Journal
In the past two decades, fast fashion has dominated every aspect of the fashion industry and changed our view of buying clothes. The industry is based on a quick stock overturn, mainly achieved through consumers buying many clothes and discarding them soon to buy new ones—havoc for the environment and sustainability.
We've created this overview of fast fashion's environmental impacts to help you understand how it massively contributes to climate change by turning garments into fashion waste.
The fashion industry largely relies on water for many of its activities. From watering crops to dyeing fabric, it would be near impossible to produce a garment without water.
However, considering how much this industry relies on water, it sure isn’t doing much to protect the water sources. Did you know that the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution in the world?
Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental threats of the 21st century. We are only now finding out about the impact of our widespread use of plastic and unsustainable synthetic fibres in nearly every aspect of our lives – and the information is worrying, to say the least.
Besides visible plastic pollution, such as plastic straws, fishing nets or water bottles, our ocean is being contaminated with microscopic plastic pollution too – microplastics – which may be even more dangerous.
The 21st century’s fashion industry isn’t exactly known for being particularly sustainable, but did you know that one of its biggest issues is the sheer amount of waste it produces?
According to a report released in 2017 by the Ellen McArthur Foundation, the equivalent of one garbage truck full of textiles goes to waste every second. The majority of this textile waste is sent to landfill and the rest is usually incinerated.
Over the past few years, phrases like “fast fashion”, “sustainability”, and “slow fashion” have become buzzwords within the fashion industry. There is no denying that the fashion industry has a significant climate change problem. The rise of fast fashion, fuelled by social media trends, has skyrocketed the industry’s carbon footprint. Every day, we’re visibly seeing the impact of fast fashion on the world around us. You need to look at the damage that microplastics in the apparel causes to the ocean to see that. Nevertheless, there is a solution to this problem by shifting from fast fashion to its slower, more eco-friendly alternative.