Written by Alveera Siddiquie
Edited by Hanna Karasinska & Emil Koch
In today’s world we can hardly do anything without leaving a carbon footprint. Whether that be charging our phones or even buying coffee. So, it’s only safe to assume that our clothes are a part of this too.
With trend cycles speeding up day by day and clothes becoming cheaper than ever before, we ought to ask ourselves, who is paying the real cost when it comes to this and what can we do to stop ourselves from being a part of the problem?
What is fast fashion?
Fast fashion refers to the sector of the fashion industry in which inexpensive clothing is produced in an innumerable amount, that too in a minimal time period. This is done to meet the ever changing clothing ‘trends’ and to provide consumers with dresses that look ‘stylish’ and ‘high-end’ but are actually not made of decent quality materials..
To any average consumer with enough money in their wallet, fast fashion is not a big issue. But what about the less fortunate? What about the thousands of children who are forced into labour at ages as little as 11?
April of 2020, more than a 1,000 garment factories in India owned by some of the world’s biggest fashion brands had refused to pay their workers the minimum wage.
Fast fashion companies source most of their labour from countries like Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar to decrease labour costs and thus, be able to afford a cheap market price for the public.
Although it may not be transparent, fast fashion has a major impact on the environment. Fast fashion is said to be responsible for 8–10% of global emissions, according reports from the UN. Actually, the issue is not with the clothes per se, but rather with how they are manufactured and the materials that are employed. The task of dying clothes to get them to be the colours we all love actually requires 43 million tonnes of chemicals a year.
Furthermore, the fast fashion industry takes up a lot of water. How much exactly? To put things into perspective, it takes 2700 litres of water to make a single T-shirt. And what is even more absurd is that it takes 4 times that to make just a single pair of jeans. Fast fashion is the second-largest consumer of water, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Even the most routine chores, like washing newly purchased clothes from the industry, contribute to the annual discharge of 500,000 tonnes of microfibres into water bodies. That is equal to about 50 billion plastic bottles. Unfortunately, even after the presentation of all these statistics, fast fashion problems are most often overlooked by most companies and people.
What can one do to reduce the impact of fast fashion?
There are several answers to this but first and foremost, think before buying. Take a few minutes out of your time to look into the company before buying and see where it falls on the sustainability spectrum. Secondly, look into alternatives. Thrifting is a great replacement. Thrift shopping is good for the environment for a lot of reasons. Mainly, it keeps clothes out of landfills and it reduces the chemical pollution caused due to wide scale production. You could also look into repairing your torn clothes repaired by a local tailor instead of throwing them out and buying new ones, reducing wastage of cloth by a great extent.
In conclusion, beneath its seemingly many advantages and its demand in the market, fast fashion’s rapid production and consumption contributes significantly to environmental degradation and exploitation of labour. The environmental impact of fast fashion cannot be ignored. From excessive water and toxic chemicals usage to massive textile waste, the fast fashion industry continues to strain our planet’s resources. As consumers, we must recognise our role in this cycle and strive for more conscious and sustainable fashion choices.
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References:
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