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The Simple Solution to Fast Fashion | Josephine Philips | TED

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Recycling fashion: The town turning waste into clothes- BBC News

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I Broke Up With Fast Fashion and You Should Too  | Gabriella Smith | TEDxWynwoodWomen

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If you think fast fashion is bad, check out SHEIN

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27 Ethical and Sustainable Fashion Terms You Need to Know

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We’ve created this super ethical and sustainable fashion glossary so you can navigate the responsible fashion world with ease.

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How clothes are linked to climate change?

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How clothes are linked to climate change?

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"Until brands tackle this issue first and foremost, 'conscious collections' by fast fashion brands can only ever be considered greenwashing," argues Flora Beverley, co-founder of sustainable brand Leo's Box.

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Fast fashion: How clothes are linked to climate change

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Fashion is responsible for 10% of global emissions - buying less and renting clothes could help.

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The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics

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The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics

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Fast fashion is both an economic and sociological phenomenon that has grown to epic proportions. What we cut in costs for garments is borne twice over by the planet, and it is absolutely crucial that we change our regulations and behaviours. We believe in empowering people with knowledge, so here is our list of the 10 most essential fast fashion statistics that will help you understand the detrimental impact of this industry on the environment.
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1 - 2. Clothing production has doubled - Garment usage lifetime has decreased

These two statistics are the embodiment of fast fashion. Clothing sales doubled from 100 to 200 billion units a year, while the average number of times an item was worn decreased by 36% overall.

3. Fast fashion generated more CO2 than aviation and shipping combined

The fashion industry is the second-largest industrial polluter, accounting for about 10% of global pollution, ranking higher than emissions from air travel and maritime transport combined.

4. More than $500 billion are lost every year due to lack of recycling and clothing utilisation

Garments given up early and thrown out instead of recycled combine to produce massive wastage, estimated at around $500 billion every year. A large portion occurs on the consumer's side, but retail stores are just as guilty, often spotted tossing or burning unsold stock.
You might also like: How Can the Fast Fashion Industry Reduce Textile Waste?
5. Fashion habits around the world vary

The previous statistics gave a global snapshot of the situation, but fast fashion is more or less prominent depending on where you live.

6. 20% of global wastewater comes from textile dyeing

The fashion industry consumes a monstrous amount of water, around 93 billion cubic metres, leaving much of it contaminated by toxic chemicals. According to the UN Environment Programme , 20% of global wastewater comes from textile dyeing. Because the bulk of the production is in countries with less regulation, the wastewater often finds its way to rivers and seas where it can wreak havoc.

7. We discard 92 million tons of clothes-related waste each year

This next figure on our list of fast fashion statistics can be difficult to grasp, so let us reframe it.

8. Produces half a million tons of microplastics

You've surely heard of the plague of microplastics, now seemingly ubiquitous on Earth. They are found everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest, to within the very air we breathe. The oceans are riddled with them, routinely ingested by fish, which are then eaten in turn as the plastic works its way up the food chain.

Garments are a huge source of microplastics because so many are now made of nylon or polyester, both durable and cheap. Each wash and dry cycle, especially the latter, sheds microfilaments that move through our sewage systems and end up in waterways. We estimate that half a million tons of these contaminants reach the ocean each year.
You might also like: Are Microplastics Harmful And How Can We Avoid Them?
9. Returns of items bought online exceed the amount of all purchased goods

As more and more online retailers, big and small, offer the option to send back goods easily and often for free, return rates, especially of fashion items, have skyrocketed, exceeding 30% of all purchased goods.

10. You can easily help cut consumer emissions by more than half

It has been shown that by:

skipping one in six washing loads,

washing half loads at below 30 degrees,

and substituting every sixth dryer usage with open-air drying,

We would reduce consumer emissions by more than half.
You might also like: Fast Fashion and Its Environmental Impact
That may seem like a complicated set of instructions, but the message is that small cuts or changes of behaviour here and there make a big difference. You can be part of that.

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The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics | Earth.Org

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Fast fashion is both an economical and sociological phenomenon that has grown to epic proportions. We believe in empowering the people with knowledge, so here is our list of the 9 biggest fast fashion statistics.

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Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?

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Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?

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In the garment industry, stories about workers who barely eke out an existence on "starvation wages" are legion: Factory workers in New Delhi often describe living in makeshift hovels "barely fit for animals." A young woman from Myanmar might wrestle with the decision to feed her children or send them to school. In Bangladesh, sewing-machine operators frequently toil for 100 hours or more a week, only to run out of money before the end of the month.

Workers have demanded higher pay in all those countries, of course, sometimes precipitating violence between protesters and police. Companies in general, however, have preferred to sidestep the issue altogether. In fact, no multinational brand or retailer currently claims to pay its garment workers a wage they can subsist on.

To be fair, defining a "living wage" can be a tricky business, one that requires some complex mathematics. Even within the same country, the minimum income a worker requires to afford basic needs - food, shelter, clothing, medicine - can vary wildly from one locale to another.

Plus, as brands are wont to remind people, most of them don't own the factories that produce their clothes, meaning they neither pay for the garment workers' wages nor determine what those wages are.

So when H&M declared in November 2013 that it would deliver a "fair living wage" to more than 850,000 workers across 750 factories by the end of 2018, the announcement was nothing short of a bombshell.

As the world's second-largest apparel company - after Inditex, which owns Zara - H&M said it felt a sense of "shared responsibility" when it came to persistently low wages, an issue as endemic to the global garment industry as unrelenting hours, unsafe environments, and rampant verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

H&M makes its famously cheap-chic apparel and footwear at about 1,900 independent suppliers around the world, often in the aforementioned low-cost countries.

"It has always been our vision that all textile workers should be able to live on their wage," it said in a statement then. "We believe that the wage development, driven by for example governments in some countries, is taking too long, so we want to take further action and encourage the whole industry to follow. With size comes responsibility, and we have the ability to contribute to change."

Its detractors were skeptical, particularly when no benchmark figures were forthcoming, but there was no reason to believe that H&M wasn't in earnest. Even the acknowledgement that workers needed better wages, as one campaigner told me in 2013, was "a vital step."

By 2017, however, H&M's language regarding its living-wage strategy took a slight turn. The 2018 goal was to have "improved wage management systems in place" at suppliers representing 50 percent of its product volume.

Workers' rights groups found H&M's "less ambitious course," along with the continued lack of specific benchmarks as it approaches its self-imposed deadline, troubling. In addition, whatever scant updates H&M released only served to bolster the impression of the brand as "notoriously opaque."

"A number of elements in those updates seem to be generalist, not concrete enough, and to a certain extent, immaterial or irrelevant to the question: Well, as a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no?" says Ben Vanpeperstraete, lobby and advocacy coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, an alliance of labor unions and non-governmental organizations in Amsterdam. "And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

"As a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no? And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

H&M certainly doesn't view itself that way. "We have always been clear on what our goal is; to set the foundation and mechanisms needed for fair living wages to be paid by suppliers," says Cecilia Tiblad Berntsson, the firm's social sustainability manager. "We have an ongoing dialogue with stakeholders and report annually both to stakeholders and media about the activities and actions within the fair living wage strategy."

2018, she adds, will mark the "first milestone" in an overarching strategy to address the issue. H&M's focus may be redirected to "where the local need is greatest and where there is a possibility to scale up effectively," but the scope of its ambition hasn't changed, Berntsson says.

To be sure, the retailer has placed itself in the crosshairs of a contentious issue. If the intricacies of a living wage weren't enough to grapple with, there is also the notion of the minimum wage - that is, the lowest wage that a country's local or federal government says employers are legally bound pay their workers.

Not only does a country's minimum wage rarely square up with the concept of a living wage, but it can also differ by orders of magnitude.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers interviewed by campaigners from Labour Behind the Labe l in 2016 said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families. The same group queried workers in India who were earning an average of 6,284 rupees ($92) per month. To make ends meet, those same workers said, they would need 13,000 rupees ($190), if not more.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families.

Brands can sometimes use this lack of agreement over calculations as a way to stall efforts at pursuing living wages, according to Dominique Muller, director of policy at Labour Behind the Label, a not-for-profit organization based in the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, it's in the interest of governments to keep the minimum wage low, in part because they don't want brands to abscond to other countries in pursuit of cheaper labor.

"There's a lot of pushing by brands to make sure that not only the government keeps wages low but also the supplier keeps wages low," Muller says. "And then the suppliers and the industry associations will say to the government, 'Look, you can't increase wages because then we wouldn't get the orders from the big brands.'"

Even within the same region, brands can play factories off each other, says Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, a human-rights organization based in Washington, DC.

"If one factory owner agrees to produce jeans for $2, then another can't charge $2.50 or they'll lose business," she says. "In a sense, we are all fueling the race to the bottom, but it's the largest, most successful brands that are driving themselves and the competition the hardest."

Occasionally, workers will score a minor victory and minimum wages will creep up. But even an uptick of 77 percent - something that occured in Bangladesh a few years ago - is only a nominal one, Vanpeperstraete says.

Despite the appearance of progress, it's important to keep in mind that Bangladesh's wage increase was "also against an inflation of 12 percent a year, and the last revision was five years before that," he says. "Consumer inflation will just eat it up again, so there are no real gains."

To promote real change, a living-wage benchmark remains an indispensable tool, Gearhart says. "A living wage benchmark quantifies what workers need to live decently, so that they can support a family above the poverty line and still be able to have some discretionary spending and the ability to save," she says.

The power brands wield over their suppliers can be oppressive to the point of tyrannical. And even so-called "codes of conduct," those legalese-adjacent blocks of text that tout a company's dedication to ethical labor practices, are rarely the talisman against supply-chain impropriety that brands make them out to be.

"The proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

"The failure of codes of conduct to ensure workers' rights has been robustly documented, with several phenomenal catastrophes - the Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan, the Tazreen Fashions fire, and Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh - occurring in factories that had been certified and/or inspected and approved for code compliance multiple times by multiple actors," Gearhart says. "Additionally, the proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

At best, codes of conduct are a feint, Vanpeperstraete says. At worst, they're a figment of someone's fever dream.

"Lots of codes of conduct talk about a living wage and we have no evidence of factories paying a living wage; lots of codes of conduct talk about right of workers to join or form a union of their own choosing and that rarely happens," he says. "These codes of conduct are more about allaying the concerns of consumers than implementing these rights in the supply chains of brands."

In some cases, codes of conduct might be little more than offhand suggestions.

Just last month, Arcadia Group, the operator of Topshop, Miss Selfridge, and Dorothy Perkins, told its factories that it would pay them 2 percent less on all forthcoming orders because it was performing under par, which it blamed on a shifting retail landscape fueled by online upstarts like Missguided and Boohoo.

