Fast Fashion Is a Bad Look for the Environment

In the United States, people throw at least 17 million tonnes of textiles each year – around 100 pounds of clothes per person. At the same time, unsold blouses, jackets and other remains of the fashion industry are found in discharges such as that of the Atacama Chile desert, so large that it is visible from space. Many of these items are fast fashionable – made quickly, sold at a lower cost and with too short style, because the industry is based on novelty to keep consumers to buy.

Fashion, however, poses more than a aesthetic problem. Each year, the global clothing industry emits up to 10% of global greenhouse gas production and uses enough water to fill at least 37 million Olympic swimming pools, as an article in this magazine noted last July. Cotton breeding can involve massive quantities of pesticides and dyeing of the wire pollutes watercourses with toxic chemicals. Synthetic polymers such as nylon are made with fossil fuels and microfibers to lose with each washing.

It is time to embrace a circular fashionable economy – which reuses clothes, fabrics and wires; recycle as far as possible; And encourage producers and retailers to choose textiles and processes that minimize the contribution of raw resources such as cotton or synthetic polymers. Our choices as consumers also count. The way we select fashion and follow the trends is an accessible way so that we can have a breach in climate change.

On the support of scientific journalism

If you appreciate this article, plan to support our award -winning journalism by subscription. By buying a subscription, you help to ensure the future of striking stories about discoveries and ideas that shape our world today.

“We know that the industry is excessive [resources] And overvalue in general, “explains Laila Petrie, Director General of Future Earth Lab, an organization of non -profit sustainability.” The volumes continued to increase, and that cannot continue forever. Nearly a third of the clothes produced each season are never sold and can go directly to the discharges.

The industry must be held responsible for examining whole supply chains and changes to reduce damage.

As awareness increases, many people make donations or buy in thrift stores or, when they buy new “certified biological” labels. And many companies try to understand how to stay profitable while producing less and ensuring that they do less harm to people and to the planet. However, consumers and businesses cannot, however, solve such a large ecological and climatic problem. The industry must be held responsible for examining whole supply chains and changes to reduce damage, says Petrie.

Last year, California promulgated a prolonged producers’ responsibility law (EPR) for textiles, which requires that brands with more than a million dollars in world sales can pay the reuse, repair or recycling of their products. Producers will start collecting used clothes in 2030, but where these clothes will not be clear. “We are looking at carefully,” explains Rachel Van Meter Kibbe, founder and CEO of the Circular Services Group consulting company. “It will be interesting to see if the brands can lead their own transition.” New York State and Washington are currently considering similar bills.

The EPR alone is not enough, however. What is necessary is “a fundamental change in the way we consume, manufacture and sell products,” explains Van Meter Kibbe. What she has in mind is a circular textile economy, which begins with the design of products with all their life cycle in mind.

For example, a shirt may need to be made with a single type of wire or with an easily recyclable and labeled mixture with its constituent fibers so that it can be easily sorted, which facilitates recycling. Advanced recycling technologies, such as the use of enzymes to separate polycotton mixtures in cotton and polymer fibers, emerge, but they are always expensive and have only started to be extended. Supporting the development of these technologies would help generate the type of innovation economy that many people say in the United States.

The Act respecting the Americas, a bipartite federal bill proposed in March 2024, seeks to provide incentives for textile reuse and recycling. If it is adopted, it would provide enormous impetus to establishing a circular textile industry in the United States as one of the largest consumers of textiles, the United States has the potential to also become one of the largest recycling economies in the world. “There is a real opportunity here – we just have to capture it,” says Van Meter Kibbe.

An initiative called Fibershed shows how such a system could work. It started in California in 2011, connecting regional farmers, designers and producers in a sustainable manufacturing economy. The concept has since spread to 79 communities around the world.

However, an important part of our clothes will continue to be made abroad, in places where farmers and factory workers work in precarious conditions to grow cotton or sewing clothes. About 100 million people, especially women in the world of world, run clothes and only a tiny fraction of them receive a decent salary. Companies with developing countries must design strategies alongside their suppliers – in collaboration with clothing manufacturers and with farmers – to improve conditions, suggests Petrie. Such a process can lead to a change in a inclusive way and therefore likely to be more effective.

As consumers, we can buy less, be more demanding in what we acquire, buy or exchange used clothes, wear each garment longer and find new uses for old pieces. These practices were the norm decades ago and some come back.

In Germany, parents often buy children’s clothing on children’s flea markets, especially helpful because children go beyond their clothes so quickly. In India, the old saris are superimposed and sewn together in a light duvet, a practice that has evolved into an art form. Butterfly holes in a beloved cardigan can be fixed either by a traditional discreet punishment, or by the profession of “visible reign”. And in the United States, people regularly buy consignment, savings and online markets for used clothes in good condition, keeping these articles out of discharges for a while.

In the meantime, we must remember that consumers are an influential block of voting. We can encourage regulators and marks to act, and we can exercise our values ​​by deciding which brands to support. What we wear every day is something we can and have to exercise a lot of power. Deserts should not be full of unwanted t-shirts. Our rivers should not be full of fashion -related microplastics.