UK Children’s Parliament on COP 28: Harry Acheampong blames fashion industry for global crisis
This year’s United Kingdom (UK) Children’s Parliament has descended heavily on the fashion industry for its contribution to the global climate crisis.
Advertisement
“We need the fashion industry, but it must be sustainable.
This industry is contributing hugely to the climate catastrophe.
“We cannot continue this path of destruction in the name of fashion.
It is time we thought of sustainability in everything we do,” the Interim Prime Minister of the UK Children’s Parliament, Harry Acheampong, has stated.
Parliament
The UK Children’s Parliament was co-founded by the late Sir David Amess and supported by Wakelet and Microsoft 365.
The Children’s Parliament is noramlly held during the annual climate change conference dubbed, Conference of the Parties (COP) with the 2023 Conference, which was the COP 28, ending in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The conference has become a yearly ritual where world leaders, climate experts and corporations meet to discuss the causes and the consequences of human activities on the planet and to draw up plans to tackle them.
Criminal
12-Year old Master Acheampong said the fashion industry was said to be the world's second-largest climate criminal, saying, “Dumping waste is unacceptable in the current climate.”
Master Acheampong said the impact of the fashion industry in terms of pollution, water use, carbon emissions, human rights and gender inequality was increasing every day.
“We cannot deny that the fashion industry represents an important part of our economy, with a value of about 2.5 trillion British pounds and employing over 75 million people worldwide,” he said.
He said the sector had grown immensely over the last two decades, as clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014.
Master Acheampong, however, expressed concern that 85 per cent of all textiles go to the dump yearly, and washing some types of clothes sends a significant amount of microplastics into the ocean.
He said some 93 billion cubic metres of water – enough to meet the needs of five million people – was used by the fashion industry annually, contributing significantly to water scarcity in some regions.
“The equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second,” he said, adding that approximately 60 per cent of all materials used by the fashion industry were made from plastic.
Master Acheampong said that every year, 500,000 tonnes of microfibres were released into the ocean from washing clothes — the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles, accusing the fashion industry as responsible for a tenth of humanity’s carbon emissions — more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.