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Fast fashion has changed the world of clothing in the recent decades. It is a business concept that allows brands to rotate stock quickly, as often as releasing a new fashion collection every week, by lowering costs and encouraging a short garment lifecycle.
While this may be bringing profit to some fast fashion brand owners, it is frequently labelled as both environmentally and ethically compromised through its practices. In its production, fast fashion is contributing substantially to plastic pollution, one of the most pressing environmental issues of today. Why and how is that?
In the past, garments were designed with a fairly circular system in mind – one where very little clothing would get thrown away because it was made to be repurposed, repaired or, if there was no other solution, burned. However, since those times, a lot has changed and fashion has become linear, with garments made to be consumed quickly and thrown away.
Worldwide, we spend $2 trillion every year on fashion – and that number is growing. Overall, we are buying more clothing but keeping it for a shorter time than just a few years ago. Once we decide we no longer want or need a piece of clothing, we have a few options of what to do with the garment. However, research shows that 80% of all garments will never be resold or reused and are headed straight to the landfill or incineration facility.
The main problem with this clothing waste is that much of it is plastic – materials such as polyester, nylon or acrylic now make up 60% of all clothing and the figure is only expected to grow. Fast fashion labels love using them because of the low production cost.
However, there is an environmental toll they don’t account for. While it can technically be recycled, most of it is not. In fact, only 10% of our clothing is ever recycled in some shape or form. Therefore, most ends up incinerated or in the landfill. If incinerated, plastic fibres emit toxins such as dioxins, acid gasses or heavy metals into the atmosphere.
If sent to landfill, synthetic clothing keeps polluting the planet for hundreds of years, while releasing microscopic plastic fibres – microplastics – that pollute our waters, land and air.
However, this is not the only situation when synthetic clothes release these microplastics – they shed from garments every time they are washed. Because our technology is not up to speed with this fairly recent discovery, they can’t be filtered out of wastewater and become part of the water cycle. In fact, data show that 35% of all microplastics currently in the ocean come from clothing.
While microplastics remain heavily unresearched and more data is needed to understand how they’re affecting our planet. The available data shows several troubling observations. Microplastics, when consumed by small marine organisms, can block their digestive tracts and lead to death from starvation.
Larger plastic pieces, such as discarded synthetic clothing which can take hundreds of years to decompose, also present a physical danger to animals, which can get entangled and injured by the strange objects.
Aside from endangering marine ecosystems in this way, we know we are consuming microplastics on an everyday basis too – they are in our tap water and, since marine fish are exposed to it, they are likely contained in the meals those of us who eat marine fish consume.
According to National Geographic, the average person consumes thousands of microplastics every day. This is particularly because the research into how this affects our health is still largely insufficient. We could only find out about potential negative impacts decades after our food chains became so contaminated with plastic.
We can reduce our impact on the planet substantially if we come back to the ways in which fashion was produced in the past. A movement opposing the practices of fast fashion and going back to circular practices is called slow fashion. Essentially, it is fast fashion’s polar opposite.
Fast fashion makes garments to be quickly consumed and replaced – slow fashion crafts them to last for years to come and be recycled or repaired when they break. Many slow fashion companies also make use of materials which would otherwise go to landfill – by using deadstock fabric, recycling used clothing or upcycling old garments into new ones.
Slow fashion sometimes uses synthetics too – but that is generally in those exact cases where it’s preventing the materials from going to landfill straight away, which would be much more environmentally damaging.
One common critique of slow fashion is that it is too expensive – but is that really the case? A $10 t-shirt from a fast fashion label may last you a year before it breaks, stretches out or tears. Then, you’re probably going to replace it by another $10 t-shirt and the cycle repeats.
A slow fashion t-shirt may cost well over $30. However, it will last you for a much longer time, as it is crafted to do exactly that and be repaired once it does, eventually break. That is why, in the long run, slow fashion can be much more of a money-saver than the dirty deals of fast fashion.
If we hope to reduce our impact on the environment and stop flooding it with so much plastic, we need to stop supporting fast fashion companies, which rely largely on synthetic fibres. These fabrics not only pollute the environment for long years after they are disposed of, they also release microplastics into greywater any time they are washed.
We can make this better by being more conscious about the things we buy and shifting fashion to be more circular again.
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