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Each time you drag a new item of clothing into a virtual shopping basket, you may be supporting an industry responsible for 10% of global CO₂ emissions – not to mention widespread social harm. Fast fashion, which is a trend that carries the latest catwalk designs to stores via polluting factories or sweat shops, is not compatible with the changes required across all sectors to prevent environmental destruction. What can you do to change it?
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To really understand How fast fashion can cause havoc on the planetIt helps to understand the path that a single garment takes. Mark Sumner, a University of Leeds lecturer on sustainability, documented the journey of a tee-shirt from the field to your closet. He reported that “it takes one-and-a-half Olympic swimming pools of water to grow one tonne of cotton”, and this is often in regions plagued by drought where farmers may only have “10 to 20 litres of water a day for washing, cleaning and cooking”.
“But the negative impacts only begin with growing the fibres,” Sumner says. Spinning and knitting the cotton into fabric generates 394 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, he estimates. Adding colour to that fabric uses yet more fresh water, which is often washed into waterways untreated afterwards – harmful chemicals and tiny fibres included.
“In Cambodia, for example, where clothing comprises 88% of industrial manufacturing, the fashion industry is responsible for 60% of water pollution,” Sumner says.
The dyed fabric must be washed, dried, then prepared for garment making. The whole energy-intensive process costs about 2.6kg of CO₂ per t-shirt – “the equivalent of driving 14km in a standard passenger car,” according to Sumner.
As you’ve probably guessed, the environmental calamity doesn’t end there.
“Over the past 15 years, clothing production has doubled while the length of time we actually wear these clothes has fallen by nearly 40%,” say Samantha Sharpe, Monique Retamal and Taylor Brydges, researchers at University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia. Their recommendation for people concerned about the fashion industry’s ballooning climate impact is simple:
“It would mean each of us Reduce the number of new clothes we purchase by as much as 75%, buying clothes designed to last, and recycling clothes at the end of their lifetime.”
For retailers and clothing manufacturers:
“It would mean tackling low incomes for the people who make the clothes, as well as support measures for workers who could lose jobs during a transition to a more sustainable industry,” they say.
Urgent action is needed to head off what the team call “ultra-fast fashion”, which is responsible for “releasing unprecedented volumes of new clothes into the market”. It’s also leaning on some of the most exploited workers worldwide, in countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Vietnam where garment manufacturing presents an extreme risk of modern slavery.
Mile 91/C & A Foundation/Alamy Stock Photo
Sharpe, Retamal and Brydges propose a movement towards “slow fashion” as the remedy, buying secondhand or renting clothes, prioritising clothing quality and classic styles over fleeting trends and reviving long-lost skills like mending and sewing.
Amber Martin-Woodhead is an assistant professor of human geography at Coventry University. She has one more tip for those who want to embrace slow fashion. She took part in The Great Fashion Fast, an initiative of Tearfund UK.
“To take part, you choose ten main items of clothing (with some exceptions such as sportswear, underwear and uniforms) and These ten items are the only ones you should wear for the whole month,” Martin-Woodhead says.
“I’ve previously taken part in UK campaign group Labour Behind the Label’s Six Items Challenge, where you only wear six items over six weeks. As the research suggests, I found it really helped me realise just how few clothes I need.”
If you’d like to do something similar, you might find Martin-Woodhead’s tips useful. These include picking “a few matching colours so that everything goes together”, “pick[ing] different items that can make lots of different outfits” and choosing “versatile items that can be layered and worn in different ways”, like a jumper that can also be worn as a cardigan.
This may not be enough to reward you with satisfaction. Louise Grimmer and Martin Grimmer, marketing experts at the University of Tasmania, found that shopping secondhand is a popular choice. may mean you’re more stylish:
“In our study, we found the higher people rate on style-consciousness” – essentially, how passionate they were about expressing themselves through their clothes and developing a personal style – “the more likely they are to shop second hand. In fact, style-consciousness was a bigger predictor of second-hand shopping than being frugal or ecologically-conscious.”
Dressing well and looking good needn’t cost the Earth, it seems.
