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Hi everyone! I’m glad you’re listening in to learn what small changes you can make to create a big difference. Today on greenme I’m going to get into all the details the environmental impacts of fast fashion, and what you can do now to make your closet eco friendly.
The term “fast fashion” derives from the fact that brands are constantly making new clothes. Instead of re-stocking items when they run out, companies create entirely new designs that push their old ones to be deemed unfashionable. You may be wondering how these brands are able to create new designs every two weeks, and the answer is, they sometimes don’t. Small brands and designers far too often see their original designs on the face of brands like H&M and Zara. Companies like Zara are able to turn a design sketch into an item of clothing being sold in stores in just 14-21 days. By restocking their racks every two weeks, the industry is now producing 400x more clothes than they were just two years ago, and consumer culture has been completely inflated.
Now, how are these companies able to produce these new clothes before the next wave of designs arrive? Have you ever questioned how H&M can SELL a shirt for three dollars, PAY for the expenses of having the shirt made and transported, and STILL MAKE a profit? The answer is cheap materials, cheap transportation fuel, cheap marketing, and cheap labor.
Fast fashion has received a lot of media attention. In the 1990s, multinational athletic wear company Nike was caught by university-student activists to be selling goods produced in sweatshops. In today’s day, sources such as the Washington Post have reported that Nike currently purchases from a factory of Uyghur Muslim workers.
People are familiar with the ethical issues of sweatshops and fast fashion. However, what many look past are their impacts on the environment.
Think of the last shirt or top you bought and what it may be made of. Most garments from fast-fashion brands are made from a material called polyester. With the rise of rapidly-produced clothing items, production of this substance has far surpased cotton, wool, and other common materials. Polyester is a patroleum-based fiber that requires immense amounts of fossil fuels to produce- to be exact, 70 MILLION barrels of oil PER year.
Now, back to your new shirt. When you throw this piece in the washing machine, you may find it to come out with tiny lint balls and fibers all over it. This is because in the wash, polyester sheds off fibers that find their way into waterways and eventually, the ocean. That’s right, polyester is THE leading cause of microplastics in the ocean, not your straws and water bottles. Aside from polyester, the fashion industry in general is not very kind to our planet’s water supply. About 20% of industrial water pollution comes from the fashion industry alone. In countries where most fast fashion garments are produced, many of which do not have very strict environmental laws, toxic wastewaters from garment-production factories are dumped directly into nearby rivers. If you’ve ever seen the photos of the notoriously-pink rivers in Bangladesh, this is exactly why. These rivers in Bangladesh have 22,000 liters of wastewater dumped into them every day. This is where we start to see environmental issues affecting not only plants and animals, but human beings who breathe air and drink water. Although I’ve just ranted on the impacts of polyester use, other leading materials such as cotton aren’t much better. 2.5% of all cultivated land on Earth is used to farm cotton, and much of this land uses harmful chemical fertilizers that wash into waterways. 5400 to 19,000 liters of water are used to produce one kilogram on non-organic cotton, and 80% of this water is used simply to wash away the fertilizers and pesticides used to farm it. This almost makes these farming methods seem completely pointless, but I’ll save the details for another episode.
Now, going back to your new shirt, it’s been some time, and you’re starting to realize that you haven’t worn this shirt in a while, so you decide to trash it. The average American throws away about 82 pounds of clothes per year, and only wears a piece of clothing about 7 times before trashing it. When it comes to waste, polyester can take up to 200 years to degrade. In fact, every piece of polyester clothing that was ever made, is STILL sitting somewhere in a landfill today.
So what can you do? The answer is simple- stop buying and stop trashing.
The key of sustainable fashion is not putting all your hopes in unaffordable clothes from sustainable brands, it’s actually to buy less. Sustainable clothing brands often sell at high prices for a reason- and this gives off the idea that the more expensive an item is, the better it is for the environment. You’ll often hear people say, how is urban outfitters any better than shein or h&m, and the answer is it’s not much better. In the world of affordable fashion, there aren’t any good, or perfect companies. And when it comes to how YOU can make a change, don’t put all the blame on the corporations that you can’t fix. Put the blame on overconsumption. Remember those 82 pounds of clothes people waste annually and the amount of privilege it takes to be able to throw away so many garments only to buy new ones.
When it comes to fashion, there are so many ways you can change your consumption habits. Now, this is what I call the time frame method: before buying something, envision yourself in one year. Where will you be? In college, starting a new job, still in high school? Ask yourself if your future self will be wearing/ using this item in one year. If not, then there’s no reason to be feeding into these corporation’s profits.
For high schoolers like me, it seems impossible to be trendy unless you have new clothes. However, it is important to keep in mind that the cycle of fashion trends repeat themselves every few decades. You can easily find pieces from thrift stores or your parent’s bin of old clothes that would be trendy today. Be careful with thrifting, as low prices at any store tricks people into overconsumption, which isn’t beneficial in any circumstance.
Now, I’m not expecting you to live the rest of your life off of whatever is in your closet now and thrift shops In fact, I have pieces in my closet from H&M and Zara, and it can be unbearable to put all the weight of fast fashion on the consumer, when corporations are still producing clothes rapidly. However, through social media, if people are able to collectively put new fashion trends on a halt and emphasize the already-existing cycle of trends that repeat themselves every few decades, we can send a message to corporations that consumers aren’t too excited about their new clothes coming in every two weeks. And this movement is already happening. Through companies like depop and etsy, upcycling clothes has never been easier. In order to save the environment from the impacts of fast fashion, we need to collectively slow fashion down.
Although it’s essential to do this and buy less, you can’t promise yourself to never buy clothes again. it’s important to invest in sustainable fashion if you can. Buy clothes made in places with stricter environmental laws such as the US and europe.
Thanks for listening in on how you can make small changes to create a big difference in the world.
