The fashion industry can only go green by becoming unfashionable

Ellen MacArthur and Stella McCartney at the report's launch

Ellen MacArthur and Stella McCartney at the report’s launch

Darren Gerrish/Getty

Green is the new black, if efforts to acknowledge the environmental harm caused by the fashion industry are to be believed.

 A report released yesterday by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlighted the damage done by our efforts to look absolutely fabulous, and they make for grim reading. The clothes industry uses a huge amount of resources to create its wares, it says, including 93 billion cubic metres of water per year for growing cotton and the like.

It also creates a vast amount of pollution, from the hazardous chemicals used during processing and dyeing, to the plastic microfibres that enter the oceans when we wash our clothes, to 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or equivalent per year from producing fibres and turning them into clothes.

The source of some of the numbers in the report isn’t clear, but