TheTimes8April2020

16 1GM Wednesday April 8 2020 | the times

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A little more than 200 million years

ago, when crocodile-like animals ruled

the Earth, the ground began to spew

out carbon dioxide.

Pangaea, the supercontinent, was

breaking up and in the tumult vast vol-

canoes belched forth from beneath.

As they did, the temperatures rose,

the sea level rose, the oceans acidified

— and one of the world’s great mass

extinctions began.

The bad news for us, a new study has

suggested, is that a close analogue to

that event, which marked the end of the

reign of the crocodile-like phytosaurs,

is the one happening today. It’s just that

instead of volcanoes it is cars, planes

and power stations that are doing the

spewing.

For a paper in the journal Nature

Communications, scientists have looked

at rocks formed during the Triassic-

Jurassic extinction, an event so signifi-

cant that it marked the boundary

between the two geologic periods.

The precise cause of the mass extinc-

tion, in which a significant proportion

of land and marine animals died, has

been a source of controversy. Consen-

sus is forming, though, that it was the

result of a period of major climatic

change. The new research analysed

CO

2

may have wiped out

reptiles 200m years ago

bubbles locked inside basaltic rocks,

searching for signs of CO 2. In this way

they were able to provide a rough calcu-

lation of the total CO 2 emitted.

Looking at one phase of eruption, in

which a hundred thousand cubic

kilometres of rock solidified over the

course of 500 years, they estimated that

a quantity of CO 2 was emitted that

was roughly equivalent to that

projected to be released during the 21st

century, assuming we keep to our 2C

targets.

They said that on this basis “it is poss-

ible that just a single... volcanic pulse

may have severely affected the end-

Triassic climate,” adding that the calcu-

lation “suggests that the end-Triassic

climatic and environmental changes,

driven by CO 2 emissions, may have

been similar to those predicted for the

near future.”

Manfredo Capriola, from the Uni-

versity of Padova in Italy, said that he

did not need to labour the parallel.

“Even if the end-Triassic world was

very different from the present-day

one, the same amount of CO 2 injected

into the modern atmosphere led to a

severe mass extinction at the

end-Triassic,” he said.

This time around we had just better

hope that we fare better than the

phytosaurs.

Tom Whipple

MATTHEW POVER

Cheap fashion is

costing the Earth,

scientists warn

Cut-price clothes are anything but

cheap — at least when it comes to the

environment.

A study has totted up the hidden

costs of fast fashion, an industry that

the authors said after two decades of

growth was the largest industrial pol-

luter after aviation.

The scientists behind the study said

that to make the clothing industry sus-

tainable required the “total abandon-

ment” of a business model that had pro-

liferated online and on the high street

in the past 20 years.

Since the turn of the millennium the

number of clothes bought in Europe

has increased by about 40 per cent,

while the amount of time each item is

worn has decreased by about the same

amount. In the UK the average

consumer now buys 26.7kg of clothes a

year. Globally, in 1975, the figure was

5.9kg.

Writing in the journal Nature

Reviews Earth and Environment,

Scandinavian scientists said that this

reflected the growth of shops “based on

offering consumers frequent novelty in

the form of low-priced, trend-led

products.”

“This business model has been

successful, evidenced by its sustained

growth, outperformance of more tradi-

tional fashion retail and market entry

of new players such as online retailers,

who can offer more agility and faster

delivery of products,” they said.

“Brands are producing almost twice

the number of clothing collections

compared with pre-2000, when

fast-fashion phenomena started, and

the overall increase in clothing-

production demand is estimated to be

2 per cent yearly.” Garment production

is water intensive. It is estimated that

for each tonne of material used, 200

tonnes of water are required.

The authors of the study also

estimated carbon dioxide production,

calculating that in total the industry

produced the equivalent of 2.9 billion

tonnes of it a year. This was just slightly

less than the whole of the European

Union combined — although they

cautioned that their calculations

significantly exceeded those of some

other groups.

Waste is also a big problem, with a

third of microplastics entering the seas

originating in garments, and almost

100 million tonnes of fabric ending up

in landfill or being burnt.

The researchers said that the biggest

change consumers could make to curb

that figure would be to move away from

viewing clothes as disposable, and in-

stead buying fashion designed to last. A

recent survey of British women found

that on average they wore garments

only seven times.

“The current business logic in the

fashion sector is based on ever-

increasing production and sales, fast

manufacturing, low product quality

and short product life cycles, all of

which lead to unsustainable consump-

tion, fast material throughput, substan-

tial waste and vast environmental

impacts,” they wrote.

“It is essential that the industry as a

whole (from fibre production to retail)

takes responsibility for its environmen-

tal impacts, including water, energy

and chemical use, CO 2 emissions and

waste production... Consumers must

understand fashion as more of a

functional product rather than enter-

tainment, and be ready to pay higher

prices that account for the environ-

mental impact of fashion.”

Tom Whipple Science Editor

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