Guardian: Fashion has an edgy reputation, but its pretty conservative about fabric. Cotton still makes up a third of fibre production. The non-organic variety (only 4% of cotton used in fashion is sustainable) has a heavy eco burden, using 11% of all pesticides produced. Plus, it takes 20,000 litres of water to produce just 1kg. But most of our closet space goes to synthetic garments, which are derived from oil.
The industry is huge, producing by my reckoning more than 80bn new garments a year. We...