The Environmental Dangers of Fast Fashion

I was just walking around San Francisco when I stumbled upon a thrift store. I should go in and see what I can find, I thought to myself. I walked into the thrift store and started looking around. Racks and racks of clothes, but not as much as I thought there would be though. With each piece of clothing I was interested in, I looked for the material it was made from. Every piece I pulled off the rack was made from a synthetic material. Well, this won’t last long, I spoke to myself.

You may or may not have heard of fast fashion. But what is fast fashion, anyway? Fast fashion is a design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on producing large numbers of clothing at a rapid rate. Clothing production focuses on replicating trends while using cheap and low quality materials in order to release these inexpensive clothes to the public. Sacrificing quality for quantity is the companies’ way of producing and selling as much as possible as fast as possible.

I’ve had experience with making clothes from premade fabrics or yarn, but have never spun yarn to weave into cloth. Before the 1800s, people would have to find ways of sourcing the materials for the fabric and then put it together to create something wearable. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that clothes were made at a larger and quicker scale. The invention and the distribution of sewing machines made it a lot easier and quicker to make each piece of clothing. When I got my first cheap sewing machine just to play around with, I definitely was making bags and clothes more and much quicker than before when I was only hand sewing. Soon, fashion brands had to find ways to keep up with the demand for cheap and affordable clothing. Up until the mid 1900s, the fashion industry ran on four seasons a year: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Now, fast fashion brands produce about 52 micro-seasons a year or one new collection a week. I have definitely seen and heard of more clothing trends being talked about/being shared online and it feels like these trends keep changing more often as social media becomes more widespread and as time goes on.

As much as I want to recycle all the clothes that are not worn anymore, a lot of our clothes nowadays are made with plastic and you can’t really recycle plastic. Synthetic fibers are commonly known as polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex, etc. These synthetic fabrics are really hard to manage and they are also made from crude oil, making them impossible to reuse, meaning they can’t be recycled or composted. 87% of garments thrown away are incinerated or thrown into landfills. Statistics published by the UNEP shows us that every year, the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water. That is enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. Even if clothes are given a second life, either second hand or passed down, the clothes are made with plastic fibers and tiny pieces of microplastics get released. According to Vox News, it’s possible that a single load of laundry could release hundreds of thousands of fibers from our clothes into the water supply. According to statistics published by the UNEP, every year, half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean,

equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles. But many of the clothing waste comes from manufacturers and clothing retailers themselves, 13 million tons of textiles each year. Manufacturers overproduce clothing and retailers end up overstocked. Every time my friends and I go shopping, we are definitely glad that a piece of clothing we like is in stock because it is better for a company to have too much, rather than not enough, to meet customer demands. As seasons change more and more frequently, the unsold supply ends up being thrown away. According to Forbes Magazine, industry overproduction runs at 30-40% each season. I like to browse the clearance section in any store because that’s when brands mark down items that are out of season. But there is always so much left over that most of the time they are usually thrown away. It contributes to about 10% of all global emissions and is the world’s second worst offender when it comes to water and plastic pollution.

Although there are many more sides that contribute to the fast fashion industry, it is safe to say that if manufacturers keep producing this many clothes every single day, we may never be able to reverse what we have done to the environment. But it is also our job as consumers to avoid supporting major retail brands that produce clothes at a rapid rate. I personally prefer to go to thrift shops because I love thrifting and looking at vintage clothes, but not everyone has the time to go thrifting. I have to admit it: I love the feeling of new and affordable clothes and I do purchase from fast fashion brands sometimes. I try to hold myself back though. It works most of the time. These are just some little things that we could do to help slow fashion down. Though, there is only so little we, as consumers, can do. Manufacturers and retail companies still have more power in what is being produced and put out to the public. There are numerous eco-friendly fibers that could replace synthetic fibers, but because there are no restrictions or laws, the industry will continue to use synthetic fibers, and that will affect our planet the most.

826 Valencia is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students from under-resourced communities in San Francisco with their writing skills.