Fast Fashion and the Environment
How fast fashion hurts environment, workers, society
By Neil Schoenherr, Washington University in St. Louis, phys.org
The overabundance of fast fashion—readily available, inexpensively made clothing—has created an environmental and social justice crisis, claims a new paper from an expert on environmental health at Washington University in St. Louis.
“From the growth of water-intensive cotton, to the release of untreated dyes into local water sources, to worker’s low wages and poor working conditions, the environmental and social costs involved in textile manufacturing are widespread,” said Christine Ekenga, assistant professor at the Brown School and co-author of the paper “The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion,” published in the journal Environmental Health.
“This is a massive problem,” Ekenga said. “The disproportionate environmental and social impacts of fast fashion warrant its classification as an issue of global environmental injustice.”
In the paper, Ekenga and her co-authors—Rachel Bick, MPH ’18, and Erika Halsey, MPH ’18—assert that negative consequences at each step of the fast-fashion supply chain have created a global environmental justice dilemma.
“While fast fashion offers consumers an opportunity to buy more clothes for less, those who work in or live near textile manufacturing facilities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards,” the authors wrote.
“Furthermore, increased consumption patterns have created millions of tons of textile waste in landfills and unregulated settings. This is particularly applicable to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as much of this waste ends up in second-hand clothing markets. These LMICs often lack the supports and resources necessary to develop and enforce environmental and occupational safeguards to protect human health.”
In the paper, the researchers discuss the environmental and occupational hazards during textile production, particularly for those in LMICs, and the issue of textile waste.
They also address a number of potential solutions, including sustainable fibers, corporate sustainability, trade policy and the role of the consumer.
Globally, 80 billion pieces of new clothing are purchased each year, translating to $1.2 trillion annually for the global fashion industry. The majority of these products are assembled in China and Bangladesh, while the United States consumes more clothing and textiles than any other nation in the world.
Approximately 85 percent of the clothing Americans consume, nearly 3.8 billion pounds annually, is sent to landfills as solid waste, amounting to nearly 80 pounds per American per year.
More information: Rachel Bick et al. The global environmental injustice of fast fashion, Environmental Health (2018). DOI: 10.1186/s12940-018-0433-7
Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-fast-fashion-environment-workers-society.html Accessed 7/31/19
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Putting the brakes on fast fashion
United Nations Environmental Programme, 12 Nov 2018 [Note: This article uses European spelling throughout]
Fashion revolves around the latest trends but is the industry behind the curve on the only trend that ultimately matters – the need to radically alter our patterns of consumption to ensure the survival of the planet.
The fashion industry produces 20 per cent of global wastewater and 10 per cent of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of water globally and it takes around 2,000 gallons of water to make a typical pair of jeans.
Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. If nothing changes, by 2050 the fashion industry will use up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget. Washing clothes also releases half a million tonnes of microfibres into the ocean every year.
Then there is the human cost: textile workers are often paid derisory wages and forced to work long hours in appalling conditions. But with consumers increasingly demanding change, the fashion world is finally responding with A-listers, like Duchess Meghan Markle, leading the way with their clothing choices and designers looking to break the take-make-waste model.
“Most fashion retailers now are doing something about sustainability and have some initiatives focused on reducing fashion’s negative impact on the environment,” says Patsy Perry, senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Manchester. For example, last year, Britain’s Stella McCartney teamed up with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to launch a report on redesigning fashion’s future.
“However, there is still a fundamental problem with the fast fashion business model where revenues are based on selling more products, and therefore retailers must constantly offer new collections. It would be unrealistic to expect consumers to stop shopping on a large scale, so going forward, I would expect to see more development and wider adoption of more sustainable production methods such as waterless dyeing, using waste as a raw material, and development of innovative solutions to the textile waste problem,” she says.
Pioneering solutions to address environmental challenges will be at the heart of the fourth UN Environment Assembly next March. The meeting’s motto is to think beyond prevailing patterns and live within sustainable limits—a message that will resonate with fashion designers and retailers seeking to reform their industry.
[Photo deleted to save printing]
At the March meeting, UN Environment will formally launch the UN Alliance on Sustainable Fashion to encourage the private sector, governments and non-governmental organizations to create an industry-wide push for action to reduce fashion’s negative social, economic and environmental impact and turn it into a driver for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Across the United Nations, agencies are working to make fashion more sustainable, from the Food and Agricultural Organization protecting arable land, to the Ethical Fashion Initiative set up by the International Trade Centre to the work of UN Environment in fostering sustainable manufacturing practices.
