Estimated time to complete: 30 minutes
In this section you will:
The world of fast fashion is highly damaging, with bad practices from start to finish. Producers use unethical and harmful practices to produce cheap and poorly made clothes, which are bought in abundance by consumers. Consumers often wear these clothes for a short amount of time before discarding the garments, which often end up on landfill sites across the globe before being burned.
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Impact of fashion
1.2 Billion
Over 1.2 billion pairs of jeans are purchased every year.
180
On average 180 metres of stitching yarn is used in one pair of jeans.
1
Less than 1% of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing.
50
50% of fast fashion pieces are discarded within a year.
10
The fashion industry is among the top 10 most CO2 emitting industries.
16
Cotton accounts for 16% of the world’s insecticide and pesticide use.
60
The average consumer purchases 60% more clothing than 15 years ago.
1
1 garbage truck full of textiles is being trashed or incinerated every second.
How is Fast Fashion impacting our environment?
The fashion industry has a market value of $406 billion, which is a lot! It is about 4% of the global market share (Fashion United, n.d.).
However, the fashion industry is also very polluting for the environment and is seen by some as the second most polluting industry in the world. Here we have listed some interesting facts for you (McFall-Johnsen, 2020):
2,700
2,700 litres of water is required to make a cotton shirt. That’s about the same as 2.5 years of drinking water for a person. And making one pair of jeans takes up to 50 bathtubs full of water.
200
Non-biodegradable substances that end up in landfill can remain there for up to 200 years (Reichart & Drew, 2019)
16
In the year 2000, fashion companies still had 2 collections per year, but in 2011 it grew to 5 collections per year. At major fashion brands such as ZARA and H&M, this number is up to 16 per year.
2625
Every second 1 garbage truck of clothing is burned or dumped - that’s 2.625 kilograms of clothing per second (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017).
Learn more about the damaging practices of fast fashion with this video:
How is it affecting humans?
Many brands have their clothes made in developing countries, which are generally countries where people are not paid much for the work they do. These countries are called low-wage countries (McCarthy, 2019). This basically means that big companies can produce large amounts of clothes for a cheap price. For the workers this means very long and hard-working days for almost no money. That is of course not fair at all! It goes against labour rights and human rights. Below we have listed the rights of workers in those low-wage countries that are often violated:
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