainable development ideology of today: circular economy (CE), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and extended producer responsibility (EPR). The modern fashion industry is characterized by a vastly globalized manufacturing supply chain (Boström and Micheletti 2016). This causes multiple challenges in the terms of the environmental and social impact of the industry, from transportation emissions (Filho et al 2019) and pre-consumer waste due to lax design-producer collaboration (Islam et al 2021), to safety violations (Lund-Thomsen and Lindgreen 2014). Besides this, the fast fashion business model, which relies on producing cheap, low-quality clothes that correspond to rapidly changing fashion trends (Ertekin and Atik 2015), contributes to globally growing numbers of fabric waste (Niinimäki et al 2020). Circular economy business model attempts at fighting the negative effects of the fast fashion industry by offering alternative way of designing clothes that takes into account the whole life cycle of the product, from beginning until the end (Levänen et al 2021). The conclusion of the paper is that while some sustainability schemes are already in place around the world, more effort is needed in order to make true change in the fashion industry. Mont and Power (2010) and Niinimäki et al (2020) recommend the focus should be shifted from the actions of individual consumers to wider systems that keep up the growing consumption. Additionally, more research into the economic profitability of sustainability schemes such as business strategies based on CE is needed, in order to motivate companies to initiate them (Levänen et al 2021, Jia et al 2020)