"The fact that a brand has the power essentially to say, 'Well, we've got these contracts agreed but we want you to provide it to us with this discount,' is quite significant," Muller says. "But it happens all the time: Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

"Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

But brands have an imperative, Muller says, if not a moral one based on the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, then a legal one in terms of modern slavery laws.

Meanwhile, the yawning divide between the haves and the have-nots is only becoming wider.

Billionaire wealth has soared by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 - six times greater than the wages of regular workers, which have risen by a yearly average of only 2 percent, according to Oxfam International, which published its latest report ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

Of the 2,043 dollar billionaires worldwide, nine out of 10 are men, a fact worth mentioning because a vast proportion of garment workers - 80 percent - happen to be women.

"Economic rewards are increasingly concentrated at the top," Oxfam says. "It takes just over four days for a CEO from the top five companies in the garment sector to earn what an ordinary Bangladeshi woman garment worker earns in her whole lifetime."

As is the case with most businesses, it's the smaller, nimbler companies that have the drive and wherewithal to innovate when it comes to better wages for workers.

Some brands, like Fair Indigo and Raven + Lily, might choose to collaborate with worker-owned cooperatives.

"In this way the workers are really setting their price for the garments in the way that is economically sustainable for them," says Robert Behnke, co-founder and president of Fair Indigo.

Others might take advantage of nascent mechanisms such as Fair Trade U.S.A.'s apparel program in North America or the Fairtrade Foundation's Textile Standard in Europe.

Patagonia was one early adopter of the Fair Trade standard, beginning with the launch of 11 Fair Trade-certified women's products in 2014. Currently, the outdoor-apparel brand pays a premium on some 200-plus men's, women's, and children's products. The extra money goes directly to the workers who made the garments, and they form a committee that decides how to spend it.

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way and really that boils down to safer working conditions, improved livelihoods, and protections for the planet," says Maya Spaull, senior director of Apparel and Home Goods at Fair Trade U.S.A. "So that's what's really behind that seal you see on Fair Trade products."

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way."

But even when given the opportunity to promote living wages, brands and retailers can sometimes be willfully obtuse.

When Continental Clothing, a London-based wholesaler of blank garments, launched a pilot line of certified-organic T-shirts and hoodies with a built-in price premium for workers in India, for instance, the concept failed to "take off like crazy," according to Mariusz Stochaj, the company's head of product and sustainability.

The premium, which is similar to the one found in the Fair Trade system, isn't much - about 10 pence (16 cents) for a T-shirt and 54 pence (79 cents) for a hoodie. But the idea is that this amount gets passed along the value chain, "from the factory through to the retailer without being marked up, ensuring that the small additional cost at the point of sale is returned to the workers in its entirety," says Stochaj.

Some of Continental Clothing's customers were welcoming of the idea, Stochaj says; others were wary of attracting unwelcome questions.

"It's the same with organic cotton or any other sustainable practices where people will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'" Stochaj says.

"People will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'"

But paying a living wage can have immediate, tangible benefits, something Stochaj discovered in the two years the "Fair Share" project has been brewing. At the factory where the scheme is being piloted, absenteeism has plummeted. And recruiting new workers has never been easier.

"We have basically people on a waiting list waiting for vacancies, which we've never had before," he says.

Perhaps the larger question is whether consumers even care about workers receiving a living wage. And until they do, most brands and retailers won't.

"For most brands this is not a priority by itself," says Adheer Bahulkar, a partner in the retail practice of A.T. Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm. "Because while more than two-thirds of consumers say that they want better living conditions for the workers, less than half of the same consumers are actually willing to pay more for their purchases."

And therein lies the rub.

"Even with brands that have the best of intentions and want the triple bottom line of environmental, human, and economic well-being, economic well-being ends up trumping the need for environmental and human wellbeing," he says. "Consumers have basically reset what they expect to pay, and this is putting more pressure on brands to either find ways to lower prices - and hence pay lower wages - or lose market share."

But consumers wouldn't have to pay much more, if anything, for their togs, activists say. After all, a garment worker's wage is only 1 to 3 percent of the total cost of most clothing, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Which is to say, if brands wanted to pay their workers a living wage today, they could. In December, Labour Behind the Label noted that it would cost H&M only 1.9 percent of the $2 billion it made in 2016 to pay all its Cambodian workers the additional $78 per month they would need to achieve a living wage.

To approach the problem from a different angle, H&M would only have to reallocate one year of its annual advertising budget to muster up living wages for its Cambodian workers for six and a half years, the group says.

One problem is that most businesses still operate in silos where the number crunchers and the do-gooders are entirely divorced, Vanpeperstraete says.

"In clothing, the people buying it, the buyers, are considered the people who actually determine the margin of that specific organization - they determine profitability," he says. "That results in an internal hierarchy of a company where the buyers are already more important than the CSR people because the buyers are making the money and the CSR people are spending the money. So who gets the last word?"

But what it all boils down to, he says, is the abundance of political will.

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so."

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so," says Vanpeperstraete. So many brands, he notes, laud their ability to deliver "ripped from the runway" looks at mass-market prices, with little turnaround time. "If they would have the same commitment to paying living wages, then that would probably happen, not necessarily overnight but in a very short time span," he adds.

H&M, with its pledge in place, yet nebulous results, exists in a liminal, in-between space. "H&M has at least had the audacity to say, four years ago, 'In five years time, workers will have a living wage,'" he concedes. "So they're sort of half there on the political will. But I think in implementation we don't necessarily feel yet or have enough evidence to believe that this is carried through in the way that the organization works."

Yet the retailer's atypical modus operandi might also be the key to its success. Unlike most of its high-street brethren, who flit from factory to factory while jostling for room on the production line with dozens of other brands, H&M maintains what it calls "strategic partnerships" with suppliers that provide 100 percent of its products for five years at a time.

In other words, it has leverage, which it can use to create - and sustain - meaningful improvements in a way that few brands can.

"H&M is in a crucial position to do stuff because it has those long-term relationships and those large buying volumes with a lot of factories," Vanpeperstraete says. "If H&M calls a factory owner, they'll listen. People pick up the phone for H&M."

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Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?

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H&M promised to make sure the people who make the company's clothes can live on their pay, but the benchmarks have shifted.

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Retail giants exploit their workforce in order to achieve a fast and cheap distribution and high consumption of clothing. Using cheap labour in places such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Indonesia where fair working laws are easily swerved, garments can be mass produced for a fraction of the price. It has been said that this type of employee can at most cost $12 a month in wages. Taking into consideration that they work up to thirteen hours a day with no breaks.

With an abundance of cheap clothing, individuals are buying unnecessary amounts, wearing it a handful of times and then discarding it. This means that more clothes are being produced, and consumed without a real value on behalf of the consumer.

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A brief history of fast fashion and its impact on the planet.

100 billion items of clothing are produced every year. That's a 50% growth in just 15 years and the main culprit for this growth - fast fashion - shows little sign of slowing down.

We've stitched together a brief history of fast fashion; from when fashion become fast, the it's had on our blue planet, and what we can do to become sustainable fashion devotees.

First: What is fast fashion?

Fast fashion can be defined as low-cost, trendy clothing rapidly produced by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.

The focus of fast fashion is affordability and convenience - largely at the cost of people and the planet.

Fast fashion plays into the idea that outfit repeating is a fashion faux pas. If you want to stay relevant, it's believed you should be sporting the latest looks while they're happening.

Overproduction and overconsumption has resulted in the fashion industry being one of the world's largest polluters. to read about the environmental impact of fast fashion.

But how did we get here?

Once upon a time, in a slow fashion world...

More than 20,000 years ago, people began hand sewing; using animal bones and horns as needles.

Up until the early 1800's, most people raised sheep or saved up to purchase wool to spin yarn to weave cloth and hand sew... You get the idea.

Adding garments to your closet was a slow, infrequent process, driven by seasonal changes and growing pains.

When was the first sewing machine invented?

It was only in 1830 - during the Industrial Revolution - that the fast fashion story really starts with the invention of the sewing machine.

Barthelemy Thimonnier, a French tailor, invented a sewing machine that used a hooked needle and one thread to create a chain stitch (which is still commonly used in denim jeans).

With the advent of the sewing machine, clothes became easier, quicker, and cheaper to make. Clothing began to be made in bulk, in various sizes, rather than just being made to order.

Dressmaking shops emerged to cater to the middle classes and - for the first time - people started wearing clothing for style, not just practical reasons.

The fashion industry used to be slow. Sweatshops were the beginning of the end of that.

What is a sweatshop?

Sweatshops are factories or workshops, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at low wages for long hours and poor (or downright illegal) working conditions.

To cater to the demand for clothing, sweatshops emerged in the 1800's (and don't be fooled: They still exist today.)

Clothing becomes a form of personal expression: 1960s

By the 1960s and 1970s, young people were creating new trends and using clothing as a form of personal expression.

There was increasing demand for affordable clothing. Textile mills opened across the developing world, and low-quality, mass-produced clothing took over.

Shopping for new clothes became a hobby and a means of social status.

When was the term fast fashion coined?

In 1990, the New York Times published an article using the term 'fast fashion' for the first time. The piece was about a new fashion retailer with a mission to transform a garment - from an idea in the designer's brain to being sold on racks in store - in only 15 days.

It's safe to say fast fashion had arrived.

By the mid-1990s, online shopping took off - accelerating what was already a dizzying rate of textile consumption.

No matter where you are in the world, chances are: If you see an outfit you like, online, you can buy it and have it on your doorstep in days. But at ?

Being fashionable shouldn't cost the earth.

All areas of fast fashion - super speedy production, use of synthetic fibres and dangerous chemicals, and competitive pricing - have massive negative impacts on our blue planet and the people involved in garment manufacturing.

What's more: Rapidly changing trends and clothing available at shockingly cheap prices instils a throw-away culture; as though clothing isn't meant to be long-lasting or worn more than a few times.

5 fast facts about fashion's environmental impact.

And that's the tip of the iceberg.

We've hardly touched on overconsumption, water usage, waste and haven't even mentioned microplastics yet. Read more about the impact of textiles on people and the planet.

How does fast fashion impact the Ocean?

Textiles in the fashion industry generally fit into two categories: Natural and synthetic.

Natural materials (like wool and cotton) are made from plant and animal sources. They tend to be more expensive and last longer.

Fast fashion relies on the cheaper (less, environmentally friendly) option: Synthetic materials. You'll recognise these plastic-based materials in your clothing: Polyester, acrylic, and nylon.

