A particularly sad truth and one of fashion’s most well-disguised secrets is that viscose has long been sourced with little consideration of the ecological consequences of taking down trees.

I HAVE A BLACK DRESS that swings through the skirt down to the mid-calf. It has a slight split on one side that shows a little leg while you’re walking and a little more at a run. It is sleeveless. The waist is slightly dropped and sits just above my hips. It is cut on the bias. I can wear a jacket over it when there is a nip in the air. It is the perfect length for my long coats. I wear it with brogues and boots, with sandals and heels. I love to wear it on dates. It is effortless in the best sense, by which I mean it is both comfortable and flattering. I could name several important events in my life that I have worn it to. Job interviews. Dinners with new friends in new cities, when I was anxious and unsure of leaving the house. I could tell you about nights I abandoned it on a beach in a town I didn’t live in so I could run into the water, knowing I could shake the sand out later. I have worn it backstage at Burberry runway shows in London. I have worn it on press trips to Tokyo, Dubai, Marrakech, and Milan. It is made of viscose, so before it was a dress, it was a tree.

One warm summer evening in 2021, I was at an event hosted by the brand that had designed it. I approached the company’s PR director and explained the story of the dress and how I’d love to know more about where the fabric was sourced. She walked me to the brand’s creative director, who and said there was no way of knowing where that viscose was sourced from but, given the time frame (the late 1990s), it was unlikely they’d be proud of the answer. Viscose in that period was usually sourced with few limitations and little consideration of the ecological consequences. Given the immense beauty of forests, and the trees, plants, animals, and birds they provide homes to, this is a particularly sad truth and one of fashion’s most well-disguised secrets.

VISCOSE IS A SOFT, silky fabric sometimes called rayon, modal, lyocell, or bamboo. It tends to feel denser and more fluid than cotton or linen, depending on how it’s been extracted and spun. The best way to understand rayon is to consider it an umbrella term for textiles that are made from cellulose, the building block of most plants. It can be extracted from straw, cotton waste, and other natural materials, but rayon mostly comes from the wood pulp of trees like pine, eucalyptus, or beech.

Despite rayon’s reputation as an eco-friendly fiber, a dark cloud hangs over its credentials. Of the 6.5 million metric tons of rayon produced every year, almost half of it comes from ancient and endangered forests, such as the carbon-rich peatlands of Indonesia and the old-growth boreal forests of Canada. Worryingly, production of rayon has approximately doubled in the last three decades; by 2025, the global viscose rayon market is projected to be worth $28 billion. In 2019, rayon made up 6.4 percent of the global fiber market.

The carbon footprint of rayon and viscose is further complicated by the process of turning wood into a textile. Unlike cotton, wool, or silk, which come out of nature smooth, elastic, and ready to be spun, converting a tree into fabric is chemically intensive and highly toxic to both workers and the environment.

First, the wood pulp is treated with caustic sodas. Carbon disulphide is added, which liquifies the cellulose without damaging its molecular structure. This substance is churned and left to sit before more caustics are added, turning it into a thick, viscous substance (hence the name). The substance is then jetted into tanks of sulfuric acid, forming fine rayon filaments that are spun, stretched, and bleached before being woven into fabric.

Documented evidence throughout the twentieth century links viscose rayon manufacturing to severe and often lethal illnesses.

When rayon was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, it was marketed as artificial silk because of its subtle sheen, softness, and propensity for drape. The First World War disrupted the supply of silk and cotton, accelerating rayon manufacturing. It was perfect for the fluid fashions of the 1920s and ’30s, and, because it was cheap, production thrived during the Great Depression. By the end of the 1930s, rayon was being produced in the United States, Britain, Japan, and Germany. But the dangers of the chemicals used in its manufacturing were poorly understood.

