Sportswear Is Making Us Sicker, Not Healthier
The Toxicity of the Sportswear Industry
Sportswear is great! It’s comfortable, stretchy, durable, and easy to care for. Whether it’s worn for physical activity or just to lounge about, it feels like a staple in today’s closets. And we love buying it: according to a Statista survey, the size of the activewear market worldwide is projected to increase by at least 25% in the next four years.
However, there is much that remains hidden from the public concerning sportswear’s more sinister consequences. I argue that sportswear has become increasingly unethical. After providing a brief background on the evolution of sportswear, I’ll outline three key ways it is decreasing — rather than increasing — our health. It harms us:
- psychologically, through exclusive ideals imbued into clothing designs,
- biologically, through its synthetic fibers and chemical additives, and
- environmentally, through its difficulty in recycling and decomposing.
I call on sportswear brands to reformulate the materials they use, educate users on the potential harms of their products, and promote a healthier, realistic, and sustainable body ideal to realign with their core mission: facilitating exercise and improving our health.
Before Diving In
I approach this analysis through a consequentialist lens. Consequentialism states that an act is moral if and only if it leads to the best possible outcome. It focuses on benevolence and increasing well-being by assessing an action’s consequences. If an action does not cause the best possible results, then it is unethical. I felt that this framework is the most fitting given sports industry research and a growing environmental crisis.
A Brief History Of Sportswear
Before diving into the impacts and ethics of sportswear, we need to understand its purpose and evolution.
Throughout the 19th century, women were expected to dress modestly, covering their bodies with long skirts and sleeves even when playing sports. In college, however, they were away from the public eye and wore more comfortable clothing, prioritizing practicality and versatility. Sportswear — and, more generally, fashion — gradually shifted from ideals of status and maturity to those of youth and carefreeness.
Today’s sportswear focuses even more on versatility, paving the way for “athleisure:” athletic apparel worn for leisure. Athleisure connotes “health” and “fitness,” and our cultural obsession with these values drives its popularity. Because wearing athleisure can motivate exercise and increase confidence, sportswear brands market it as mood-boosting and fitness-enhancing. Athleisure also boasts physiological benefits, such as improving fitness (due to the ability to move freely) and preventing injury (due to compression).
“When you let go of the expectation to perform, that’s when the real magic happens. You learn that the joy of the game will always outlast a win.”
– The “About Us” Section from Outdoor Voices
However, how widespread are these benefits? What other psychological and physiological effects does sportswear cause?
Promoting Exclusivity and Unrealistic Ideals
Sportswear (and athleisure, especially) promotes an unrealistic standard for what healthy bodies should look like. Based on their designs and marketing, sportswear brands reify the idealization of a thin-fit body type — an unrealistic ideal for women’s physiques. When women of these idealizations don sportswear, they are associated with health and fitness. However, when those of other body types wear sportswear, it connotes laziness. This results in uncomfortable cognitive dissonance — people recognize the unrealistic nature of the ideal yet are pressured to continue in their drive to achieve it.
Fatphobia is already rampant in American society, especially when it comes to sportswear. At the age of nine, children feel insecure about their bodies, with 81% of girls and 55% of boys wanting to change their body shapes. Sportswear brands only further body insecurities by glorifying an unrealistic body type, as exhibited by their lack of sizing inclusivity. Therefore, because it exacerbates fatphobia, the sportswear industry doesn’t really focus on health; it focuses on exclusion and image.
It’s More Than Psychological Harm — It’s Biological
On top of influencing what our bodies should look like, sportswear also impacts how our bodies should function.
Sportswear is made of synthetic fibers, which consist of microplastics (MPs) and chemical additives, such as Bisphenol A (BPA) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs). The concern with these materials is their potential toxicity in high doses. MPs and additives chemically bonded to the fabric can leach off quite easily and enter our bodies, especially when exposed to sweat and heat.