Synthetic fibres make up almost 60% of annual fibre consumption. Said differently: Our clothes are around 60% plastic.

These synthetic fibres produce non-biodegradable waste that pollute the Ocean. How? A single 6kg laundry load releases up to 700,000 synthetic microfibres which pass through our drains and into our Ocean.

Once in the Ocean, microfibres are ingested by and end up making their way back up the food chain, to us, and pose numerous health risks.

We can put fast fashion out of style.

More and more, consumers are demanding sustainable clothing and calling out the true cost of the fashion industry. As a result, we're starting to see some changes in the fashion industry, but there's a long way to go.

As recently as 2018, the fashion industry produced tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. Luckily for us, we can all directly influence the fashion industry and the impact it has.

As individuals, the first thing we need to tackle is our relationship with consumerism.

"What can I do to tackle fast fashion?"

Continue to learn about how to spot fast fashion brands (then steer clear of them).

Embrace buying less fast fashion items. (In a week or two, that item will be out of fashion anyway, right?)

When you do shop for clothing, ensure you're purchasing with long-term wear in mind.

Support responsible, ethical clothing brands.

Buy second hand.

Only wash your clothes when they're actually dirty.

Be an outfit repeater (re-wear your clothing until it really is end-of-life).

Repurpose clothing when they're end-of-life.

Subscribe to our newsletter for Ocean news, stories, and science.

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What is fast fashion, when did it start, and how does it impact the environment? Who coined the term fast fashion? What can we do to address it? This is a brief history of fast fashion.

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The rise of fast fashion is largely behind the growing amounts of clothing we buy and throw away each year (Credit: Press Association)

Fast fashion is leading to a mountain of clothing being thrown away each year and has a huge impact on the environment, so can we turn our unwanted garments into something useful?

Open your wardrobe and be honest. How long was it since you last wore some of those clothes? Do you think it might be time for a clear out?

Languishing in the back of cupboards and bottom of drawers are outfits that don't fit any more, items that have gone out of fashion, or even clothes that have never been worn. In fact, according to research conducted by sociologist Sophie Woodward at the University of Manchester, on average 12% of clothes in the wardrobes of women she studied could be considered "inactive".

If you were brutal, you'll probably manage to fill a bin-bag or two with clothes you no longer want or need. But what then?

Around 85% of all textiles thrown away in the US - roughly 13 million tonnes in 2017 - are either dumped into landfill or burned. The average American has been estimated to throw away around 37kg of clothes every year. And globally, an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is created each year and the equivalent to a rubbish truck full of clothes ends up on landfill sites every second. By 2030, we are expected as a whole to be discarding more than 134 million tonnes of textiles a year.

Millions of tonnes of clothing, shoes and other textiles end up in landfill every year because very little is sent for recycling (Credit: Alamy)

"The current fashion system uses high volumes of non-renewable resources, including petroleum, extracted to produce clothes that are often used only for a short period of time, after which the materials are largely lost to landfill or incineration," says Chetna Prajapati, who studies ways of making sustainable textiles at Loughborough University in the UK.

"This system puts pressure on valuable resources such as water, pollutes the environment and degrades ecosystems in addition to creating societal impacts on a global scale."

There are good reasons to seek out alternatives to chucking clothes in the bin - globally the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, with textile production alone is estimated to release 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. Vast amounts of water are also needed to produce the clothes we wear too and the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of global waste water. ( Read more about the impact our fashion addiction has on the planet.)

At the same time we are buying more clothes than ever - the average consumer now buys 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago. More than two tonnes of clothing are bought each minute in the UK, more than any other country in Europe. Globally, around 56 million tonnes of clothing are bought each year, and this is expected to rise to 93 million tonnes by 2030 and 160 million tonnes by 2050.

While most clothes with care will last many years, changing fashions mean their lifespan is artificially shortened by consumers changing tastes. Industry figures suggest modern clothing will have a lifespan of between 2-10 years - with underwear and t-shirts lasting just one to two years, while suits and coats last for around four to six years.

Would recycling our clothes help to reduce the toll our fashion addiction has on the environment?

Currently just 13.6% of clothes and shoes thrown away in the US end up being recycled - while the average American throws away 37kg of clothes every year. Globally just 12% of the material used for clothing ends up being recycled. Compare that to paper, glass and plastic PET bottles - which have recycling rates of 66%, 27% and 29% respectively in the US - and it is clear clothing lags behind.

Indeed, most of the recycled polyester being used now by leading fashion brands in fact comes from bottles rather than old clothing.

Much of the problem comes down to what our clothes are made from. The fabrics we drape over our bodies are complex combinations of fibres, fixtures and accessories. They are made from problematic blends of natural yarns, mand-made filaments, plastics and metals.

"For example, a 100% cotton t-shirt contains many other components such as labels and sewing threads which are usually made from another material like polyester," says Prajapati. "Similarly, a typical pair of jeans are made from cotton yarn which is generally blended with elastane, and other components such as zips and buttons and polyester sewing thread and dyed using a range of dyes."

Sorting clothing by hand is a time consuming task made more complicated by the many blends of man-made and natural fibres used in modern garments (Credit: Getty Images)

This makes them hard to separate so they can be effectively recycled. Sorting textiles into different fibres and material types by hand is labour intensive, slow and requires a skilled workforce. Growing use of modern fabric blends in clothing also makes it hard to do this mechanically too, although European researchers have been developing techniques that make use of hyperspectral cameras - which can see light beyond the limits of human vision - to better identify different fabric types. Once sorted, the dyes that have been applied to the fabrics need to be removed in order for yarns to be reused.

Currently, however, very few of the clothes that are sent to be recycled are actually turned into new clothing - a process known as "material to material" recycling. Old wool jumpers, for example, can be turned into carpets, cashmere can be recycled into suits. But as of 2015, less than 1% of used clothing was recycled in this way.

While of course there is a healthy market in second-hand clothes being sold online, perhaps the most popular way of disposing of old clothes is simply to give them away so they can be reused through charity shops. Increasingly, however, clothes donations are being used as a way of simply passing on the textile waste problem to others.

At Oxfam's Wastesaver clothes sorting and recycling plant in Batley, Yorkshire, UK, 80 tonnes of old clothes pass through the factory every week. Lorraine Needham Reid, Oxfam's Wastesaver manager, has worked at the plant for over 10 years. Over that time, however, she has seen a real decline in the quality of clothes that are reaching them, particularly when it comes to the materials used to make the clothes.

These days, most of what reaches Wastesaver will end up never being worn again. Over a third - 35% of the clothes - go to Oxfam's partners in Senegal to be sold. Between 1-3% go back into Oxfam shops around the UK to be re-sold.

The majority is sent for recycling in some way, but about six tonnes of the garments are of such poor quality they are simply torn up so they can be used as industrial cleaning clothes and stuffing for mattresses or car seats.

Fibre recycling technologies do exist, but they are only used on a small scale. Generally, the techniques can be separated into mechanical and chemical recycling.

"Blends are most suitable for mechanical fibre recycling, where fabrics are shredded and pulled to transform them into fibres of shorter length," says Prajapati. Shorter fibre length produces fabrics of lower quality and strength, so the results from this kind of recycling can't be used for clothing. Instead these tend to then be "downcycled" to produce other composite fibre materials such as thermal insulation or carpet for use in the building industry. Some researchers have found ways of creating noise insulation from old textile fibres.

Chemical fibre recycling for fabrics with large quantities of one type of fibre, for example polyester and nylon are well established, says Prajapati. "However, they consist of multiple processes and additional chemicals, making the process and resulting yarn or fabric costly," she says.

Treating cotton-polyester blends with enzymes from fungi can recover the man-made fibres for reuse (Credit: Getty Images)

There has been success on a smaller scale to effectively separate natural and synthetic blends and capture both types of fibres, without losing either fibre in the process. However, scaling up this technology to an industrial scale remains the challenge.

One group of researchers led by Carol Lin, a chemical engineer at the City University of Hong Kong, has developed a technique for recycling fabrics made from cotton and polyester blends by feeding them to fungi. The fungi Aspergillus niger - which typically forms a black mould on grapes - produces an enzyme that can break down the cotton into glucose that can then be used turned into syrup. The remaining pure polyester fibres can then be reused to make new clothing, they claim. Poly-cotton blends are now among the most popular fabrics for use in cheap clothing, commonly used in t-shirts, shirts and even jeans.

Lin and her team have since refined the process so it can be done on a larger scale using industrially produced cellulose enzymes, and have been working with the clothing retailer H&M to examine what impact this recycling process might have on its textile waste.

Austrian researchers have also developed techniques using enzymes that allow them to turn old wool clothing into a material that can be used as a resin or adhesive.

But if we ever hope to make our clothing sustainable, more fundamental changes to the clothing industry will need to be made. Fabrics, fibres and garments will need to be designed in ways that make them easier to recover and recycle.

"Recycling needs to be incorporated into the current system to make it more circular," says Prajapati. "Therefore, the way we design clothes needs to change, it needs to facilitate recycling."

One option is to create new types of materials altogether, from different sources, that either won't have the same impact on the environment or might be easier to recycle. Some are even looking at turning other types of waste - such as off milk - into clothing.

When milk turns sour, it separates into whey at the bottom and protein flakes on top. When you remove the whey, you are left with a kind of cottage cheese.

"This cottage cheese is put into a machine that works like a noodle machine," says Anke Domaske, founder of QMilk, a company that has been developing new types of biodegradable fibres in Hemmingen, Germany. "Together with water you create a dough. At the end there is a spinneret with holes so fine that you do not end up with noodles, but fine fibres that are thinner than hair."

The company then spins these fibres into yarns, which it says have a silk-like texture. These can then be used to make jersey or woven fabrics, or other textiles like felt. Crucially, when a garment made completely from QMilk fibres is no longer wanted, it can simply be composted at home, Domaske says.

QMilk isn't the only company creating textiles from unusual sources.

The dye that is added to clothing also needs to be removed before it the yarn can be recycled (Credit: Getty Images)

After working for years at a design company in Germany, Renana Krebs saw behind the scenes how poor the textiles and clothing industry is for the environment. She vowed to do something about it and in 2016, she started Algalife, making fibres and dyes from algae.

Algae is already widely used in the beauty industry, in certain foods and it is used to make biofuels. "After learning about all those industries, and the benefits that we get from algae, we asked 'why not to do this for textiles?'" says Krebs.

One benefit is the algae are harvested in a closed system, meaning there is no freshwater used in the process at all. All the algae need to grow is water and sunlight. By extracting natural colourings from different types of algae, Krebs and her team have been able to combine these with enzymes and fixative agents - which help to bind the pigment to a fabric - from synthetic and natural sources, including oak galls, pomegranate rind and juniper needles.