When World War II broke out, the Nazis reduced their reliance on imported textiles, in part by turning to rayon factories. The war meant factories were experiencing labor shortages, which the regime dealt with by sending political prisoners to work. One of these prisoners, French resistance fighter Agnès Humbert, documented the appalling conditions inside the factories. In her memoir, she described prisoners with overalls that were in tatters, having been eaten away by acid that also left them with wounds anywhere it touched their skin, mostly on their hands and feet. Abuse was rife. Humbert was given little to no training and left to operate machinery for 12 hours a day. She watched as the workers around her suffered spells of blindness, insomnia, and psychosis. Suicide attempts in the factories were so common that bars were placed on second-story windows to prevent workers from jumping out.

Documented evidence throughout the twentieth century links viscose rayon manufacturing to severe and often lethal illnesses. A 2002 report from the World Health Organization found that exposure to carbon disulphide — the main chemical used in processing viscose rayon — causes a range of neurophysiological effects, including blindness, nerve damage and impaired motor skills, while increasing the risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease. The toxic nature of the chemicals used in rayon production results in hazardous waste.

A 2017 report by the Changing Markets Foundation found visible and highly odorous pollution on production sites in India that belonged to the Aditya Birla Group — the world’s biggest viscose producer. Hazardous waste from factories turned the river water dark red, and an independent laboratory test revealed the air had 125 times the level of carbon disulphide recommended by the WHO. The surrounding villages did not have access to safe drinking water; in one alarming instance, 60 villagers fell seriously ill and lost the ability to walk. More heartbreaking reports came out of Aditya Birla’s plants in Indonesia, with locals reporting illegal discharge of waste by the factories at night or after rainfall. Similar problems have been reported across China and other parts of India and Indonesia — and the issues are not limited to one company.

THE VISCOSE MARKET is highly concentrated, with just 10 companies supplying 75 percent of the market. The world’s second-largest viscose producer is Austria’s Lenzing Group, which has spent a great deal of time and energy positioning itself as an eco-friendly company. It has almost single-handedly managed to move the conversation about viscose rayon away from deforestation and toxic chemicals to focus solely on viscose being produced using best practices, like sourcing from Forest Stewardship Council (fsc)-certified forests and closed-loop, non-toxic production. But the truth about sourcing this fiber and whether it is good for the environment, for the Earth, is a little more convoluted than champions of viscose would have us believe.

Sustainable sourcing from forests is a complicated business.

Sustainable sourcing from forests is a complicated business. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations divides forests into several categories: primary forests, secondary forests, planted forests, and plantations. Primary (or old-growth) forests have undisturbed ecologies and no visible signs of human activity; they are critical to the environment because of their age and density. Secondary forests are regenerating through natural processes after human intervention and, if left undisturbed, may be invaded by primary forest trees and revert to their natural state. Planted forests have been seeded. They resemble natural forests and include forests established to restore ecosystems and protect soil and water. They are sometimes referred to as semi-natural forests, and their main use is for production of wood and fiber. The final category is plantation forests, which are intensively managed landscapes mainly composed of one or two tree species, planted with regular spacing and established for the production of wood and fiber.

Krishna Manda, who co-leads global sustainability at the Lenzing Group, explains that one of Lenzing’s core commitments is to protect ancient and endangered forests. So the company sources wood pulp only from semi-natural forests and plantations. Manda tells me that people have been sustainably harvesting the forests of Europe for hundreds of years. Thanks to forest management, the number of trees is increasing and the total area of forest is growing. In sustainably managed forests, he explains, the trees are rotated on a hundred-year cycle, “so the size of the trees, the age of the trees, and the health of the trees are part of the calculation when you harvest them.” By taking these things into account, it means “every year the harvest is less than the growth.” Lenzing meanwhile works to protect biodiversity along the supply chain. One of the company’s certifications is awarded only when 20 percent of the productive area is kept for native flora and fauna.

It seems counterintuitive that we would look to conserve nature by cutting down trees and keeping a mere portion of the land for biodiversity, especially considering how important forests are to carbon sequestration and maintaining ecosystems. I think of forests and their significance to ecology, to religion, to mythology. Although I understand that it’s complicated, I can’t help but feel we should be replanting forests and allowing nature to take over, letting the trees grow wild and old with giant knotty trunks and gnarled branches.

