What our fast fashion habit is doing to the planet

The term fast fashion has changed slightly over recent years. It originally meant the practice of high street clothes stores producing cheap clothes, quickly, based on clothes on the cat walks of the most recent fashion shows.  Now, though, it has taken on somewhat of a further sense to mean the way many people view and use cheap clothes - fast fashion is where people buy a fashionable item, wear it once once or twice and then throw it away.  The clothes are generally cheap, imported and of low quality but the wearer doesn't see or care about this.  They buy them to satisfy their Fast Fashion Habit.  In fact, the term Single Use Clothing could be used in many cases.

Vast amounts of all these fashion items end up in landfill day after day and remember, the term fashion doesn't just apply to clothes - it includes shoes and accessories such as bags, belts and hats.  In America fashion items make up more than 9 percent of solid household solid waste meaning on average each American throws away about around 81 pounds (36kg or 5½ stones) every year. Source - EPA Estimates. And this doesn't account for all the packaging these clothes came in.

Whilst much clothing can be recycled many people do not know this or the infrastructure is not there to facilitate recycling which explains why so many clothes go to landfill. And clothing made from mixed fibres such as 50% cotton/50% polyester is almost impossible to recycle anyway.

Giving to charity is not necessarily the answer, either.  Whilst it is fair to say some people do take their fast fashion items to charity shops or place them in textile recycling bins there are simply too many clothes to deal with - with an estimated 80 million items of clothing being purchased across the globe annually, charities cannot cope and many charity shops are now refusing cheap fast fashion items.  In other cases they sell them on to third world countries but this is not a sustainable solution.  By flooding their markets with the clothing rejects from the West, the knock on effect is that local textiles industries are being destroyed.

Our insatiable appetite for more and more clothes is having a very real negative effect on the planet. Take the Aral Sea on the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It used to be the world's 4th largest inland lake but in the 1960's the desert area around it was developed as an "ideal" location for growing cotton. Water from the Aral Sea was used to irrigate the desert and the cotton the area grew fed the rapidly expanding clothing industry. Estimates vary but it is stated that it takes somewhere between 1000 and 1800 US gallons of water to make one pair of jeans - even at the lower estimate that is 3785.41 litres or 3.78 cubic metres of water for EVERY pair of jeans made.  In less than 30 years this has had a devastating effect on the Aral Sea.  The picture on the left was taken in 1989 and the one on the right in 2014. Remember this used to be the world's 4th largest inland lake.

By NASA. Collage by Producercunningham. - 1989: aral sea 1989 250mFile:Aralsea tmo 2014231 lrg.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35813435

The Aral Sea has been renamed the Aralkum Desert.  But worse than just being turned to desert, so many pesticides were poured onto the cotton fields that the desert is now also highly polluted and even with irrigation it is unlikely it could grow anything. 

With more people rejecting clothing made from man-made materials in favour of natural materials such as  cotton, without a reduction in our overall consumption of clothing we are only going to see more examples of disappearing fresh water and changed/poisoned landscapes. The bottom line is that that the cotton in your jeans or your t-shirt or whatever cotton clothes you have in your wardrobe may well be advancing the loss of fresh water habitats.

There are probably thousands of articles online about how to break your fast fashion habit (I've linked to one here > 10 simple steps to dress sustainably) so I am not going to repeat the information in this blog.  But you might also want to read the following articles if you need any further convincing that we REALLY need to change our attitude to the clothes and fashion items we buy. 

Sources and further reading:

• How Many Gallons of Water Does it Take to Make a Single Pair of Jeans?
• World of Change: Shrinking Aral Sea
• How second-hand clothing donations are creating a dilemma for Kenya
• We Buy A Staggering Amount Of Clothing, And Most Of It Ends Up In Landfills
• This teacher wore the same dress for 100 days

Are you willing to break your addiction to fast fashion to help save the planet?