Environmental Issue Profile
When wearing a piece of clothing, people don’t usually think of the sustainability of what it means to wear clothing and what the reasoning behind the price of the clothing is. Things like the mass production of cheap clothing made out of cheap materials that you end up throwing out after only wearing a couple of times turn into a big problem when you begin to look at fast fashion. There is way more to fast fashion than just the environmental aspect, you also run into many moral aspects as well as social aspects which are a big factor in creating non-sustainable clothing. In addition, I personally work in a thrift store that focuses on trying to recycle as much clothing as possible.
Fast fashion can be defined as “how the clothing industry churns out lots of relatively cheap garments and gets them to stores every few weeks.” At a first glance, you may not see anything wrong with the mass production of clothing items especially if you are able to get them at a cheap price making you think that it’s a good thing since the clothing items are so inexpensive, but, the reality is that there is more to clothing than what you may think. The fashion industry is argued to be more interested in the profitability aspect of the consumer-producer relationship because some of the big contributors of the fashion industry acknowledge that fast fashion is a problem, yet continue to participate in unethical actions. For example, “According to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year”. One of the reasons why clothing is so cheap with companies like Forever 21, is because of the material they use in their clothing to maintain the low prices they have. Many times, companies choose to use a material that is at low cost to them to maintain the lowest cost to produce as possible, oftentimes using materials such as cotton. The issue with cotton is that it is not a resource that is very sustainable, in fact, according to EHP cotton “accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States, the largest exporter of cotton in the world”. On top of that, cotton uses up large amounts of water (up to 20,000L) to get produced making the source even less sustainable. Many companies also turn to other cheap materials such as synthetic fibers containing plastic which oftentimes end up either in landfills or nearby water sources.
The other big issue with fast fashion is who produces the clothing for these large companies and how they can get the clothing produced at such a low rate. Many times, workers who produce clothing come from outside countries such as China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam and these workers usually put themselves at risk when creating the clothing as well as getting paid a low wage for the job they do. China is the largest exporter of clothing in the world but their wages can be as low as 12–18 cents per hour. On top of getting paid such low wages, these factory workers will put themselves in danger in order to produce the clothing we get for so cheap. One example of this is our blue jeans. In order to get the color for the blue jeans dyed, a toxic blue chemical needs to be used which is inhaled by workers and ends up in their lungs. In Bangladesh, this has started to become a larger and larger issue as the dye used to make clothing so vibrant is affecting water-ways so much to the point where the water is dyed completely red or black because of the chemicals used. This has also caused the local area to not be safe to live in since people from Bangladesh have restricted access to water and all the nearby water is polluted and contaminated but some still use the contaminated water as drinking water because they have no choice.
Fast fashion has not always been popular, in fact, it used to be the norm to reuse clothing as much as possible. The history behind fast fashion goes back to World War I when resources were scarce and the country had to worry about resources toward the war rather than the profitability of the country. This caused the United States to reduce their variety in what colors were used as well as how much each person owned. In fact, the government at the time was promoting a more sustainable way to wear and reuse clothing even using slogans like “Make economy fashionable lest it becomes obligatory”. This idea of conservation was gone by the 1920s when consumerism became popular once again and only continued to grow resulting in what we know today as fast fashion.
When looking at all the issues behind fast fashion, there are many ways you can look at it, therefore, meaning there are many different solutions to make fashion more sustainable. A way you can make sure your clothing is more sustainable is by shopping second-hand instead of buying clothes brand new or donating clothes you were thinking of throwing away. By purchasing clothes second-hand, you purchase clothing that has been used or that was planned to be thrown away giving the clothes a second life before ending up in landfills. Some second-hand stores also try to recycle clothing before resorting to throwing it away. When buying clothing you can also buy from brands such as Patagonia, they make their clothing out of more sustainable fabric and will accept/fix clothing to also give that piece a second chance before throwing it away. Patagonia has even claimed that its profits have increased since doing this. On top of these options, you can also pay attention to where the items are made, it is more likely that fair wages are happening as well as better materials when you buy from the U.S., the UK, or Canada. As far as the dyes go, there has only been early research to make dyes less toxic and more reusable. For example, a student from the University of Georgia claims to use less water in her method of dying which includes a method of a jelly-like substance to dye instead of a watery substance which is meant to cause less pollution and waste less water as much as “90 percent”. Charlotte McCurdy is a designer who has designed clothing out of algae so the coat itself can reduce carbon dioxide and is also working on a carbon-neutral dress. Even Though she does not plan to mass produce these pieces of clothing, I still find it crucial/important to the step toward a more sustainable fashion industry.
Fast fashion has many issues behind it including the sustainability of the clothing, the habits people intake after acquiring clothing, the moral aspect where people are working under unfair conditions to provide us the clothing, etc. While many solutions have been proposed to stop the mass production of fast fashion, it will still continue to grow as long as there is a demand behind it. The more we begin researching our products, where they come from, and where they end up, the faster we can actually decrease the pollution made by the fashion industry.
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