They have also been able to produce fibres that can turned into yarns by purifying proteins from the algae or even using them to produce a bio-oil that can be turned into bioplastic fibres.

Prajapati has also been working with colleagues at De Montfort University to produce enzymes that could potentially make the clothes dying process more sustainable.

Currently most textiles are coloured using synthetic dyes, which are petroleum derivatives, and patterned with complex processes. These processes can require temperatures of up to 100C for cotton, nylon and wool, but higher for polyester and other synthetic fibres. On top of this, the process requires high pressures, long processing times and the use of additional chemicals such as acids and alkalis, which are harmful towards the environment in large quantities.

Prajapati and her colleagues have been developing processes that use enzymes so that textile dyes and patterning of fabrics can be done temperatures as low as 50C, at atmospheric pressure and pH conditions around neutral without the use of additional chemicals.

"The key advantages over conventional methods include simpler processing of textiles, the elimination of pre-manufactured dyes and opportunities for multiple colours to be achieved through simple alteration of processing conditions," she says.

Pigments made by Algalife have similar benefits, plus the added benefit of being created from renewable sources, says Krebs. You can even drink the dye they produce, she says. Algalife is now working with a major retail fashion brand and hope to have clothes made from algae in stores by 2021.

Other major brands across the fashion industry are starting to pay attention to the demand for more sustainable practices. Companies like Adidas, that recently announced a range of trainers made from ocean plastic. High street retailer Zara also announced in 2019 that it would be using only sustainable materials by 2025.

The shredding process used by mechanical recycling methods leads to shorter, weaker fibres that cannot be resued to make clothes (Credit: Alamy)

"Using recycled, rather than virgin, materials offers an opportunity to drastically reduce non-renewable resource inputs and the negative impacts of the industry, like CO2 emissions, water and chemical use," says Prajapati.

But some are sceptical about how committed some large brands are to sustainability, accusing them of "greenwashing", which the companies deny.

Zara was one of the original inventors of the fast fashion system as we know it, says Clare Press, Australian Vogue's sustainability editor-at-large and author of the book Wardrobe Crisis. "Let's not pretend people shop at Zara for heirlooms to pass down through the generations," she says. "In the last 20 years the fashion system has changed completely, moving away from seasonal drops towards near-instant gratification. Waiting six months for a runway look seems crazy to a new generation of fashion fans raised on Instagram and 'see now, buy now'."

So while recycling and more sustainable fabrics will be a key part of the solution, consumers too will need to change their behaviour if we hope to lessen the impact that the fashion industry is having on our planet.

"We need to slow down, take a little time to reconnect with our clothes and appreciate them again," says Press. "Remember that whatever you are wearing, it took both physical and creative resources to make it."

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Fast fashion is leading to a mountain of clothing being thrown away each year and has a huge impact on the environment, so can we turn our unwanted garments into something useful?

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FAST FASHION GETTING FASTER: A LOOK AT THE UNETHICAL LABOR PRACTICES SUSTAINING A GROWING INDUSTRY

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FAST FASHION GETTING FASTER: A LOOK AT THE UNETHICAL LABOR PRACTICES SUSTAINING A GROWING INDUSTRY

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Mass consumption is and the fashion industry is no exception. Worldwide pieces of clothing are consumed every year, a 400% increase from only twenty years ago. However, approximately 85% of these textiles end up in a landfill every year. This is an indicator of the mass demand from consumers and rapid turnover in trends that is occuring. In 2014 the average person bought 60% more clothing than in the year 2000, however, they kept each item of clothing only half as long. This can largely be attributed to the rise of fast fashion, micro-trends, and the cheap and exploitative labor that makes it possible.
The Rise of Fast Fashion
refers to the rapid production of clothing, generally in a way that sacrifices quality for quantity. Prior to the mid 1900's there were generally 4 seasons of fashion, one for every season of the year. Now fast fashion companies such as H&M create 52 "micro-seasons" a year , one for every week. This new pattern created a massive demand for apparel and the creation of approximately 53 million tons of clothing annually. In order to sustain this level of production at a cost that allows the consumer to purchase clothing in large quantities, many fast fashion companies sought a way to cut costs in the supply chain. In order to achieve this, companies began taking their production to developing countries to take advantage of cheaper labor costs and less regulations. The rapid trend cycle, known as micro-trending, encourages the majority of fast fashion companies to engage in unethical labor practices in order to create a high volume of clothing at a low cost.
Labor Practices in Fast Fashion What We Don't Know Can't Hurt Us?
One of the main reasons fashion companies are so eager to take their subsidiaries to countries such as Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh is the lack of oversight that occurs during the actual textile production . Many brands choose to have minimal control over each step of the supply chain in order to avoid opening themselves up to enormous legal liability. Brands allow their subsidiaries to remain largely unregulated because it absolves them of responsibility for the unethical practices being used to produce their clothing at such low costs. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of their labor forces as it is being brought more and more into the public purview, as exemplified in 2019 when thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike over their low wages garnering international attention.
What We Do Know
The fast fashion industry employs approximately 75 million factory workers worldwide. Of those workers it is estimated that of them make a living wage. This leads to workers living below the poverty line and the European Parliament has even described the conditions of factory workers in Asia as " slave labor ". Many garment workers are working up to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. The textile industry also uses child labor particularly because it is often low skilled, so children can be exploited at a younger age.

Additionally, the health of laborers is adversely affected by working conditions. The production of fast fashion clothing employs the use of 8,000 synthetic chemicals. Some of these chemicals have been shown to cause cancer and factory workers are regularly exposed to and breathing in these chemicals.

There are also structural dangers that come with avoiding codes. This was demonstrated by the deadliest garment industry accident in modern history in Bangladesh when the Rana Plaza Factory collapsed in 2013 and 1,100 people were killed and 2,500 more were injured. Safeguards on the building had expired and engineers had even recommended the building should be condemned. However, workers were ordered to come in anyway, and they came for fear of not being paid. After this incident , building inspections were done on 1,106 factories used by fast fashion companies and 80,000 safety related issues were found.
Looking Forward
The idea that all companies take responsibility for their supply chains and ensure factory workers have a living wage and conditions are safe is a bit of a pipe dream considering the very exploitation of that labor is what allows those companies to increase their profit margins. Therefore, rather than ask for individual accountability, it is clear a more structural change is necessary. The most successful regulation in this sector is the Bangladesh Fire & Safety Accord , which came after the Rana Plaza factory collapse. The Accord is the first legally-binding agreement in the modern era between workers, factory managers, and apparel companies and affects the safety of over one million workers in Bangladesh factories. This model should be emulated in other countries that rely on fast fashion manufacturing and a similar model could be used to ensure fair wages.

In addition, countries that headquarter the fast fashion companies can implement regulations that de-incentivize outsourcing offshore, or require that if a company is going to outsource offshore they be in greater control of their supply chain. This would force greater regulation of wages and hopefully prevent companies from abusing foreign labor because it is less expensive.
Conclusion
The fashion industry is growing rapidly , with an estimated 20% growth between 2020 and 2021, and it isn't slowing down. Consumer demand for a larger quantity of clothing at a cheaper price point has pushed development of the fast fashion industry. This has led to the dangerous exploitation of the labor force who makes the fashion industry possible. In order to prevent further damage to garment workers it is necessary that legislation emulating the Bangladesh Fire & Safety Accord be put into place in every country. There need to be larger pushes for legislation around fair wages and corporate responsibility for supply chain management. It is imperative to address and resolve the human rights violations occurring as a result of fast fashion.

Author Bio: Emma Ross is a second year law student at The George Washington University Law School. She graduated in 2020 from Binghamton University with Bachelor's in Political Science and Psychology. She is currently a member of the George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law. She also serves as a legal consultant to the Coalition for Integrity.

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Fast Fashion Getting Faster: A Look at the Unethical Labor Practices Sustaining a Growing Industry

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Introduction Mass consumption is on the rise and the fashion industry is no exception. Worldwide 80 billion pieces of clothing are consumed every year, a 400% increase from only twenty years ago. However, approximately 85% of these textiles end up in a landfill every year.

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WA youth are Trying to Make Fashion Friendlier 

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WA youth are Trying to Make Fashion Friendlier 

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Wash. youth are trying to make fashion friendlier to the environment

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In South India, one garment manufacturer is busy changing the narrative around offshore factories. What started in 1994 as a nonprofit rehabilitation program by Franciscan nuns has grown into a thriving social enterprise. Assisi Garments uses local organic cotton and provides training and employment for deaf, mute, and economically disadvantaged women in a safe and supportive environment. The revenue Assisi Garments makes goes to paying the women a fair wage as well as supporting orphaned youth and medical facilities.

This story is one of many that sustainable fashion entrepreneur and Source My Garment (2019) author, Adila Cokar, loves to share. Cokar has worked in various roles of the fashion industry for 18 years-from starting her own clothing line to connecting other clothing businesses with fair trade suppliers. Her recent book named after her business, Source My Garment, is an insider's guide to
responsible offshore manufacturing.

"There's a huge misconception that all factories are unethical," Cokar says. "There are a lot of great manufacturers out there that need our help as a global economy."

The bad rap around offshore garment manufacturing is founded in disaster. In 2013, building owners ignored warnings that Rana Plaza, an eight-story building housing five garment factories in Bangladesh was unsafe. Garment workers were ordered to return to work the day the building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people and injuring 2,500 others. Many of the garment workers were young women.

The deadliest incident in the history of the garment industry caught the attention of people around the world to the mistreatment of factory workers; yet over six years later, women workers are still exploited in the fast fashion industry through harassment, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and long contracts with low pay. While feminist movements have attempted to reform issues around reproductive rights, workplace harassment, and discrimination, fast fashion retailers have monetized the movement with t-shirts bearing feminist slogans made by women working in overseas sweatshops.

Fast Fashion is a Feminist Issue

Feminism fights for gender equality-equal rights and access to opportunity among the sexes. But while women make up about 80 percent of garment workers around the world, they earn significantly less than men, and promotions are a rare prospect for these women. On average, Bangladeshi women work 60 hours a week and earn an hourly rate of 28 taka or $0.95 in USD, according to the 2018 Garment Worker Diaries report. The nonprofit Labor Behind The Label's "Undercover, Told by Workers" campaign in 2016 recorded that working conditions in Cambodian garment factories are poorly ventilated and lack access to water. These conditions, coupled with overwork and chemical exposure, mean workers in these factories are fainting and malnourished.

