The Worldly team spoke with Cecilia Chan, Chief Commercial Officer at Legend Swimwear Factory, who describes the environmental event that shaped her childhood and how today’s global fashion crisis can benefit from the same type of international cooperation that solved the Ozone Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

Video transcript

I’m Cecilia Chan, the Chief Commercial Officer of Legend Swimwear Factory. I look after the sales and marketing departments in the company. Legend Swimwear Factory is a full suite swimwear delivery partner for world famous brands and retailers.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of a discovery that changed my childhood and also redefined the world. In 1985, a group of British scientists discovered something pretty terrifying. A hole in the Ozone Layer, the size of twenty million square kilometers wide. It’s about the size of North America. For those that grew up in Australia and New Zealand, next to the hole under the Antarctica, it redefined our lives.

Slip, slop, slap is a campaign that really rings to our heart. Slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. That wasn’t for going to the beach, it’s every day before going outside, before sports, before going to school.

The campaigns were unforgettable. Graphic images of sunburned skin, gripping statistics of skin cancer deaths. UV alerts and anti-smoking campaigns were fighting over airtime on both television and also the radio. They were pretty unforgettable and also unavoidable.

But here’s the extraordinary part. In 1987, so two years after the discovery of the ozone hole, the world got together and signed the Montreal Protocol.

It wasn’t any ordinary treaty. It was the first treaty ever to be ratified by every nation on the planet to phase CFCs out of our lives. Science raised the alarm. Together, we solved the Ozone Crisis.

And today, the Ozone Layer is on the path to recovery. The Ozone Crisis really came down to one family of chemicals: CFCs. But the challenge was that it was everywhere, in every household, in every community. So the solution also had to be everywhere, across industries, across nations, and bound by global standards.

So it’s very similar to what we’re facing with the fashion crisis right now. The challenge is that it is the sheer scale of what we are producing and throwing out. Every additional piece of clothing multiplies emissions across the supply chain. And here’s the truth: Over ninety percent of the fashion industry’s emission comes from the supply chain, or Scope three activities.

And more than half of that comes from Tier 2 mills. So that’s your fabric dyeing, printing, molding and shaping of trims and materials. That is the hotspot that Worldly makes visible so that we can turn blind spots into actionable data.

But here’s why it matters: For every additional garment that we make, we add to our emissions. Back in the 2000s, the global industry produced around fifty billion pieces of garments per year. That number today has doubled to over one hundred billion pieces per year. Fueled by Black Friday stampedes and e-commerce deliveries, and studies suggest that close to forty percent of what the garment industry produces never sells.

Brand new, sent to the landfill never worn. And for the clothes that we do wear, we used to wear them for about one hundred and twenty times on average before we throw it out. That number today for some nations is down to seven to ten wears. So we have managed to double what we produce, throw almost half of what we produce out brand new, and for the part that we don’t throw out, we wear that for a handful of times and we throw that out also.

Yes, there are innovations such as repair, rental, but against numbers in the tens of millions, innovations like those are just a drop in the ocean. The fashion industry has really turned into a high throughput pipeline, churning resources on the way in and multiplying emissions on the way out. This notion of buy more, pay less, want it now—our insatiable desire amplifies consumption, drives overproduction and fuels emissions.

Mills may be where the carbon shows up, but it is the upstream choices of how much and how fast that determines the true scale. Yes, scope three reduction matters, but scope three alone can never offset the sheer scale of over consumption and over production. So how do we tackle this problem?

The industry really has to act together on this. Right? It’s not one aspirational brand or one sustainable supplier of the year. Real change will come when the whole industry moves as one.

Science has raised the alarm. Policy is starting to give its teeth. The industry must reform. We must break the cycle of over consumption and over production that drives emissions. And people will adapt with the same unity and with the same resolve. Together we overcame the Ozone Crisis and I’m hopeful that we can overcome the fashion crisis too.