14/05/2021
We live in a world of fast fashion. It is often defined as cheap, but these cheap clothes comes with a very high cost on the environment.
The simplest way to understand ‘Sustainable Fashion’ is knowing that the most sustainable outfit is the one you ALREADY HAVE!
Fast fashion as we know, it made us believe that we are only as good as our last outfit. Hence, they kept pumping stores with newer styles every week at unbelievably cheap prices. We being the puppets of marketing got pulled into this endless cycle of consumption, kept shopping and yet left feeling hollow with the constant feeling of ‘I have nothing to wear!’
One phrase that really bothers me is ‘outfit repeating’. Like, we are not meant to wear clothes more than once? Why is ‘outfit repeating’ even a thing? Clothes aren’t single-use. They’re not disposable.
According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, emissions from textile manufacturing alone are projected to skyrocket by 60% by 2030.
Water
Among the environmental impacts of fast fashion are the depletion of non-renewable sources, emission of greenhouse gases and the use of massive amounts of water and energy. The fashion industry is the second largest consumer industry of water, requiring about 700 gallons to produce one cotton shirt and 2 000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans. Business Insider also cautions that textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams or rivers.
Even washing clothes releases 500 000 tons of microfibres into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.
#2021