Poor working conditions are just one element of this feminist issue-workplace violence often goes unchecked in unregulated factories. A 2018 report from Global Labor Justice includes a written report from an Indian woman working in an H&M supplier factory, where she was beaten by a supervisor. After filing a complaint with the human resources department, the supervisor was told to apologize, but his harassment did not stop. As a recent widow, the woman continued to work at the factory to support her daughter.

This is not an uncommon story for women garment workers. Barriers to equality are rooted in poverty, lack of education, and exploitation by the fast fashion industry, to name a few. But like Assisi Garments, there are businesses that challenge the narrative of exploitation by implementing practices to give power to these women.

This $12.99 tee from Forever 21 shows one example of how fast fashion retailers are monetizing the equal rights movement, while doing little to address injustice and fair wages in its own supply chain.

Finding Fair Trade

Fair trade is an example of such practices. The fair trade movement is "about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world," according to Fair Trade Foundation. This system requires companies to pay fair prices to workers, establishing transparency, accountability, and respecting the rights of workers and the environment.

Businesses that employ fair trade principles are in direct contrast to fast fashion brands-for women workers, these principles have made offshore manufacturing equitable by advocating for living wages, combating unsafe labor conditions, and challenging abuse and harassment in the workplace.

Mira Fair Trade is one business that exemplifies these values. Fond of handmade clothing and accessories, Meera Viswanathan would purchase products local artisans created on her annual visits to India with family. Upon visiting rural areas in Rajasthan and Gujarat one year, she learned the women artisans loved to create but had no outlet to sell-if they had access to markets, they could support their families. Inspired to act, Viswanathan researched the fair trade model and began Mira Fair Trade.

"I noticed firsthand in some rural areas in India[...]when you pay a woman, whatever money she gets she saves for the family," Viswanathan says. "These women bought rice and inexpensive vegetables to cook and feed the kids. If they had a little bit more money, they would buy clothing for their kids, medicine, and if they could make a tiny bit more money, they send their kids to school. Food first, medicine next, then education, in that order," she adds.

Mira Fair Trade works with no more than 30 families to adequately support the artisans. The women workers set their own prices based on material and labor costs. The business is Fair Trade Federation verified.

"I haven't heard anything but good things [from the artisans]," Viswanathan says. "These women are paid, and more importantly, are treated with respect. They can support their families and send their kids to school."

Meera Viswanathan (center, in purple) with women artisans crafting prosperity totas. Traditionally, totas bring luck and prosperity to those who hang them near a door or window.

Like Mira Fair Trade, Cokar's business is changing the narrative around garment workers. Cokar uses her platform to amplify the positive changes that have taken place in factories around the world by facilitating partnerships with clothing brands seeking ethical and environmentally friendly manufacturers. Most of all, Cokar values the people she works with.

"It's all about building relationships," says Cokar. "Every person has a story, so does a factory. It's not just about where it's getting made[...]the second part is really to tell their story. They're part of the business."

Rebecca Ballard of Maven Women is familiar with the injustices of the fast fashion industry as a former human and labor rights lawyer. She believes women empowerment and fashion can go hand in hand. Maven Women, like Mira Fair Trade and Source My Garment, is committed to fair trade values.

"I am passionate about women claiming their potential to be changemakers in our world," Ballard says. "This is our industry and the problems in this industry are problems we can solve."

Ballard started her ethical and sustainable fashion brand because she had trouble finding clothes that fit her values, vocation, and aesthetic. After three years and two children, she refined her business to honor both workers and consumers with clothing that is sourced sustainably, is high quality, and functional for working women.

"We are a movement of women demanding more of themselves and others," says Ballard. To her, ethical fashion is about giving women ownership of their bank accounts, their homes, and communities.

These three women herald a change in the fashion industry-that clothing brands can be catalysts for addressing feminist issues. By paying workers a living wage, women have increased agency in economic decision-making from the household to international institutions, according to UN Women. Additionally, women who are paid more have fewer children due to increased access to education and contraceptives.

Rebecca Ballard, left, stands with models of her dresses from Maven Women's collection, made in Los Angeles in a woman-owned factory. Photo by Mark Story.

Feminist Fashion and Climate Change

Educating women, while a feminist agenda item, also increases resiliency against climate change. Project Drawdown names educating girls and access to birth control as the #6 and #7 most effective solutions to climate change. If you combine them as one goal, they become the top solution. When women are educated, they are more likely to earn their own incomes and determine their own futures on childbearing.

Additionally, women are disproportionately affected by climate change. Around the world, women have fewer rights, funds, and freedoms-these barriers are expected to be exacerbated by the climate crisis. Since around 80 percent of the estimated 60 to 75 million workers in the garment industry are women, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, the fight for gender justice in the fast fashion industry would empower millions of women around the world.

Sectors like the fashion industry that depend on a female workforce also face material risks. Women are more in tune with community wellbeing and are usually among the first in community response to natural disasters, according to a UN report. The current barriers to equality limit a business' ability to respond and adapt to the unpredictable realities of a changing climate. If the fashion industry is to adequately prepare for a climate disaster, addressing gender inequalities and building gender-sensitive policies can bolster a company's resiliency.

As consumers, choosing ethical and sustainable fashion goes beyond voting with your dollar-it manifests substantial change for disenfranchised women workers around the world. Clothing brands based on fair trade principles empower women on both sides of the supply chain. Researching a company's supply chain and pressuring fast fashion retailers to clean them up fights for the rights of women garment workers and your right to know what is in your clothing.

"In terms of consumers, fashion is identity," says Ballard. "It's hugely empowering to say, 'I'm going to dress myself in a way that fits my body and my values.'" In this sense, fashion is literally wearing your values on your sleeve-and dressing yourself in ethical clothing is a feminist action.

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Learn about the harmful working conditions offshore textile workers face and what some groups are doing to improve the situation. - Green America

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How Zara Grew Into the World's Largest Fashion Retailer 

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How Zara Grew Into the World's Largest Fashion Retailer 

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What is fast fashion and why is it a problem?

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What is fast fashion and why is it a problem?

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Fast fashion is 'fast' in a number of senses: the changes in fashion are fast, the rate of production is fast; the customer's decision to purchase is fast; delivery is fast; and garments are worn fast - usually only a few times before being discarded.

The rise of fast fashion has had devastating consequences, from its reliance on plastic fabrics and its enormous carbon footprint to its erosion of workers' rights.

In this article we explain what we mean when we say 'fast fashion' and why it is so bad for people and the planet.

What is fast fashion?

In the last few decades, we have seen fashion trends changing more and more quickly. Pressures on workers to produce more and at lower prices have grown alongside pressures on consumers to turn to the newest trends.

Fast changing trends

At its heart, the fast fashion business model relies on consumers endlessly buying more clothes. Brands tempt consumers by offering ultra-cheap garments (for example, Missguided's £1 bikini) and ever-changing new ranges. At the time of writing, fast fashion brand Shein featured 21,139 clothes under the 'New in' section of its website.

Fashion brands have long used new styles and lower prices to attract customers, but previously brands would plan new ranges many months, even years, in advance. The pace of change was relatively slow and there were fewer products on offer. In comparison, fast fashion is focused on responding to ever-changing consumer tastes as quickly as possible.

For example, in the BBC's 'Breaking Fashion' show we see Manchester-based fast fashion company, In the Style, reproducing a bodysuit worn by Kylie Jenner. The company manages to have the piece designed, manufactured and on sale within 10 days of the piece first being worn publicly by the celebrity.

The rise of fast fashion is intertwined with social media and celebrity/influencer culture. A celebrity posts a photo wearing a new outfit, and their followers want it, so fast fashion brands rush to be the first to provide it. Fast fashion brands often target young people - so called Gen Zs -, who have been brought up amongst social media and influencer culture. In fact, a recent survey found that almost 75% of 18-24 year olds believe influencers can be held somewhat accountable for the rise in disposable fashion.

Of course, the flow of causality is not that simple: fast fashion brands are not simply reacting to consumer demand, they are also creating it. But the essential point is that these brands operate on the basis of constantly producing new lines of clothes to meet the insatiable and ever-changing consumer demand for all things new.

Fast production

Faster changing trends means that producers are under pressure to manufacture clothes more and more rapidly. Factories are expected to produce new lines with only a couple of month's notice, meaning that their workload - and therefore the amount of employment they can offer to workers - is unpredictable and insecure.

The drive to produce garments rapidly has led many UK fast fashion companies to reshore clothing production to the UK, where previously almost all clothing brands sourced from less-economically developed countries such as Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Leicester has become a central hub for clothing production and many of the scandals associated with workers' rights in the UK have been found in factories in the city.

The exploitation of workers in fast fashion supply chains is partly the result of brands pressuring suppliers to produce clothes as cheaply and quickly as possible. We talk about this more below.

Fast sale and delivery

The low-cost of fast fashion items encourages fast sale. The average person in the UK buys 60% more clothing today than in 2000. We buy more clothes per person in the UK than in any other country in Europe, and our addiction has grown - with online searches for 'cheap clothes' increasing 46.3% during the first coronavirus lockdown.

Even if you are out-of-pocket you can buy items using Klarna and other easy credit services. Its post-purchase payment options allow you to defer paying for your garment for 14 to 30 days, much like a payday loan.

Most companies also offer cheap deals for quick delivery. At the time of writing, Boohoo offered unlimited next-day delivery for one year for just £7.99.

Fast use

It's estimated that the average item of clothing is worn just 14 times, and in 2019 The Guardian reported that one in three young women considered an item worn just once or twice to be old.

Much modern clothing is not made to last. Due to super-fast production, designs are generally not well stress-tested before sale, and cheap synthetic fabrics are used in order to keep costs low. Much of it will end up in landfill after only being worn a handful of times.

Five things you need to know about fast fashion

The problems with fast fashion

What are the environmental problems with fast fashion?

The endless creation of new clothes comes with a heavy environmental price. Every year the sector requires 93 billion cubic meters of water, which is enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people, and is responsible for around 20% of industrial water pollution as a result of textile treatment and dyeing.

There are also numerous problems with the materials and processes used. For example, cotton production uses 6% of the world's pesticides and 16% of insecticides.

The industry also has a heavy carbon footprint, which is responsible for up to 10% of total global carbon emissions, and estimated to increase by 50% by 2030.

The above problems affect the clothing sector more broadly, but one issue is particularly endemic to fast fashion: plastic.

How much plastic do clothes contain?

The rise of fast fashion has been heavily dependent on synthetic fibres such as polyester, nylon, acrylic and elastane, which are made from heavily processed petrochemicals (fossil fuels). These materials are cheap to produce - polyester, for example, costs half as much per kilo as cotton - and therefore allow brands to keep prices low, though with a high environmental price-tag.

