Did you know that fast fashion emits twice the amount of carbon dioxide than the flights and maritime combined? Yes, that’s how high carbon consumption is in the fast fashion industry and an indication of how much impact it leaves on the environment. Fast fashion has made the trendiest clothes available at affordable prices to everyone which makes it popular among people and above all, the impact that it has on the environment is not as obvious as transport or other industries. This ignorance has been the catalyst for the boom of the fast fashion industry which unfortunately is impacting our planet deleteriously.
High Purchase, Low usage
According to EARTH.ORG, the sales of clothes have gone up to 200 billion units a year from 100 while the frequency of wearing the same clothes again has dropped by 36%. So, people are buying more clothes but not wearing them as often. The high affordability of clothes in fast fashion has significantly reduced the value of apparel among customers leading to skyrocketing sales of the clothes. This has also consequently led to increasing in landfill waste as more clothes are being dumped more regularly. When people find their recent purchase of clothes to be not in trend anymore or they outgrow it, instead of donating the outfits, they are choosing to throw them away. Based on UN Environment Program, at every second, about one truck full of clothes is thrown into the landfill and UNECE states that about 85% of textiles contribute to landfill waste annually or in other words, 21 billion tonnes of waste! Isn’t it worrying what we are doing to our environment?
Sucks the water, Spits the waste
Fast fashion is the second-highest user of water in the world whereby it uses one-tenth of all the industrial usage for production purposes. To paint a picture, one cotton shirt needs 2700 litres of water to be produced which comes up to the amount of water a person drinks in 2.5 years! What’s more disturbing is the fact that the industry that consumes so much water ends up producing 20% of global water waste which is disturbing. So, not only does this 2.7 trillion dollars worth of industry is over-using the water but also polluting the water with toxic chemicals that often ends up in the ocean. Sadly, more often than not, this pollution is irreversible and the damage is here to stay. It is a common practice that many of the major fast fashion producing textile companies are situated in countries with less stringent regulations on wastewater management which allow them to get away with this.
Micro-price, Microplastic
Microplastic is slowly growing to be one of the major plagues in the environment and fast fashion contributes to approximately 9% of microplastic losses into the ocean annually. To retain the affordability of the garments, fast fashion often opts to use fabrics such as polyester and nylon which are sources of microplastic, because they are both durable and cheap. However, for the discounts that we enjoy on the clothes, our planet pays a hefty price. These fabrics take an extremely long time to decompose and when they do, they release harmful chemicals into the ocean that affects the marine ecosystem. Ironically, when we ingest seafood that might have been impacted by these chemicals or microplastic, we will end up having implications on our health. Hence, it is just a vicious cycle affecting both the earth and us.
Many of us including me are guilty of contributing to this knowingly or unknowingly but it is never too late to start mitigating the ramification of excessive fast-fashion consumerism. It takes very little to practice sustainability in fashion. Reduce the purchase, reuse your clothes and donate them instead of littering them away. If all of us start small today, we can certainly make a beneficial change that will protect our only home, the earth, and hence us.
Sources
- UNEP, https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/putting-brakes-fast-fashion
- Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/fast-fashion-environmental-impact-pollution-emissions-waste-water-2019-10
- EARTH.ORG, https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-9-biggest-fast-fashion-statistics/
- UNECE, https://unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/RCM_Website/RFSD_2018_Side_event_sustainable_fashion.pdf
Thanusha is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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