Clothes are easy to ignore because they are made far away and have throughout history been made by enslaved, unpaid and low-paid laborers, often by women. But clothing affects every other environmental problem we care about. Let’s say you wear a cotton T-shirt — it required thousands of gallons of water to make. If that T-shirt is viscose rayon, it may well have come from a tree felled in the Amazon (viscose rayon is made from plants). And if it’s polyester, acrylic or nylon, you’re wearing plastic. When those plastic clothes get washed, they junk up our oceans with microplastic pollution.

Fortunately, some clothing companies are waking up to the climate crisis. A growing number of brands are bowing to grass-roots pressure and consumer surveys that show that sustainability and ethics are top concerns for young shoppers. In August, at the Group of 7 summit, 32 clothing companies got together to set “science-based targets” for emission reductions. Since then, two dozen more brands have signed this so-called Fashion Pact. Kering, the luxury conglomerate that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, has set a goal for all of its brands to go carbon-neutral.

But fashion can’t go green on its own. It won’t even make a dent in the problem without international cooperation and mainstream attention. Two new reports, one by Stand.earth and the other by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, show that most brands aren’t measuring their emissions, much less cutting them. That’s because a vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions the clothing industry churns out happens in the supply chain — in factories and farms that brands don’t own, and that are spread out and far away.

The clothing industry, like most industries, is also stubbornly reliant on fossil fuels. They’re used to fire up boilers in textile mills, to make the pesticides dumped onto cotton fields and to produce the gobs of chemicals that dye and finish fabrics. Fossil fuels are also the feedstock of synthetic fibers, which now make up the bulk of what we wear. Getting clothing off oil will not be easy.

Consumers have an important part to play in making fashion sustainable. We can work to extend the life of all clothes by switching more of our purchases to secondhand and online resale, renting for special occasions, and repairing clothes instead of throwing them away. We can choose remanufactured and upcycled apparel like those on offer from Eileen Fisher and Converse.