Polyester is the most widely used of these synthetic fibres and is now found in over half of all textiles produced. It is generally produced from polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET, a type of plastic derived from crude oil and natural gas - also used to make items such as plastic bottles.

The ubiquitousness of plastic in clothing means that the textile sector accounts for 15% of total plastic use; the only sectors that use more are construction and packaging. Many brands are making a song and dance about using recycled plastics for their clothes, but a recent report by the RSA found that the actual level of recycled content was pitifully low. Across four major online fast fashion brands, the use of recycled fabrics was a mere 4%.

Our analysis of Shein's website found its recycled content was even lower, at only 0.5%, despite the brand claiming, " When selecting materials, we do our best to source recycled fabric, such as recycled polyester."

Recycling plastics where possible has some benefits, but it does nothing to address the problem of microfibres - the miniscule bits of fabric that are released when clothes are worn, washed, or disposed of, that find their way into our bodies and the natural world.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, clothes release half a million tonnes of microfibres into the ocean every year, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles.

These fibres have been found almost everywhere: from the summit of Mount Everest to the placentas of unborn babies. We still do not know the effects they may have.

How much waste does the clothing industry cause?

The industry is also responsible for enormous amounts of textile waste. The amount of textiles being produced globally per person has more than doubled from 5.9kg to 13kg over the period 1975-2018.

Many of the clothes bought are thrown away after being worn just a handful of times: the industry produces an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste annually, much of which is burnt or finds its way to landfill, while less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new garments.

Some of this waste consists of items that never even reached the consumer - clothing lines that have become outdated and so are destroyed instead of sold.

Atacama clothing mountain highlights over-consumption

The shocking reality of fast fashion's waste problem hit the headlines in November 2021 with an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report on the mountains of discarded clothing ending up in Chile's Atacama Desert. A total of 59,000 tons of second-hand clothing is said to arrive in Chile for resale each year from Europe, the US and Asia. However, an estimated 39,000 tons is unable to be sold and ends up dumped in the desert.

The situation highlights the myriad of problems in the fashion industry. The over-consumption of new clothing means that even an increasingly thriving second-hand clothing market cannot keep up, and this is exacerbated by the amount of poor-quality clothing not suitable for resale.

While second-hand markets certainly play a huge role in reducing the carbon impact of clothing when replacing the purchase of new items, a system where clothing gets shipped around the world multiple times, only to be wasted anyway is clearly not sustainable.

Clothing made of plastics

The piles mounting up in the Atacama, and in landfills across the world, are not biodegradable. Much of our clothing is made from synthetic plastics and also contains chemicals harmful to the environment.

Many fashion brands are pledging to address the issue of the use of virgin plastics in clothing manufacture, a material derived from the fossil fuel industry. However, this is often by replacing it with recycled synthetics.

And this may well be from recycled plastic bottles but, as a recent Guardian article points out: "PET bottles are also part of a well-established, closed-loop recycling system, where they can be efficiently recycled at least 10 times. The apparel industry is 'taking from this closed-loop, and moving it into this linear system because most of those clothes won't be recycled', said Maxine Bédat, Executive Director of New Standard Institute. "Converting plastic from bottles into clothes may actually accelerate its path to the landfill, especially for low-quality, fast-fashion garments which are often discarded after only a few uses."

The fashion industry, governments and consumers need to act to slow down consumption and ensure that garments are sustainable at every stage of their life cycle, from fibre production, to manufacture, to end-of-life.

Why is it bad for workers?

In order to offer clothes at ultra low prices, fast fashion brands need their costs to be low. One of the main ways of doing this is to drive down the wages of garment workers in the supply chain.

For years, brands have 'chased the cheap needle' around the world, seeking countries with the lowest labour standards so that garment workers can be easily exploited. In recent years, many UK fast fashion brands have found the cheap needle closer to home, often in quasi-legal factories in cities such as Leicester.

In the UK, Boohoo has become somewhat the symbol of fast fashion's worker exploitation problem. Numerous exposés have shown that while the pockets of Boohoo's directors are bursting at the seams, the people who actually stitch the seams of its clothing are paid a pittance, with some found to have been paid under half the minimum wage.

The Levitt report, which looked in depth at Boohoo's Leicester supply chain, found that "The allegations of unacceptable working conditions and underpayment of workers are not only well-founded but are substantially true." Levitt also claimed that these problems were endemic to the system and likely found across Boohoo's supply chain.

Worker exploitation is an essential part of the fast fashion model. If an item is very cheap, chances are that the person who produced it was paid little.

A 2022 report Unbearable Harassment: The Fashion Industry and Widespread Abuse of Female Garment Workers in Indian Factories, found that every single woman spoken to for the report (90), had either experienced or witnessed gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) carried out by male supervisors and managers at the factories they worked at.

"Verbal, physical, and sexual harassment exists in every garment factory - not just this one. It existed before COVID, it exists during COVID, and it will exist after COVID..." Smita, Tamal Nadu.

The report goes on to state that:

"Violence on the factory floor cannot be dismissed as just a factory-level problem; rather, it must be understood as an industry-wide culture of violence driven by the business model of global fashion brands".

Which are the leading fast fashion brands?

It is important to note that most of the fashion sector has become 'faster' in recent years. As such, even the more mainstream, established brands will be 'fast' to some extent. However, there are some brands that stand out as much faster than the rest:

Boohoo, which also owns the following brands: Burton, Coast, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins, Karen Millen, MissPap, Nasty Gal, Oasis, Pretty Little Thing, Wallis, Warehouse

In the Style

I Saw it First

Missguided

If a brand is offering vast numbers of 'new in' clothes (usually thousands of new items every day) and its products are super cheap, then it is a fast fashion brand.
UPDATE
Missguided collapsed at the end of May 2022, leaving suppliers and workers out of pocket for months of completed orders.

The Frasers Group, controlled by the Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley, has reportedly bought the company out of administration for £20m. This process will take around two months to complete.

We will review the impact of the collapse and new owner in due course.

Meanwhile, Labour Behind the Label have campaigned to demand workers and suppliers are paid, amidst reports that many are owed thousands of pounds.

Update from COP26 on fashion

Considering its comparative carbon impact, maybe the fashion industry deserved more focus at the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, but it was not totally without attention.

In the second week, an update to the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action was announced, with more ambitious targets for carbon reduction to align with the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree aim. The charter currently has 130 signatories including brands such as H&M, Primark, Levi's, Chanel and Adidas.

A request for government-backed incentives for using sustainable materials was also submitted by global non-profit Textile Exchange, with its COO, Claire Bergkamp, stating: "We need both regulations to stop bad action and incentives for sustainable materials to help reduce the price burden that currently exists for sourcing more responsibly. Our hope is through trade incentives and tariff reductions, we can level the playing field, without placing the burden on suppliers across the value chain".

The call was supported by 50 of the world's largest fashion and textile companies. It is an interesting turn of events considering the UK Government's complete reluctance to regulate the UK fashion industry as recommended by the 2019 Fixing Fashion report. The call could also be viewed as a profit-driven industry with a history of wreaking havoc on the environment, now demanding it be subsidised for doing the right thing. However, it is true that with such a harmful and complex industry strong legislation is badly needed to start curtailing fashion's destructive path.

Awful conditions at a Shein factory exposed

A Channel 4 documentary broadcast autumn 2022 went undercover at a Shein factory to expose predictably awful conditions and exhausted, exploited workers.

The brand is also shown to copy designs from independent designers, rely on unpaid influencers for its marketing, and use manipulative sales techniques such as countdown timers and multi-buys to encourage overconsumption.

Yet the company is hugely popular and massively outsells its fast fashion rivals. Despite many similar documentaries and decades of campaigning on garment worker rights, it seems that cheap clothes are an addiction we just can't break.

Check out our clothing guides to find some much more ethical options for new clothes, or choose second hand.

What progress has been made in the decade since the Rana Plaza disaster?

The Rana Plaza disaster and the Accord

April 2023 marks the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh which killed more than 1,100 garment workers, an event that exposed the appalling human cost of fast fashion. Simon Birch asks what progress, if any, has been made over the past decade in the fight against fast fashion.

Following the Rana Plaza disaster the Bangladesh Accord was established. This was the first and only legally binding agreement that holds brands to account for health and safety in the garment industry, and is designed to prevent another Rana Plaza tragedy from ever happening again.

"The Accord represents a significant victory for textile workers," says Anna Bryher from Labour Behind the Label, one of the UK's leading campaign groups against fast fashion. "There's been a massive improvement in the safety of clothing factories in Bangladesh," acknowledges Bryher.

Whilst this is welcome good news, the bad news is that the Accord hasn't done anything to address the pitifully low wages that Bangladeshi garment workers still receive.

But whilst the global fast fashion business model is still based on exploitative low wages, the brands themselves are now coming under increasing pressure.

Profits at fast fashion pioneers ASOS and Boohoo are tumbling whilst last year Missguided, one of the UK's flagship fast fashion companies went bust, all largely as a result of the cost-of-living crisis that's seen soaring costs of everything from cotton to shipping.

Environmental claims from fast fashion companies under the spotlight

Last year, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into whether eco-friendly and sustainability claims made by the fast fashion chains Asos, Boohoo and George at Asda constitute greenwashing.

Meanwhile over in Europe, the EU is stepping up its fight against throwaway culture by aiming to end fast fashion by 2030.

In an ambitious initiative launched last year, the EU announced its intention to vastly expand its clothing design rules on recycling and sustainability. In just seven years' time, all textiles sold within the EU must be recyclable, free of hazardous substances and contain a high percentage of recycled fibres.

All these actions are clearly good news for the environment but the bottom line is that fast fashion still demands the exploitation of garment workers.

However, it's important to remember that the problem is with the clothing companies, not with the clothing industry.

"We all need clothes and the clothing industry provides millions of jobs around the world from farmers who provide the cotton and fabrics to workers in garment factories," says Heather Webb, a former researcher at Ethical Consumer who has since worked within the fast fashion industry as an ethical trade analyst.

"Big fashion brands are consistently treating the factories they buy from poorly and it's the workers and environment who suffer," says Fiona Gooch from Transform Trade that campaigns for a more ethical global trading system.

"We need a fashion watchdog to regulate UK garment retailers along the same lines as the existing supermarket watchdog that's successfully reduced the unfair buying practices of the UK's largest food retailers," explains Gooch. "A fashion watchdog would reduce abusive and unfair purchasing practices of the garment retailers which would ultimately benefit garment workers."

