Fast fashion makes shopping/buying clothes more affordable and convenient, but it affects the environment at the same time.
To manufacture clothes, the fast fashion industry exports it’s production business overseas particularly in countries like India, Bangladesh, Thailand for cheap labor to avoid high wages implemented by governments of many developed countries. The workers/labours particularly women are paid low wages and forced to work longer hours in inadequate working conditions. The fashion industry uses one tenth of all the water used industrially required for factories and clean products.
Approximately 60% of all materials used by fashion industry are made from plastic. It is also responsible for 9-10% of humanity’s carbon emissions which is more than all international flights and ships combined. Around 70 million barrels of oil per year are used to produce polyester fibre in our clothes.
By changing to recycled polyester fabric would help to minimise the carbon emissions, however, it can have a long term effect on our environment as polyester takes hundreds of years to decompose and can also lead to microfibres entering into the environment. Researches have shown that online shopping can result in lower carbon footprint than travelling to shops to purchase products, particularly if the customers live far away. It can also be cheaper and convenient for online sellers and brands to dump and dispose returned goods, instead of finding another home for them. This results in wastage of greenhouse gases produced in manufacturing and also emissions are released as it burns. Cutting down on washing can also enable to further decrease the carbon footprint of our wardrobes. Some companies are also working on methods to minimise the environmental impact from production of their jeans, while others have been developing ways of recycling denim.
Chemicals are major components in our clothes. The constant and heavy use of chemical in cotton farming is leading to diseases and premature death among cotton farmers and also ocean water pollution and soil degradation.
Have we ever stopped and thought about the harm we are causing to our Mother Earth? Like Kira Simpson said “We can sit back, do nothing, and watch our planet be destroyed. Or we can take action, become advocates, and start making lifestyle choices which are kinder to people
and the planet. So in order to make our environment sustainable, try to choose organic fibres and sustainable brands, we should donate our clothes instead of throwing them away, try to be innovative with the clothes you have instead of buying new ones and try buying second hand clothes to reduce the number of clothes being produced. Each year, thousands of endangered and ancient forests are cut down and replaced by plantation of trees which are used in making wood -based fabrics such as rayon,viscose and modal. While shopping, we must choose lycocel/tencel instead of rayon,modal or viscose. As even a small step can make a huge difference.
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