Author Correction: The environmental price of fast fashion

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9 Published online 07 Apr 2020

Owing to an editorial error, the first sentence of the abstract mis-claimed that the fashion industry is the second largest industrial polluter after aviation. This sentence has been revised to read ‘the fashion industry is facing increasing global scrutiny of its environmentally polluting supply chain operations’ to better reflect quantitative estimates of pollution rankings. The Abstract and Introduction also stated that the fashion industry consumed ‘1.5 trillion litres of water per year’, which has now been corrected to ‘79 trillion litres of water per year’. The sentence stating the fashion industry is the second largest consumer of water has further been changed to ‘a major consumer of water’. The CO₂ estimates have been modified from ‘up to 10% of global CO₂ emissions (>1.7 billion tonnes annually)’ to ‘8-10% of global CO₂ emissions (4-5 billion tonnes annually)’. Also in the Introduction, the statement ‘global consumption has risen to an estimated 62 million tonnes of textile products per year’ has been corrected to ’62 million tonnes of apparel per year’. In Global supply chains, ‘polyester (a synthetic) accounted for 51% (54 million tonnes) in 2017’ has been corrected to ‘polyester (a synthetic) accounted for 51% (54 million tonnes) in 2018’. In the sub-section Post-consumer textile waste, ‘Post-consumer textile-waste recycling varies widely between countries’ is updated to’ Post-consumer textile collection rates varies widely between countries’. In Closing the loop, ‘polyester accounts for only 14% of the global fibre market share’ is corrected to ‘polyester accounts for only 14% of the global total polyester market share’.

Several changes have also been made to the citations and references: the original reference 4 in the statement ‘~20% of industrial water pollution from textile treatment and dyeing’ updated; reference 14 added to the statement ‘when fast-fashion phenomena started’; reference 14 added to the statement ‘fashion brands are now producing almost twice the amount of clothing today compared with before the year 2000’; reference 17 added to the statement ‘between 13 kg and 16 kg of textiles across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland’; reference 40 changed to reference 42 in the statement ‘a T-shirt and a pair of jeans made in Asia (primarily China, Bangladesh and Turkey) and used in Sweden’; the original reference 88 updated in the statement ‘the sharing economy (including swapping and renting) is worth an estimated 28 billion Euros in transactions’; reference 24 replaced with 34 in the statement ‘and cotton recycling remains limited’; and reference 17 updated. These errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the manuscript.