Consequences of Fast Fashion for the Environment

By Sruti Bontala

Fast Fashion is a term coined to describe the fashion business model that focuses on producing cheap, short-termed clothing to please buyers with the latest trends. This business model has gained momentum and popularity through business like Zara, Shein, and Forever21 because of their tendency to pump out clothing super fast. The main appeal of Fast Fashion though is that with it, buyers don’t have to wait for long to buy the new seasonal collections. They can buy all the trends all year long and with fashion changing in the blink of the eye, fast fashion can seem really tempting to many people.

Ethical Issues With Fast Fashion

Well, first of all the Fast Fashion industry manipulates many of its workers and severely mistreats them. As many people might know, companies often place their factories and sweatshops in third world countries because the cost of labor and manufacturing is quite low in those areas. Third world countries are also becoming recently industrialized so they have an abundance of workers that are willing to work in these factories even when they are getting paid less than minimum wage. Many workers struggle to survive due to poverty so even those poor wages can look appealing to them.

Unfortunately, many of these countries don’t have good labor associations or laws and often allow children to work in these factories causing millions of children to slave away in these sweatshops and not go to school. Amounting to 85% of the workers, women also get abused in this industry as they have to go through sexual harassment and manipulation. Also because of those poor labor laws, the sanitation and safety of the factories is also horrible. There have been horrifying incidents due to poor infrastructure of the factory buildings like when the Rana Plaza clothing manufacturing complex collapsed in Bangladesh on April 24, 2013. The collapse killed 1,000 workers and injured over 2,500. There are about 40 million garment workers today and most of them do not have any rights or protections.

Environmental Issues With Fast Fashion

Fast Fashion, or fashion in general is a huge industry mounting to about $25 trillion. It is also the second most polluting industry right after oil. The constantly changing trends and looks by influencers causes this industry to try to speed up production and in turn this results in these companies trying to cut corners of the environmental regulations, since at the end of the day it all comes down to profit. The Fast Fashion industry also uses many harmful chemicals and toxic dyes which leads to the pollution of waterways; in fact the fashion industry is the second largest polluter of water ways in the world, only second to the agricultural industry.

The clothing made by the Fast Fashion industry is also cleverly made to last only a small time period so it keeps buyers coming back for more. This works well for the industry since it is designed on the premise of giving buyers the in-the-moment trends. This issue causes a lot of waste as tons of waste gets pumped out into the landfills each year; precisely 9.1 million tons of clothing goes to the dump annually in just North America.

How You Can Help

To start off you can buy clothes from ethical and sustainable brands that are transparent about their manufacturing policies! Some examples of ethical brands are Levi’s and Patagonia. This might seem like a fairly easy decision but many people can’t afford these brands because they tend to be quite pricey. But no need to worry, this problem has an easy fix; some other things you can do to not fall into the trap of Fast Fashion are upcycling, recycling, and thrifting. Upcycling involves taking old clothing and making changes to them to create a brand new fashionable garment and recycling involves donating your old clothes to thrift stores and/or other donation centers; by doing this you can get rid of old clothing without sending them to the dump. You can also go thrifting, although it might not seem all that appealing at first you can find some great pieces at thrift stores and have the wonderful satisfaction that you are making the world a better place. There are infinite possibilities to solve this problem of Fast Fashion if you are willing to step out of your comfort zone and find new ways to be sustainable.

A List of Sustainable Brands: https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/fair-trade-clothing

Citations

- https://www.euronews.com/living/2020/07/10/exploitation-and-sweatshops-are-at-the-core-of-fast-fashion-it-s-time-to-dismantle-the-sys

- https://www.bwss.org/fastfashion/