Whilst acknowledging that a fashion watchdog would be a good thing, Anna Bryher believes that it wouldn't fix the problem of low wages within the clothing industry. What's needed says Bryher is new legislation to enable clothing brands to be held to account for their unfair purchasing practices.

Heather Webb agrees. "We need government intervention in the market," says Webb. "One of the key things that could improve both the pay and working conditions of garment workers is a law outlawing the unethical buying practices of clothing brands."

Progress by brands is extremely slow

The Ethical Fashion Report published in 2023, 10 years after the first edition, found that although there has been some progress for garment workers, overall change is still too slow. Their research found that at the current rate of progress, it would be 75 years before all companies are paying a living wage at even a minimum of one factory per company. The vast majority of clothing companies (84%) were not sourcing from any factories which paid a living wage.

Find out more in the report and also use the charity's 'Speak Out' tool to see how individual brands are doing and let them know what you think.

People's clothing habits are changing

Despite the pervasiveness of fast fashion, things are beginning to improve.

New research from WRAP has found that compared with similar research carried out in 2013, we are wearing our clothes for slightly longer. Jeans, for example, now have a longevity of just over four years, compared to just over three in 2013. The research also found that more than half of us are happy to buy second hand clothes; nearly 60% of us put a lot of effort into maintaining our clothes; and that a similar proportion look for ways to repair clothes when they're damaged.

The WRAP research also estimates that the UK's wardrobes hold 1.6 billion items of unworn clothes, an average of 31 items for each adult. And yet we're still spending more than £4 billion on shopping for clothes each month. WRAP makes the point that as textiles and fashion are responsible for between 4% and 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, we need a revolution in our clothing habits to make our wardrobes sustainable.

Circular clothing industry

The purpose of the WRAP research was to understand the population's receptiveness to circular business models for clothing. These included second hand, upcycling, subscription, rental (pay-per-wear) and repair (where a brand repairs an item of clothing a customer has purchased from it for a fee).

WRAP found that 40% of people are likely to use a subscription service and that 58% are open to using a repair service. Among those who have already used a circular business model, the majority said they would do so again.

WRAP argues that this shows there is a clear case for clothing brands and retailers to adopt circular business models.

Read the full WRAP report into clothing longevity on their website and read tips on repairing and buying second hand in our article on upcycling and buying second hand clothing.

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What is fast fashion and why is it a problem? | Ethical Consumer

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Alex Crumbie explores the growing concern about the social and environmental impacts of the fast fashion clothing industry and sets out what's wrong with fast fashion.

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Clothing retailers like Zara, Forever 21, and H&M make cheap and fashionable clothing to satisfy the needs of young consumers. Yet, fast fashion has a significant environmental impact. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the industry is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions - more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Unfortunately, fast fashion problems are often overlooked by consumers.
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What Is Fast Fashion?

The term ' fast fashion ' has become more prominent in conversations surrounding fashion, sustainability, and environmental consciousness. The term refers to 'cheaply produced and priced garments that copy the latest catwalk styles and get pumped quickly through stores in order to maximise on current trends'.

The fast fashion model is so-called because it involves the rapid design, production, distribution, and marketing of clothing, which means that retailers are able to pull large quantities of greater product variety and allow consumers to get more fashion and product differentiation at a low price.

The term was first used at the beginning of the 1990s, when when Zara landed in New York. "Fast fashion" was coined by the New York Times to describe Zara's mission to take only 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores. The biggest players in the fast fashion world include Zara, UNIQLO, Forever 21 and H&M.

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion

According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the European Union. It dries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

The Quantis International 2018 report found that the three main drivers of the industry's global pollution impacts are dyeing and finishing (36%), yarn preparation (28%) and fibre production (15%). The report also established that fibre production has the largest impact on freshwater withdrawal (water diverted or withdrawn from a surface water or groundwater source) and ecosystem quality due to cotton cultivation, while the dyeing and finishing, yarn preparation and fibre production stages have the highest impacts on resource depletion, due to the energy-intensive processes based on fossil fuel energy.

According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, emissions from textile manufacturing alone are projected to skyrocket by 60% by 2030.

The time it takes for a product to go through the supply chain, from design to purchase, is called a ' lead time '. In 2012, Zara was able to design, produce and deliver a new garment in two weeks; Forever 21 in six weeks and H&M in eight weeks. This results in the fashion industry producing obscene amounts of waste.

This story is funded by readers like you

Our non-profit newsroom provides climate coverage free of charge and advertising. Your one-off or monthly donations play a crucial role in supporting our operations, expanding our reach, and maintaining our editorial independence.

About EO | Mission Statement | Impact & Reach | Write for us

You Might Also Like: The 9 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics
Fast Fashion and Its Environmental Impact

1. Water

The environmental impact of fast fashion comprises the depletion of non-renewable sources, emission of greenhouse gases and the use of massive amounts of water and energy. The fashion industry is the second largest consumer industry of water, requiring about 700 gallons to produce one cotton shirt and 2 000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans. Business Insider also cautions that textile dyeing is the world's second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams or rivers.

2. Microplastics

Furthermore, brands use synthetic fibres like polyester, nylon and acrylic which take hundreds of years to biodegrade. A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics - tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic - in the ocean come from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester.

According to the documentary released in 2015, The True Cost, the world consumes around 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year, 400% more than the consumption twenty years ago. The average American now generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year. The production of leather requires large amounts of feed, land, water and fossil fuels to raise livestock, while the tanning process is among the most toxic in all of the fashion supply chain because the chemicals used to tan leather- including mineral salts, formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives and various oils and dyes- is not biodegradable and contaminates water sources.

3. Energy

The production of making plastic fibres into textiles is an energy-intensive process that requires large amounts of petroleum and releases volatile particulate matter and acids like hydrogen chloride. Additionally, cotton, which is in a large amount of fast fashion products, is also not environmentally friendly to manufacture. Pesticides deemed necessary for the growth of cotton presents health risks to farmers.

To counter this waste caused by fast fashion, more sustainable fabrics that can be used in clothing include wild silk, organic cotton, linen, hemp and lyocell.
You might Also Like: How to Recognise Fast Fashion Brands and Which Ones to Avoid
The Social Impacts of Fast Fashion

Fast fashion does not only have a huge environmental impact. In fact, the industry also poses societal problems, especially in developing economies. According to non-profit Remake, 80% of apparel is made by young women between the ages of 18 and 24. A 2018 US Department of Labor report found evidence of forced and child labour in the fashion industry in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam and others. Rapid production means that sales and profits supersede human welfare.

In 2013, an eight-floor factory building that housed several garment factories collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,134 workers and injuring more than 2,500. In her project An Analysis of the Fast Fashion Industry, Annie Radner Linden suggests that 'the garment industry has always been a low-capital and labour intensive industry'.

In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein argues that developing nations are viable for garment industries due to 'cheap labour, vast tax breaks, and lenient laws and regulations'. According to The True Cost, one in six people work in some part of the global fashion industry, making it the most labour-dependent industry. These developing nations also rarely follow environmental regulations; China, for example, is a major producer of fast fashion but is notorious for land degradation and air and water pollution.
You might also like: The Danger of Sweatshops
Is Slow Fashion the Solution?

Slow fashion is the widespread reaction to fast fashion and its environmental impact, the argument for hitting the brakes on excessive production, overcomplicated supply chains, and mindless consumption. It advocates for manufacturing that respects people, the environment and animals.

The World Resources Institute suggests that companies need to design, test and invest in business models that reuse clothes and maximise their useful life. The UN has launched the Alliance for Sustainable Fashion to address the damages caused by fast fashion. It is seeking to 'halt the environmentally and socially destructive practices of fashion'.
You might also like: What Is Slow Fashion and How Can You Join the Movement?
One way that shoppers are reducing their consumption of fast fashion is by buying from secondhand sellers like ThredUp Inc. and Poshmark, both based in California, USA; shoppers send their unwanted clothes to these websites and people buy those clothes at a lower price than the original. Another solution is renting clothes, like the US-based Rent the Runway and Gwynnie Bee, the UK based Girl Meets Dress, and the Dutch firm Mud Jeans that leases organic jeans which can be kept, swapped or returned.

Other retailers like Adidas are experimenting with personalised gear to cut down on returns, increase customer satisfaction and reduce inventory. Ralph Lauren has announced that it will use 100% sustainably-sourced key materials by 2025.

Governments need to be more actively involved in the fashion industry's damaging effects. UK ministers rejected a report by members of parliament to address the environmental effects of fast fashion. On the other hand, French president, Emmanuel Macron has made a pact with 150 brands to make the fashion industry more sustainable.
Featured image by EO Photographer Chin Leong Teo
The best advice on reducing the environmental impact of fast fashion comes from Patsy Perry, senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Manchester, who says, "Less is always more."

This story is funded by readers like you

Our non-profit newsroom provides climate coverage free of charge and advertising. Your one-off or monthly donations play a crucial role in supporting our operations, expanding our reach, and maintaining our editorial independence.

About EO | Mission Statement | Impact & Reach | Write for us

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Fast Fashion: Its Detrimental Effect on the Environment

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Fast fashion has a massive environmental impact, it is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions.

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Fast fashion brands continue to be popular due to their convenience and cost. However, sustainable fashion has grown in the past few decades, even in the past few years. Their missions and values to promote humane clothing production facilities, protect the environment, and support their communities have made them trend in popularity.

Fast fashion is clothing that is mass-produced to keep up with ever-changing trends. The goal of fast fashion is just that - to produce it fast. Because it is made quickly in large quantities, the clothing is cheap. However, cheap and mass-produced clothing does not have the best quality, so they are not meant to be worn more than a few times.

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion

Although fast fashion sounds like an ideal way to purchase clothing, it is harmful both environmentally and ethically. However, it is a powerful industry, one that produces 100 billion items of clothing per year.

According to the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, fast fashion is responsible for 2-8% of the entire world's carbon emissions. The biggest issue with fast fashion is waste. Because fast fashion keeps up with ever-changing trends, leading to productions of poor quality clothing that is not meant to last, consumers only wear a clothing item a few times before throwing it away.

If consumers switched to high-quality clothing, like the boots produced by Oliberté, they would be less likely to waste or throw away their clothing so quickly. This would lead to less production, which would lower the amount of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere.

What is Sustainable Fashion?
Environmental Benefits of Sustainable Fashion
On the ethical side, factory workers for fast fashion companies are often subject to less than livable wages. Because the cost of the clothing is so cheap to sell, workers often make a fraction of that price, leading to many of them living below the poverty line. In some cases around the world, major fast-fashion corporations have been accused of providing inhumane work environments for their employees.

