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Fashion
Fast Fashion, the Environment, and the Need to Stop the Cycle By Doireann Minford, JF Law and Political Science The Fast Fashion Industry Every year, 300,000 tonnes of textile waste are incinerated or sent to landfill sites. Burberry alone burned £28.6 million worth of goods in 2017. The fast fashion industry is a method of design, manufacturing, and marketing with the goal of rapidly producing goods in order to maximise profit. It has turned the traditional two fashion seasons a year into an unsustainable fifty-two ‘micro-seasons’ annually in response to the highly competitive nature of high-street brands. Clothing may seem cheaper than ever, but wherein lies the true cost? Industry-wide water consumption, emissions, and chemical use were ignored as contributors to the global climate crisis until recently. The fast fashion industry is responsible for an estimated 10 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions every year. Should the burden of solving these problems be left to environmentally-conscious consumers? Or is it arguably time to use policy, legislation, and governmental initiatives to end the climate crisis the industry has contributed to? The Demand for Inexpensive Clothing There is no doubt that sustainable clothing is expensive. It is produced with ecological integrity as well as sustainability in mind and, when compared to well-known high-street brands, it is just not as accessible. Brands such as Zara have promised that by 2025, their clothing will be fully sustainable. While this may point towards a trend in high-street brands attempting to atone for their previous transgressions against the environment, this trend will not be met well by all. When affordable clothing shops such as Penneys reopened after the first lockdown last year, many commentators were quick to criticise the people queuing outside these stores for the chance to shop in person for the first time since March. All too quickly these critics were reminded just how fast children grow. In a time where one in five people in the country were on some form of unemployment payment, it was assumed that everyone had access to online stores to avail of their shopping needs. For many, this is all they could afford or all that they were willing to buy. Penneys broke their daily sales records twice in the days that followed reopening, showing us that the demand for low-cost clothing will never reach zero. The Exploitation of Workers The exploitation of both humans and the planet accounts for the majority of these businesses’ profits. They can demand extreme turnarounds for new products in order to feed the West’s greed without any regulation by locating their factories in countries with poor records for workers’ rights such as India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. Workers, predominantly women and girls, are forced into these factories for wages of less than 15 cent an hour for long shifts in perilous conditions. In one investigation of a factory in India, it was found that no worker was part of a trade union and 99 per cent of the women and girls interviewed were being paid far less than the Indian minimum wage.
“The fast fashion industry is responsible for an estimated 10 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions every year.”
