Toxic Threads
#3 Fast fashion: more fashion, more toxics The brands in this study include some “fast fashion” brands, which deliver new fashion trends in increasingly short cycles in response to customer preferences. From the early 1990s brands looked for ways to increase their profits by encouraging consumers to buy more clothes and to buy them more frequently. Faced with pricing pressure from low-cost supermarket brands such as Walmart, fashion companies shifted the bulk of their manufacturing to the Global South.
It is reported that, every year, around 80 billion garments are produced worldwide – the equivalent of just over 11 garments a year for every person on the planet.97 However, the consumption of garments is not evenly distributed. In Germany, for example, 5.97 billion garments, including 1 billion t-shirts, were consumed in 2011, the equivalent of 70 garments for every person.98
A key part of this huge turnover in clothes is their disposability. Some consumers will imitate certain Brands such as Zara, H&M, Gap, and Benetton focussed celebrities and refuse to wear any item of clothing more on speeding up fashion cycles by presenting trends to than once.99 This, combined with poor quality and low consumers mid-season. It is now the norm to have six to prices, can lead to a throwaway mind-set and shorter eight fashion seasons compared to the traditional two to lifespans for clothes – even though the fabric itself could four collections a year for many high street brands.94 To last for decades. A large proportion of these thrownachieve this, they needed increasingly short turnaround away clothes gets dumped in landfills or is incinerated. times, from design through to the finished article, bringing In Germany, 1 million tonnes of clothing are thrown away the production of the more high fashion items closer to the every year.100 In the US the 13.1 million tonnes of textiles point of sale, while keeping basic items manufactured in generated in 2010 made up 5.3% of municipal waste,101 the Far East95, as well as some dyeing and wet processing. while in the UK it is 1 million tonnes a year.102 image © Alex Stoneman / Greenpeace
Known as “just in time” manufacturing, new technological systems links all parts of the supply chain together to reduce the time needed for a garment to be produced. Zara, a leading proponent of fast fashion, can put together a clothing range in 7 to 30 days and then replenish bestsellers in the stores in just five days. These faster-changing fashion products are made possible by pressuring suppliers to deliver to ever-tighter deadlines that inevitably encourage the cutting of labour costs and environmentally irresponsible practices96.
image Scientist Melissa Wang works at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories in Exeter University.
Greenpeace International Toxic Threads: The Big Fashion Stitch-Up 31