The Environmental Dangers of Fast Fashion
We’ve all heard that fast fashion is wasteful as well as potentially unethical and dangerous. But what are the problems that are created by fast fashion? How did it get its bad name?
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Fast fashion is a business model that gets its name from getting more clothing to market in faster cycles to keep pace with fashion trends. For consumers, this is great. It means access to more of the latest fashions at affordable prices. What’re more these new designs are available on a weekly basis, whereas traditional fashion brands could only launch seasonal collections. So what’s not to like?
The problem with fast fashion is that the intensity of production and logistics that make this possible put an incredible strain on workers and the environment and create even more waste than traditional, “slow” fashion. As you might expect, to meet faster turnaround times and lower price points, fast fashion items are made with cheaper materials and lower quality craftsmanship than traditional clothes. What’s more, weekly updates to your wardrobe mean more clothes and more disposable clothes that are more likely to end up in the landfill.
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Basically, the benefits of fast fashion come at an extremely high cost for many human beings and the planet itself. This week we are going to explain some of these costs of fast fashion.
Carbon Emissions: Millions of fast fashion garments produced every year require enormous resources, from the raw materials to the factory plants, shipping, storage, all of these processes generate incredible amounts of greenhouse gasses.
Other Greenhouse Gas Emissions: What’s more, fabrics that are used in cheap clothes are often synthetic (thus made from energy-intensive fossil fuel) or made with blends that are difficult to recycle. As we highlighted in our previous post, “The Benefits of Recycling Clothing”, clothes that are not recycled and are landfilled are decomposing in a way that releases methane into the atmosphere.
Soil and water pollution: Growing plants like cotton and the processes of dyeing and treating fabrics use chemicals and dyes that are full of lead that degrades the soil and nearby waterways. Fast Fashion fabrics are also more often than not polyesters that shed microplastics into the water during wash casting damage to people, plants, and animals.
Deforestation and land-overuse: Thousands of hectares of rainforests are cut down and replaced by industrial plantations of fabric-making trees (used for rayon), while pastures are overgrazed by animals that are herded for their wool.
Water overuse: The fashion industry is also a greedy water drinker. According to Global Fashion Agenda, the amount of water consumed by the fashion industry could be enough to fill 32 million Olympic-size swimming pools. One of the thirstiest industries is cotton. Can you believe that it takes 2,700 liters of water (enough for an average person to meet their daily drinking water needs for two and a half years), to make just one, basic white cotton t-shirt? In the take-make-dispose business of fast fashion, there is no time to slow down and reduce the consumption of water.
What about human beings and waste? Honestly, there’s too much for one post. There are so many ways in which fast fashion negatively affects factory workers and expands landfills we need to follow up in a future entry.
Meanwhile, the above should be enough to encourage you to look out for fashion brands that work on reducing their contribution to these human and environmental costs. For example, a number of brands opt for organic cotton or water-saving alternatives, implement water-saving production practices, work with charities and organizations focusing on water conservation, and put time into researching ways to do better. We are still far from finding a sustainable and broadly accessible solution to fast fashion as a lot of customers can’t afford ethical brands that tend to come at a premium price, but we can affect change in this space. Individually, we can consume less but more consciously. Collectively, we can pressure legislators and brands to revise their policies to find a compromise between fast and slow fashion, which is ethical and sustainable as well as affordable and fashionable.