I explain this feeling to Rodney Keenan, a professor of forest and ecosystem science at the University of Melbourne, and he tells me that this isn’t really how forests work. As a general principle, he says, allowing nature to take its course isn’t the best option for the future of forests. “To maintain a lot of the values you want from a forest — whether it’s conservation, carbon stocks, protection from wildfire, managing insects, pests, disease, feral animals, and all the other things that can go on in forests,” he says, “you need to be actively managing them.” He points out that in Australia, the traditional owners of the land managed forest landscapes for over 60,000 years. “The removal of that management has had very significant consequences for our forests, and is partly leading to the kind of large-scale wildfire events that we’ve had over the last 20 years or so.” He impresses upon me the idea that forests are dynamic. “Old trees don’t stay there forever — even within a forest you’ll have trees dying and natural regeneration occurring, and that happens at different scales depending on the nature of the disturbances that are operating in those forests.”

LENZING OFTEN POINTS to the work it does with the nonprofit Canopy to highlight its eco-friendly credentials. Canopy works to secure large-scale forest conservation and to transform unsustainable forest product supply chains by working directly with the industry. It has partnered with designers like Stella McCartney and Eileen Fisher and, at the end of 2020, it conducted an independent audit of Lenzing’s pulp sourcing. This audit confirmed Lenzing is at “low risk of sourcing wood from ancient or endangered forests or other controversial sources.” But despite Lenzing and other fashion houses promoting their connection to Canopy to prove the sustainability of their viscose and rayon sourcing, my conversation with Canopy revealed a more nuanced position.

Amanda Carr is the senior lead on the CanopyStyle campaign. Via email, Carr tells me that “CanopyStyle is dedicated to systemic change in the sourcing of pulp for textiles across this particular supply chain, including viscose, rayon, modal, lyocell, acetate, and all the trademarked brands in between.” Canopy’s priority is to ensure no viscose is sourced from ancient and endangered forests, and she says the next step is to replace fiber from forests with fiber from a more sustainable source. Its preference is for next-generation solutions like using old clothing to make new pulp, or growing fiber from yeast or food waste.

“It’s important to note that conserving forests is thought to be able to provide about 30 percent of the solution to the climate crisis,” Carr says — a figure reiterated by United Nations Environment Programme. She explains why it’s so complicated to classify different forests to determine what sustainable sourcing looks like.

While sourcing wood products and pulp from plantations may be cited as a sustainable alternative by companies like Lenzing, she says, “all too often, plantations have come at a cost of recent deforestation in places like Indonesia’s rainforests, for example, so a blanket statement that plantations are the most sustainable isn’t accurate.” Furthermore, some “secondary forests are very old and, if left unharvested, have the potential to begin to provide the kind of eco-services (storing carbon, filtering water, regulating rainfall) that ancient forests do.”

In order to protect ancient and endangered forests, Carr says, sometimes trade-offs need to be made so fiber supply can be satisfied.

When she writes that “we don’t see easy, cut-and-dry answers to these types of questions,” I feel vindicated after months of complicated reading and mind-bending conversations with experts.

“It feels like a human-centric notion to assume we could possibly do better for our plant, our biodiversity, and our climate by managing a complex forest ecosystem for resource extraction or even tree growth,” she notes. “They simply need to be left standing and providing for the cultures and communities that have safeguarded them for millennia to have the biggest benefit.” She tells me that, in some circumstances, there is not an option for sustainably managed forestry because some forest ecosystems or landscapes are irreplaceable.