Researchers have already detected MPs in human blood, lungs, stool, and even placentas. While there is no direct causation of MPs for disease, recent studies have found it correlated with inflammatory lesions, bioaccumulation, oxidative stress, and colorectal cancer. BPA and BFRs are also harmful. While they make clothing softer, more malleable, and less flammable, they are endocrine disruptors — they can interfere with our bodies’ normal biological processes, including metabolism, growth and development, and reproduction.
Blatant Environmental Disregard
Furthermore, the clothing industry is more polluting than you think. While most people believe that food and drink-related industries are the most plastic-intensive, clothing and fabric-related industries are almost five times worse. They encompass 55% of the top 20 polluting plastic-intensive industries, largely due to what they are made of: synthetic fibers.
The entire life cycle of synthetic fibers is unrenewable. First, producing these synthetic fibers requires extractive and nonrenewable resources, such as crude oils and fossil fuels, and virgin content (new, non-recycled material). Second, the discarding of these fibers is also unsustainable. While being durable means the products have a longer life span, it also means they are difficult to recycle and take longer to break down (from 20 to 500 years). So, they end up in landfills.
Synthetic fibers also harm ecosystems and wildlife during their long decomposition. MPs leach off clothing and into air, soil, and waterways, impacting marine and terrestrial ecosystems. A study on marine pollution found MPs in species with different diets, distribution patterns, and ages, indicating widespread plastic pollution. The toxic effects of MPs in animals are also unclear but hypothesized to harm physiological processes.
Using such environmentally harmful practices to produce sportswear displays a blatant disregard for the environment. Considering its long-term environmental degradation, ecosystem disruption, and exploitative use of natural resources, the sportswear industry engages in unethical production practices.
So, What Does This All Mean?
From analyzing these three harmful aspects of sportswear (psychological, biological, and environmental), I can confidently say that the sportswear and synthetic fabric industries are unethical.
First, marketing tactics have shifted sportswear’s focus from physical activity to one’s appearance, which is the exact antithesis of what sportswear was initially designed for. Rather than encourage everyone to explore outdoor settings, sportswear brands call attention to one’s inevitable failure to meet “the perfect” physique. The long-lasting psychological impact fuels persistent body insecurity through its exclusive messaging and designs.
Second, sportswear correlates with long-term biological and physiological harm. These harms far outweigh the immediate benefits of increased fitness.
Third, the sportswear industry demonstrates blatant environmental disregard; it uses non-renewable materials, creates difficult-to-decompose-and-recycle fabrics, and disrupts ecosystems. These impacts contradict their supposed intentions to respect nature and result in long-term harm, affecting ecosystems and humans.
“We design our product and operate our business through a lens of circularity and longevity to minimize environmental impact.”
“We are committed to making the best products on earth — and keeping Mother Nature, our communities and the future in focus. Nature is at the heart of what we do.”
– Sustainability statements from Outdoor Voices and The North Face, respectively. The Center for Environmental Health sent legal notices to both of these brands after testing of their athletic clothing showed high levels of BPA.
Having assessed all these adverse consequences, I hope I illuminated just how unethical the sportswear industry is.
Is There Anything We Can Do?
Unfortunately, there aren’t many alternatives to the existing sportswear apparel. At the business level, there exist some certification initiatives, such as the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) and OEKO-TEX®. While these work towards safer fabrics, they are remedial and explicitly tackle human, not environmental health. More preventative measures include regulation and litigation. For example, California’s Proposition 65 has regulated maximum BPA skin exposure since 1986. The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) is also making strides by actively suing several sports brands for high BPA exposure.
While these are significant first steps, they do not adequately address the problem. Leading sportswear brands have such a monopoly over the industry that it’s hard to avoid them. Alternatives simply don’t boast the same advantages as synthetic fabrics: accessible, affordable, scaled-up, durable, moisture-wicking, and more.
At the individual level, you can be more intentional about what you buy and why you buy it. Read the labels carefully and try to opt for natural fibers, when you can; buy things you need rather than want; invest in long-lasting, timeless pieces; and spread awareness! By increasing awareness, we can start to dismantle these long-lasting, harmful processes.