And some entrepreneurs are already designing the fashion of the future:
Kaya Dorey Photo by UN Environment
Some argue that recycling is itself energy intensive and does not address our throwaway culture—the number of times a garment is worn has declined by 36 per cent in 15 years. An alternative might be found in a viable rental market for clothes. Pioneers in this field include Dutch firm Mud Jeans, which leases organic jeans that can be kept, swapped or returned, Rent the Runway, Girl Meets Dress and YCloset in China.
“The rental model is clearly a winner for the higher end of the market where consumers may have no intention of wearing an occasion dress more than once… but at the lower end, it’s all too easy to go online and be able to buy outright any trend or item,” says Perry. “For rental to be a success at this market level, companies need to offer sufficient choice of brands and styles that would engage consumers and tempt them away from outright purchase, and the rental service needs to be smooth and faultless.”
Her best fashion advice? Less is always more.
“Keep your clothing in use for longer to reduce its environmental footprint, as well as reducing the amount of new stuff you need to buy and the consequent use of resources. This also reduces the impact of the disposal of perfectly good but unwanted clothes.”
Source: https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/putting-brakes-fast-fashion Accessed 7/31/19
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The environmental costs of fast fashion
Water pollution, toxic chemical use and textile waste: fast fashion comes at a huge cost to the environment
Patsy Perry for The Independent (UK), 8 January 2018
Women walk past tannery wastewater that is being pumped from a factory straight into the street, in Cairo’s Ain el-Sirra district ( Reuters )
It’s tough to love our clothes and keep wearing them for longer when we are faced with a tempting array of newness on offer in the shops. But before you head out into the January sales for those irresistible deals, spare a thought for the impact of fast fashion on the environment.
Fast fashion focuses on speed and low costs in order to deliver frequent new collections inspired by catwalk looks or celebrity styles. But it is particularly bad for the environment, as pressure to reduce cost and the time it takes to get a product from design to shop floor means that environmental corners are more likely to be cut. Criticisms of fast fashion include its negative environmental impact, water pollution, the use of toxic chemicals and increasing levels of textile waste.
Vibrant colours, prints and fabric finishes are appealing features of fashion garments, but many of these are achieved with toxic chemicals. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture. Greenpeace’s recent Detox campaign has been instrumental in pressuring fashion brands to take action to remove toxic chemicals from their supply chains, after it tested a number of brands’ products and confirmed the presence of hazardous chemicals. Many of these are banned or strictly regulated in various countries because they are toxic, bio-accumulative (meaning the substance builds up in an organism faster than the organism can excrete or metabolise it), disruptive to hormones and carcinogenic.
Polyester is the most popular fabric used for fashion. But when polyester garments are washed in domestic washing machines, they shed microfibres that add to the increasing levels of plastic in our oceans. These microfibres are minute and can easily pass through sewage and wastewater treatment plants into our waterways, but because they do not biodegrade, they represent a serious threat to aquatic life. Small creatures such as plankton eat the microfibres, which then make their way up the food chain to fish and shellfish eaten by humans.
A barrel full of chemical waste lies where a textile factory was demolished (Getty/iStock)
The devastating impact of toxic chemical use in agriculture, for growing cotton, was shown in a documentary called The True Cost, including the death of a US cotton farmer from a brain tumour, and serious birth defects in Indian cotton farmers’ children. Cotton growing requires high levels of water and pesticides to prevent crop failure, which can be problematic in developing countries that may lack sufficient investment and be at risk of drought.
Most cotton grown worldwide is genetically modified to be resistant to the bollworm pest, thereby improving yield and reducing pesticide use. But this can also lead to problems further down the line, such as the emergence of “superweeds” which are resistant to standard pesticides. They often need to be treated with more toxic pesticides that are harmful to livestock and humans.
There is growing interest in organic cotton, with H&M and Inditex, the parent company of Zara, featuring among the world’s top five users of organic cotton by volume in 2016. But overall use of organic cotton represents less than 1 per cent of the world’s total annual cotton crop.
Hunger for newness
Textile waste is an unintended consequence of fast fashion, as more people buy more clothes and don’t keep them as long as they used to. The international expansion of fast fashion retailers exacerbates the problem on a global scale. Wardrobes in developed nations are saturated, so in order to sell more products, retailers must tempt shoppers with constant newness and convince them the items they already have are no longer fashionable.
Increasing disposable income levels over recent generations means there is less need to “make do and mend”, as it’s often cheaper and more convenient to buy new than have an item repaired. Busy lifestyles make many people more time-poor than previous generations, and with the loss of sewing and mending skills over time, there is less impetus to repair our garments. The rise of supermarket fashion that can be purchased alongside the weekly shop and the regular occurrence of seasonal sales make clothing seem “disposable” in a way it didn’t used to be.