But of course, the reality of the supply chain means it is not quite so simple. In order to protect ancient and endangered forests, Carr says, sometimes trade-offs need to be made so fiber supply can be satisfied — “for example, more intensive plantation management on degraded lands to concentrate fiber production.” Forest certifications, like the ones Lenzing uses, are “a good tool,” she says, but they are constrained because certification is applied from a local viewpoint, without considering regional or global needs. Governance is another constraint; regulations must be developed in alignment with Indigenous and traditional governance to determine what should be conserved and what should be extracted across entire ecosystems. “This is not the kind of planning that voluntary certification applied by individual corporations accomplishes,” she says.

Canopy’s position is that sourcing of viscose should eventually move away from forests, secondary or otherwise, toward recycled cellulose options. Some of this is mapped out in its Survival plan, which includes a hierarchy of strategies: first conserve and reduce; then maximize the use of the lowest footprint fibers (recycled, agricultural waste, and next generation fibers); then, where virgin inputs are still required, explore potentially fast-growing, on-purpose bast crops (like hemp, flax, jute, and kenaf) grown under specific standards; and, lastly, use trees from plantations on degraded lands.

According to Textile Exchange, the market share of “recycled” cellulose fibers is very small, but a lot of ongoing research and development means it is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. Recent technological advancements have made it possible to convert some textile waste into new materials. Any plant-based material can potentially be dissolved to make fibers, so theoretically all natural fabrics like cotton, linen, and silk could be regenerated into viscose rayon. Canopy says this creates an opportunity to recycle a fraction of the 20 million tons of cotton fabric waste and the 6 million tons of viscose fabric waste generated every year back into viscose pulp. The process is much more efficient than converting trees.

“It is like we are standing on a cliff edge, and we have an opportunity to build a fence at the top versus a hospital at the bottom.”

“On average, it takes 2.5–3 tons of trees to create 1 ton of viscose pulp, but it takes only about 1 ton of recycled cotton or rayon to make 1 ton of viscose pulp.” Carr says. A wonderful reality of working in this forest-based fabric supply chain is the opportunity to steer investments toward solutions and away from problems, she adds. “It is like we are standing on a cliff edge, and we have an opportunity to build a fence at the top versus a hospital at the bottom.”

It’s important to acknowledge that Lenzing is part of this mission. The company has done significant research on alternative, non-wood cellulose sources and concluded that textile waste can be a valuable raw material for the production of viscose rayon. And they have developed fabrics made from pre-consumer cotton scraps and post-consumer garments combined with wood pulp. Carr says that even though CanopyStyle has confirmed Lenzing has a low risk of sourcing from the world’s ancient and endangered forests, “at the end of the day, the best thing to do if you had to source viscose from Lenzing would be to buy their recycled line, where they are blending 30 percent textile waste into the mix of their Refibra product line.”

Ultimately, sourcing viscose rayon from forests does not have the same potential for regeneration as the farming of other natural fibers. But since the science used to take wood pulp and turn it into a fabric can be applied to transform textile waste into an input material, there is still potential for viscose rayon production to become a force for good.

TEXTILE WASTE IS an insurmountable problem for the fashion industry because of the volume of clothes being discarded and, much like rubbish made of plastic, it isn’t going away. Synthetic fibers won’t biodegrade, and natural fibers have to be disposed of in the right circumstances (like compost), so we need innovative solutions. The notion that we can turn old textiles into new, superior ones is extremely interesting. Since viscose rayon is made of cellulose, it is better on the body and for the environment than synthetics; it breathes against the skin and does not have a complicated relationship with oil or sweat, which makes it nicer to wear, and it doesn’t shed plastic microfibers into waterways every time it’s washed.

This means that, despite viscose rayon’s dark and complex history, the material may have a hopeful future. If we can eliminate trees and forests from its sourcing, transition to sourcing from textile waste and bast fibers and further innovate production to be closed-loop and non-toxic, viscose rayon could truly earn the eco-friendly reputation it has already been given.

The fashion industry faces an extremely complex set of problems that touch every single part of the supply chain. To solve these problems and move beyond mere sustainability, fashion needs to embrace many and varied innovative solutions. We are just at the beginning of this journey, staring down a long road to get to a place where our clothes are doing more good than harm.