Sustainable fashion is clothing that is produced with a focus on being environmentally friendly. Many sustainable fashion brands also focus on being ethical as well, as the two go hand in hand. While it has grown in popularity in the past few years, it still has a long way to go to be anywhere near as popular as fast fashion. Their main struggle is competing with the prices of fast fashion, despite their quality being notably higher.

Ethical Benefits of Sustainable Fashion

The main difference in fast vs. sustainable fashion is the amount of waste that each one produces. Sustainable fashion decreases waste by making clothing that is significantly better quality. Less waste leads to both less water pollution and fewer carbon emissions during production.

There are also ways during production that a clothing company can be sustainable. For example, Oliberté partners with Vibram to craft their boots' soles. One of Vibram's goals is to reduce energy consumption in their facilities. They also work to reduce waste during production and even collect data to determine better ways to recycle and reuse materials.

Unlike fast fashion, sustainable fashion focuses more on ethics as well as the environment. They promote healthier work environments by taking extra measures to ensure safety and provide livable wages for their workers.

Major sustainable companies like Oliberté are Certified B Corporations, meaning they have verified high standards in both their social and economic performance. This is a major step to reducing inequality and poverty rates by providing opportunities through their business.

How Can I Support Ethical Companies?

Ethical companies provide all the following benefits to their communities:

Providing humane working conditions in their communities, including developing countries

Paying livable wages to their factory workers to reduce poverty rates and eliminate child labor

Give back to the community by working or supporting the local area

Partner with companies that share similar values to their own to support the growth of ethical companies

Future Growth for Sustainable Fashion

A shared value of ethical companies is their belief in supporting the community. For example, when the pandemic began spreading worldwide, Oliberté stepped up and committed to producing masks to sell on their website. Along with their boots, they were determined to help combat the spread and encourage their consumers to join them in the fight against COVID. By doing so, they showed their commitment to the community's overall health and wellbeing.

Simple. Support ethical companies by consuming what they have to offer. By purchasing their products or services, you are allowing that company to stay in business, continue paying fair wages and motivating them to stay in line with their values and mission.

Supporting ethical companies helps encourage brands to become lifestyles. Beyond just fashion, they attempt to educate the public on important issues in their community and around the world. They promote their mission by supporting other companies and non-profit organizations that share their ethical beliefs. Purchasing from an ethical company can help bring its popularity above fast fashion in the future.

While purchasing from ethical companies helps to boost their business, it is also important to remember the effects of fast fashion. Educating others on fast fashion vs. sustainable fashion will help boost ethical companies while teaching the importance of their impact on the community.

The future for sustainable fashion looks bright. In 2009, New York Fashion Week hosted its first-ever Eco Fashion Week. Since then, sustainable fashion weeks have popped up all over the world, even spreading to the regular fashion weeks in London, Milan, and other major cities.
According to a report by The Business Research Company, sustainable and ethical fashion is expected to grow to $9,808.5 million in 2025. That means businesses like Oliberté, the world's first Fair Trade Certified™ footwear factory, will continue to grow in both profit and popularity.

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Oliberté is a sustainable boots and mask company handcrafted in Canada

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Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry. But the sad truth is that despite high-profile attempts at innovation, it's failed to reduce its planetary impact in the past 25 years. Most items are still produced using non-biodegradable petroleum-based synthetics and end up in a landfill. So what can be done? New ESG strategies such as the use of bio-based materials, recycling, and "rent-the-runway" concepts have failed. Instead, we must stop thinking about sustainability as existing on a spectrum. Less unstainable is not sustainable. And governments need to step in to force companies to pay for their negative impact on the planet. The idea of "win-win" and market-based solutions has failed even in one of the most "progressive" industries.

Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry. Products ranging from swimsuits to wedding dresses are marketed as carbon positive, organic, or vegan while yoga mats made from mushrooms and sneakers from sugar cane dot retail shelves. New business models including recycling, resale, rental, reuse, and repair are sold as environmental life savers.

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Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry. But the sad truth is that despite high-profile attempts at innovation, it's failed to reduce its planetary impact in the past 25 years. Most items are still produced using non-biodegradable petroleum-based synthetics and end up in a landfill.

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Social media is deciding trends at breakneck pace, and it's fueling fast fashion

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Social media is deciding trends at breakneck pace, and it's fueling fast fashion

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Social media - yeah, we're looking at YOU, TikTok! - has accelerated trend cycles. Researcher Mandy Lee explains what that means for fashion consumption.

ALINA SELYUKH, HOST:

What does it mean if you hear your clothes are so 2021? Well, probably that you're looking at TikTok and getting a dig for being part of a microtrend. A new wave of this conversation has been sparked by a movie on Hulu called "Not Okay." The main character's satirical portrayal of influencer culture is prompting hot takes like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It's crazy 'cause they dead filmed this last summer, and trends have, like, moved forward so fast that it almost feels, like, outdated.

SELYUKH: What is a microtrend? Fashion writer and TikTok influencer Mandy Lee defines the term like this.

MANDY LEE: Singular pieces of clothing rather than maybe genres or aesthetics that reach peak and obsolescence very, very quickly.

SELYUKH: And to keep up with microtrends, many people rely on fast fashion. That's the latest clothes, which are constantly dropped at low prices by mass-market retailers like Shein or ASOS. Fast fashion is often criticized for not being the most environmentally or ethically sound. But Lee argues people go for it for many reasons.

LEE: Accessibility with resources, you know, nearby - maybe they don't have somewhere to shop that's convenient to them close by. Maybe the sizes that are offered for places that they would prefer, that might be a little more ethical - they don't carry those sizes.

SELYUKH: Sustainable shopping at thrift stores is often seen as an antidote to fast fashion, but Lee says the actual problem is just buying too much stuff.

LEE: Also, you can totally overconsume at the thrift store. I feel like I see that almost more than people doing fast fashion hauls nowadays, where people are buying just, like, trash bags and trash bags of stuff at the thrift store just because it's cheap.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I have one of my craziest thrift hauls literally ever and biggest.

LEE: I think that the problem really lies with the idea that a wardrobe is revolving and, you know, people striving to constantly replace things that may not be on the pulse.

SELYUKH: So instead of thinking of our clothes as disposable, regardless of where they come from, Lee says, it's all about our habits.

LEE: My ideas about ethical shopping is thinking about longevity. So how long can you wear something that you're about to buy? And, like, really think about it. And that exercise has helped me save a lot of money and to make my wardrobe something that I truly love and do not get tired of.

SELYUKH: That was fashion writer and TikTok influencer Mandy Lee.

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Social media is deciding trends at breakneck pace, and it's fueling fast fashion

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Social media - yeah, we're looking at YOU, TikTok! - has accelerated trend cycles. Researcher Mandy Lee explains what that means for fashion consumption.

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As the TikTok app gains popularity among multiple age groups across the globe, information is spreading quickly and videos are going viral almost instantaneously. Growing like no other app, TikTok has been the world's most downloaded app since early 2020, providing another platform for businesses both big and small to influence users. One recent sensation is Shein, a Chinese online retailer focused on clothing, accessories, shoes, bags, and other fashion items for all ages. Shein is known for cheap prices that appeal to the teenage eyes, which tend to be the most active on TikTok.

Shein is based in Guangzhou, a port city northwest of Hong Kong, China, and utilizes thousands of supplies to sew and stitch clothing. In 2020, Shein had annual revenue of $10 billion. In the first three months of 2022, Shein accounted for almost a third of fast-fashion sales in America. Making Shein so successful is the hybrid dynamics between the most profitable online retailer, customer-obsessed Amazon, and data-obsessed Chinese consumers. Similar to Amazon, Shein is attracting users with cheap prices and quick delivery to support their constant searching, compulsive purchasing, and promise of company engagement. Shein's integrated supply chain, data-driven design, and understanding of the social-media hype cycle are setting them apart from Western competitors such as Amazon.

Another factor making Shein stand out from the competition is the fact that it pays suppliers on time, fostering confidence and allowing the brand to commission modest quantities at discounted rates. This instantaneous transactional process increases the frequency with which it can design, produce, market, and sell new fashion items, helping Shein keep up with the most recent trends. In addition, Shein's proprietary software connects the suppliers, contractors, and customers and provides them with regular updates on what is popular or not, determined by an AI algorithm. This enables them to continuously modify the entire pipeline, from supply chain to sales output, all while satisfying the newest tastes without accumulating or managing much inventory. Responding to the elastic supply and demand, the company quickly orders more resources or products, redesigns fashion lines, and increases the consumer base by meeting popular demands and triaging products as customers dismiss outdated trends. By using this rapid and disruptive sourcing-production-outlay business model, Shein has reduced inventory turnover to just 30 days compared to an industry average of 150 days. This is achieved by centralizing goods in a limited number of massive warehouses and then distributing these goods directly to clients. Shein's global data collection through scanning social media platforms is essential to the core of its success.

Using social media as an asset has brought Shein a total of 250 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. About 70% of TikTok and Instagram users shop on Shein's mobile app, which has been so successful that copy-cat companies are trying to adopt it in their processes. Browsing through Shein's app feels similar to walking through a store in person. Discounts and pop-ups appear at random, creating a sense of excitement, instant gratification, and accessibility due to low pricing and speedy delivery. Shein is continuing to expand on these staples in their operations, participating in more paid media and increasing their advertising in hopes of overcoming competitors such as Pretty Little Thing in the UK and Fashion Nova in the U.S. With app users skyrocketing during the pandemic, Shein has reached a $15 billion valuation following these new marketing efforts that are setting them apart.

Although there are many beneficial approaches within Shein's strategy, there are also risks along with it. Similar to other fast-fashion brands, Shein is often criticized for their production waste and negative impact on the environment. Shein's clothing materials are also known to contain high levels of hazardous chemicals, such as lead, perfluoroalkyl, and phthalates. The low prices that the brand is known for can coincide with poor quality items, leading to the question of if these cheap goods are actually worth the cost, especially when compared to competitors' products.

Overall, the Shein approach is somewhat obscure with a lack of openness at a time when fast-fashion companies are under great pressure to be transparent, especially regarding their Chinese supply networks and environmental sustainability. With many comparable brands in the market, Shein will have to evaluate how their quality, prices, marketing, and reserved reputation impact their standing among other fast-fashion names.

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As the TikTok app gains popularity among multiple age groups across the globe, information is spreading quickly and videos are going viral almost instantaneously. Growing like no other app, TikTok has been the world’s most downloaded app since early 2020, providing another platform for businesses both big and small to influence users.

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Ghana becomes dumping ground for the world's unwanted used clothes