Fast Fashion Environmental Impact

In today’s world, we’ve become used to being able to buy a T-shirt for $5 or a trendy pair of jeans for $10. Meanwhile, you can expect H&M or Zara to come up with a totally new line of styles every few months.

That’s why these companies fall into the category of fast fashion. Such low prices and fast cycles have made fashion more accessible to the public. But the reasons behind these advantages are ominous.

Fast fashion is notorious for its poor treatment of two different (but highly interdependent) issues: human rights and the environment. In order to offer hundreds of new styles at dirt-cheap prices, these companies use a long production chain and extensive exploitative labor.

Meanwhile, they rely on cheaper materials with a bigger carbon footprint and produce a LOT of waste. Let’s take a look at some of the specific ways in which fast fashion fails society on these two fronts.

The Problem

The most obvious issue is simply that people are encouraged to buy way more than they need. More demand means more resources, more greenhouse gas emissions, and more waste, period.

But it also means that companies rely on cheap labor in order to keep up with the demand. Brands rely on factories in countries with different labor laws and different structures of accountability so that they can exploit a local labor force.

The consequence is minimal compensation for workers and absolutely inhumane conditions. Examples of this are extensive, with the most dramatic being the 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse.

The Bangladeshi factory was being used by companies including Walmart, The Children’s Place, and Primark to produce their clothing. Cracks were noticed in the building structure, and the factory management was notified.

However, the workers were ordered to continue working in order to meet the incredibly high demand of the fast fashion industry. Sure enough, the entire building collapsed with the workers inside.

One thousand one hundred thirty-four people were killed, and approximately 2,500 were injured. As such, this was the deadliest building collapse in modern human history.

Production Issues

The environmental impact of production in fast fashion is similarly problematic, starting with textile materials. The most common textiles have a big environmental impact for a range of reasons, some of which might surprise you.

Cotton uses massive amounts of water; synthetics (like polyester) are derived from petroleum; even grazing sheep for wool is unsustainable for the current global demand. To add insult to injury, synthetic materials don’t decompose, so they’ll either need to be recycled (unlikely) or sit in a landfill for over 500 years (in the case of polyester and lycra).

Besides the fabric itself, the dyes that are used by these brands are often very toxic. During production, they can seep into local waterways, poisoning the plants and animals that live there.

Large-scale production also leads to exorbitant amounts of water use. It takes 713 gallons of water to produce one regular, cotton T-shirt: that’s equivalent to about 17 bathtubs!

Now, water is technically a renewable resource, but so much demand is taking a serious toll on our landscape. Droughts are more frequent and more severe.

While economically advantaged communities can usually withstand such droughts, the world’s most vulnerable people simply cannot. And our natural ecosystems are the first to experience serious, sometimes irreversible, damage from an over-dry climate.

More production means more waste. In fact, even offering more options (i.e., a wide range of styles for the consumer) means more waste.

Many textiles can’t be recycled, and even if they can, consumers often don’t know how to. But waste doesn’t just happen on the consumer level.

Higher demand and more options mean that the brands themselves will be generating more waste. There is waste as a natural consequence of production, but also due to the increased likelihood of malfunction. Plus, the company will need to dispose of all the clothes that don’t sell at the end of the season.

If you think production and disposal are bad enough, there are even environmental effects in between these two points of the garment’s lifecycle. Online shopping is becoming increasingly popular (especially thanks to the pandemic).

So, we can add shipping to the industry’s carbon footprint. Meanwhile, even washing your clothes can be a problem! Synthetic materials, like nylon, fleece, and polyester, are made up of tiny plastic fibers that come off in the washing machine.

Water treatment plants aren’t able to capture such small fibers. As a result, they get into natural bodies of water. In fact, textiles are responsible for 35% of the microplastic pollution in the ocean. These plastics can poison marine life as well as humans through the water we drink.

So what’s the solution?

There are many ways the average fashion consumer can reduce their personal footprint while putting pressure on big companies to do the same. The first thing to consider is, how many clothes do you actually need?

Reducing the number of clothes you buy is the best place to start. This minimizes your footprint at all stages of the fashion cycle.

Some activists have developed the capsule wardrobe: a guide to the least amount of clothing needed to live a normal life with a fair amount of variety. This is based on the idea that you can mix and match different garments for different contexts and make things more interesting.

At some point, you will need to go clothes shopping. See how much of your shopping list you can check off at a secondhand store. Buying used clothes avoids the environmental and human burdens of production at very affordable prices for you (unless you’re buying vintage!).

Secondhand shops are often associated with a charitable cause you’ll be supporting. Besides thrift shops, you can also take advantage of pre-owned clothes in other ways. Organize a clothing swap with friends or look at clothes sharing apps like the Nu Wardrobe.

You might not be able to find everything you need at a secondhand shop. If you can afford it, buying higher quality clothes will already reduce your footprint simply because the clothes will last longer.

Sustainability in fashion

There are also lots of brands that specialize in sustainable fashion, such as Everlane, Tentree, and Rothy’s. These companies use low-impact materials such as organic cotton and recycled fibers, and they often employ carbon-neutral production.

Their supply chains are often very short as part of ensuring humane treatment and fair compensation to all their employees. Some of them, like Tentree, even plant trees for every purchase you make!

Unfortunately, sustainable fashion still just isn’t affordable for everyone. But it’s possible that if you buy fewer items that will last longer, you’ll be able to make up the difference. Take a look at your budget to see if that’s the case for you.

When it comes time to say goodbye to your favorite T-shirt, there are a few more ways to minimize your footprint. First, ask yourself why you’re getting rid of it. If there are holes or other damage, you may be able to mend it at a tailor.

Otherwise, consider donating your clothes to a secondhand store or a homeless shelter to extend their life. Do a little research about your secondhand store first. Usually, these stores don’t accept just any clothes that come their way.

Many are equipped to recycle what they don’t keep or pass the clothes along to a homeless shelter, but some will just throw them away. If you don’t have a secondhand store nearby that disposes of clothes responsibly, check out your nearest H&M. H&M certainly has a very long way to go in terms of sustainability, but many shops offer to recycle your old clothes.

Finally, you can always make your own clothes! Although sewing and knitting are time-consuming, this can be a really fun and gratifying way to minimize the impact of production and shipping. If you do, make sure that the cloth or yarn you use is still sustainably produced.

Greenwashing

As you venture into the world of sustainable fashion, beware of greenwashing: when companies make themselves sound more sustainable than they are! H&M is a great example of this. As mentioned, the company offers clothes recycling, as well as many products made from recycled materials.

These actions aren’t bad in and of themselves, but the vast majority of their clothes still rely on the harmful practices described above. H&M might be doing better than some of its competitors, but it still has a very long way to go before it can call itself fair and sustainable.

It can be hard to tell if a company is living up to its word, so you might need to do a little research into its practices. Ask yourself:

How long is their supply chain?
Where are their factories located, and what are their policies?
Are the materials used for all or most of their products sustainable?
Are they carbon neutral?

Access

There is still an issue of access to clothes for people who just can’t afford sustainable brands. We need to ask ourselves two things: what kinds of profit margins are reasonable for clothing brands to expect? And, what kinds of pressure do we put on people to continually buy new clothes?

If fast fashion brands can just accept smaller profit margins, they can clean up their practices while keeping their prices relatively low; I expect their margins are so large now that they’d still be able to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, let’s reevaluate the social expectations that lead to people accumulating more clothes than they can ever hope to wear. Greater acceptance of secondhand clothes shopping and mending will also support this shift to more sustainable fashion.