“Knocked up in third world factories by workers on third world wages to wear once and waste. Most fast fashion clothes end up in landfill within the year. The textile industry puts out more greenhouse gasses than all the worlds ships and aircrafts combined…Is fashion a worthwhile part of our aesthetic sensibility, essential to our dignity and self-esteem, or a planet destroying con, exploiting those who make it and those who buy it by appealing to our shallow neediness?”
Michael Buerk, The Moral Maze

Late last year I started to see and hear the term “fast fashion” getting tossed around a lot, especially in the Instagram sphere. Until then, I didn’t even know what fast fashion was let alone the impact it has on our world, and consequently the impact my purchasing choices had on our world too.

Fast fashion is defined by google as “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.” Fast fashion moves quickly from the catwalk to the stores and it moves just as quickly from the consumer to the bin. Fast fashion is everywhere, and there’s a high chance you’ve bought from a fast fashion brand yourself; think Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo, Missguided and Fashion Nova. These brands produce cheap, throwaway clothes to match the fast-changing demand of their consumers.

The reason that fast fashion is so popular isn’t just the price tag. We have become a throw-away society. It isn’t admirable to wear any item of clothing more than once and this ideal can greatly be attributed to Instagram, but that’s whole other article. Apparently, the average person only wears 20 percent of their clothing. I mean, I bought 3 items of clothing for my holidays this year that I didn’t end up wearing. To be fair, two of them were from a vintage shop but the third was from Zara. Why didn’t I wear it? It broke before I could. That basically tells you everything you need to know about fast fashion. As Kara Lane, the author of The Smart Woman’s Guide to Style & Clothing, wrote: “Clothes that start to fall apart after a few washes are not bargains.”

So… what’s the real price of fast fashion? Yes, you might be celebrating buying your perfect dress for £5 from Missguided (been there – it was see-through), or a pair of mom jeans for £12 from Primark but have you ever thought about the environmental cost of a new “girl gang” slogan tee?

The environmental impact caused by the production and consumption of fast fashion is a huge problem within this industry. According to an article by The Independent, “Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture.” Think about how often you see a crazy patterned dress or, especially recently, neon coloured items. Most of these looks are achieved through toxic chemicals that contaminate our water supply.

Approximately 10-15% of dyes are released into the environment during the dyeing process. This causes the changing colours and contamination of the earth’s water supply. This was the case in the Jian River in China, which was turned red due to an “illegal dye dump”. Actions like this lead to a disruption in the natural food chain, largely because of the loss of algae in the water. This results in the death of aquatic life and stands to increase the loss of biodiversity that our world is suffering. What’s more, dyes ruin the soil and poison the water that they are dumped into.

Another huge contributor to the environmental issues caused by this industry are the materials that are used to make clothes. Most fast fashion items are made out of polyester. Polyester is a cheap, synthetic material that, when washed, releases microplastics (any piece of plastic that is less than 5mm is classed as a microplastic by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) into the water and oceans. This is also the case with other materials such as lycra.

Microplasticshttps://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/detail-of-hands-showing-microplastics-on-the-beach/269097019?asset_id=269097019 — Microplastics
https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/detail-of-hands-showing-microplastics-on-the-beach/269097019?asset_id=269097019

Although it doesn’t release plastic into the oceans, cotton isn’t that much of a greater alternative. According to Matthew Taylor, who spoke on the Moral Maze episode The Morality of Fashion, “Farming of cotton is problematic in terms of water use, sustainability and other environmental damages and a huge proportion of clothes are not biodegradable.” One extreme example of the effects of cotton manufacturing is that of the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea was the worlds 4th largest lake, which had almost completely disappeared by 2014. This is partly due to the over manufacturing of cotton as the river water was used to grow and produce it. The loss of the Aral Sea has also contributed greatly to the large-scale loss of biodiversity. Although the manufacturing of cotton in Uzbekistan is a severe example of unethical farming, the effects of the cotton industry are felt elsewhere.

WRAP estimates that £140 million worth of clothing goes into landfill each year. They also found in their Valuing Our Clothes Report that, although improvements were made in the fashion industry between 2012 and 2016, the carbon emissions increased from 24 million tonnes CO2e to 26.2 million tonnes CO2e due to the increase in new clothes being purchased. This tells us that we, as consumers, are largely the problem. The more new clothes we buy, wear once and throw away, the more we add to the carbon emissions produced by the fashion industry every year.

So, what is the environmental cost of fast fashion?

According to the Climate Queens podcast, your jeans and a nice top combo is actually equal to around 13 years of one person drinking 2-3 litres of water per day!

(1 cotton t shirt uses 2700 litres of water and one pair of jeans uses 7600 litres water.)

Water wastage is a huge problem when it comes to the health of our planet and its people. In contaminating fresh water with toxic ingredients, and wasting water for an over saturated agricultural system, we are limiting even more the access to clean, drinkable water. Apparently 780 million people do not have access to an improved water source already. We also need to save water in case of a severe drought. Water is used to grow and produce food. A lack of water may lead to even more starving nations across the world. As well as this, our overuse of water is increasing the lack of biodiversity in our oceans, lakes and rivers. A lack of biodiversity means a further lack of food as an estimated three billion people depend on fish as their primary source of dietary protein. Additionally, “according to the World Wide Fund for Nature the ocean provides the world with goods and services worth at least €2.2 trillion every year.” As well as providing us with the chemicals we need to create medicine.

According to WRAP, “The annual footprint of a household’s newly bought clothing, along with the washing and cleaning of its clothes, is estimated to be equivalent to the:

carbon emissions from driving an average modern car for 6,000 miles
water needed to fill over 1,000 bathtubs
weight of over 100 pairs of jeans”

How to help

Fashion, although essential to our individualistic nature and need to express ourselves, is destroying our world. We need to act now. How can you stop adding to the problem that fast fashion continues to contribute to daily?

The best and most obvious way to stop adding to the pollution caused by fashion is to not buy at all. Resist the dopamine rush caused by a new purchase and instead, find out how to value the clothes you already own.
Upcycle your old clothes! Learn how to sew so that you can repair any damaged items rather than dumping them into landfill. Make unwanted and useless clothes into new items; cut your denim jeans or gym leggings into shorts or turn that skirt that no longer fits into a crop top.
Buy slow fashion. Think vintage shops, charity shops, kilo sales and clothes swaps. There’s no shame in re-loving preloved items. Depop is actually one of my favourite places to shop at the minute. Use peer-to-peer rental sites such as Byrotation and Ourcloset.UK to make use of others’ unwanted goods instead of buying new.
When you do need something new, make it an investment. Spend more on something high quality that will last for a long time, this will lead to you buying less clothes and thus reducing your carbon footprint as a whole. Vote with your dollar by purchasing good quality, sustainably made clothes (bonus if you rent them out on the aforementioned rental websites).
Think about how you take care of your clothes. Washing polyester items in a wash bag will reduce the amount of microplastics being let out into the water. Washing your clothes on a lower heat and tumble drying and ironing less frequently will further reduce your carbon footprint. Finally, just be careful with your clothes; looking after them will ensure they last longer and result in you buying less.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-near-clothes-374677/

This article was not meant to scare-monger. These are the facts and the current purchasing habits of people everywhere (including myself, until recently) are severely effecting our world. As a challenge and a way to lower my own carbon footprint, I am deciding to say no to new clothes for at least 3 months. I’ll either buy from vintage shops, charity shops or not at all. Let me know if you decide to join me.

Thanks for reading!