There is interest in moving towards a more circular model of textile production which reuses materials wherever possible, yet current recycling rates for textiles are very low. Despite a long-established national network of charity shops and increasing numbers of in-store recycling points in UK high-street stores, three-quarters of Britons throw away unwanted clothing, rather than donating or recycling it.
What shoppers can do
So, can consumers reduce the environmental cost of fast fashion when out shopping? Choosing an eco-friendly fabric is complex as there are pros and cons to all fibre types. Garments which are labelled as being made from natural fibres are not necessarily better than synthetic, as fibre choice is only one part of a complex picture. Fibres still have to be spun, knitted or woven, dyed, finished, sewn and transported – all of which have different environmental impacts.
For example, choosing organic fabrics is better than choosing non-organic fabrics in terms of the chemicals used to grow the fibres, but organic cotton still requires high amounts of water and the impact of dyeing it is higher than the impact of dyeing polyester.
Models with gas masks – part of a Greenpeace campaign for top fashion brands to remove toxic chemicals from their supply chains in Indonesia (AFP/Getty)
Recycled content is often best of all, as it reduces the pressure on virgin resources and tackles the growing problem of waste management. For example, Patagonia was the first outdoor clothing brand to make polyester fleece out of plastic bottles. In 2017, it decided to rationalise its T-shirt ranges and from spring 2018, will offer only two fabric options of either 100 per cent organic cotton or a blend of recycled cotton and recycled polyester, recognising that even organic cotton has a negative environmental impact.
The Love Your Clothes initiative from the charity Wrap gives information for consumers on each stage of the purchase process, from buying smarter, to caring for and repairing items, to upcycling or customisation and finally responsible disposal. Ultimately, the best thing we can do is to keep our clothing in use for longer – and buy less new stuff.
Patsy Perry is a senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Manchester. This article first appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com)
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/environment-costs-fast-fashion-pollution-waste-sustainability-a8139386.html?amp Accessed 7/31/19
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By Elizabeth Reichart and Deborah Drew for World Resources Institute, January 10, 2019
Think about how many sweaters, scarves and other clothes were given as gifts this holiday season. How many times will people wear them before throwing them out?
Probably far fewer than you think. One garbage truck of clothes is burned or sent to landfills every second! The average consumer bought 60 percent more clothes in 2014 than in 2000, but kept each garment for half as long.
Gone are the days when people would buy a shirt and wear it for years. In a world of accelerating demand for apparel, consumers want—and can increasingly afford—new clothing after wearing garments only a few times. Entire business models are built on the premise of “fast fashion,” providing clothes cheaply and quickly to consumers through shorter fashion cycles.
This linear fashion model of buying, wearing and quickly discarding clothes negatively impacts people and the planet’s resources. Here’s a look at the economic, social and environmental implications:
According to the Ellen McArthur Foundation, clothing production has approximately doubled in the last 15 years, driven by a growing middle-class population across the globe and increased per capita sales in developed economies. An expected 400 percent increase in world GDP by 2050 will mean even greater demand for clothing.
This could be an opportunity to do better. One report found that addressing environmental and social problems created by the fashion industry would provide a $192 billion overall benefit to the global economy by 2030. The annual value of clothing discarded prematurely is more than $400 billion.
Apparel production is also resource- and emissions-intensive. Consider that:
Clothing production has helped spur growth in developing economies, but a closer look reveals a number of social challenges. For instance:
Rapid consumption of apparel and the need to deliver on short fashion cycles stresses production resources, often resulting in supply chains that put profits ahead of human welfare.
So, what does a more sustainable apparel industry look like, and how do we get there? We’re starting to see some early signs of an industry in transition. Business models based on longevity, such as Rent the Runway and Gwynnie Bee, are the beginnings of an industry that supports reuse instead of rapid and irresponsible consumption. Just as Netflix reimagined traditional film rental services and Lyft disrupted transportation, we are beginning to see options for consumers to lease clothes rather than buy and stash them in their closets. Ideally, an “end of ownership” in apparel will be implemented in a way that considers impacts on jobs, communities and the environment.
This is only the beginning of the radical transformation required. Apparel companies will increasingly have to confront the elephant in the boardroom and decouple their business growth from resource use.
To meet tomorrow’s demand for clothing in innovative ways, companies will need to do what they have never done before: design, test and invest in business models that reuse clothes and maximize their useful life. For apparel companies, it’s time to disrupt or be disrupted.
Source: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/01/numbers-economic-social-and-environmental-impacts-fast-fashion Accessed 7/31/19
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