At the beginning we were all so happy to be able to renew our wardrobe on a monthly basis for a reasonable amount of money! We welcomed Fast Fashion with open arms and and made our fashionista dream come true. Little did we know at the time that it would have such a big impact on human beings and environment. Below a few figures about the The Effects Of Fast Fashion.
The Effects Of Fast Fashion on the environment
The figures are outrageous! The Fast fashion Industry produce 150 billion pieces of clothes yearly while only 80 billion pieces are bought and worn? Guess what? The rest is a pure waste and is thrown away.
Indeed, by encouraging people to change their style every single week, the fast fashion brands end up with an insane amount of unused garments. Besides, those garments are not made to last so the unused clothes finish up in landfills. On the top of it, as it is hard to recycled them, the fibres increase pollution. (yikes!).
Hawthorn report that in the United Kingdom alone over 350,000 tonnes of clothing is send to landfills each year.
Studies driven by The Institute of Sustainable Communication show that the fashion is the second most polluting industry in terms of clean water. Fashion requires a lot of water to produce clothes and rejects toxic chemicals along the manufacturing process. Do you have any idea of the denim production impacts on the environment? Our article called “how are jeans made?” will en light you.
Finally, fashion garment factories use coal to manufacture their pieces and are responsible for 10% of worldwide carbon emission. They also use plastic and vinyl materials to make faux leather (for example) which add hazardous chemicals in your clothes composition. Not only it is unsafe for the environment but also for us!
The Ethical issues raised by Fast Fashion
Fast Fashion is so cheap for a very simple reason. The brands employ workers in developing countries (China, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Ecuador, Indonesia…) so they can pay them below western living wage.
Furthermore, in order to meet the demand of fussy customers formatted by fast trends and over consumption, the brands neglect the worker’s right. They work long hours in awful working environment for a low pay. Some are even underage!
We just celebrated the 5 years of the Rana Plazza collapse that killed over 800 people. Basically, those workers pay the price. It is high time we stop that madness.
Alternatives to fast fashion
You are not powerless! There is so much you can do to limit the effects of fashion. You can buy second hand clothes from vintage stores, you should avoid fashion trends and you could support ethical brands. To understand better those ideas, refer to our article about the alternatives to fast fashion and find out the list of fast fashion brands to avoid.
We wrote this article because we found those The Effects Of Fast Fashion alarming. We do not mean to freak you out but we think it is important that you realise how fashion trends can be dangerous. So what actions are you going to take to improve the situation? Comment to share your idea!
