What’s Hot this Season?
From designer handbags to cotton t-shirts, millions of tons of merchandise each year meet their fiery fate at the mouth of an incinerator. In July 2018, British designer brand Burberry admitted to tossing $36.8 million of merchandise into the flames to prevent their high-end products from falling into the wrong hands. Facing backlash and boycotts, Burberry reevaluated the decision, and stated they would no longer send excess materials up in smoke. Influential brands like Nike, H&M, Urban Outfitters and Louis Vuitton have been known to employ this strategy in order to preserve brand exclusivity or simply dispose of unsold goods.
Nike employees have been asked to slash old shoes before throwing them away, according to The New York Times. Another Evening Standard article reported that some branches of Urban Outfitters pour green paint on their “deadstock.” Even clothing companies and consumers that do not destroy excess product contribute mounds of textile waste. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, 3.1 million tons of textiles were combusted in municipal solid waste in 2015. They accounted for 9.1 percent of collected waste combusted with energy recovery. Municipal landfills consumed 10.5 million tons of textiles in 2015. They accounted for 7.6 percent of all solid waste in landfills.
In the long run, our current fast fashion model is highly unsustainable.
Even donating clothes has become a harmful means of purging waste. East Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan and Burundi have said they no longer want to receive “clothes of dead white people,”,as donated items threaten their efforts to build domestic textile industries, according to The New York Times. The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, an environmental organization, released a report in 2017 regarding the fashion industry as the most wasteful in the world. They report an exponential growth of textile consumption in the past 15 years, attributing the stunt in data to “a growing middle class across the globe with higher disposable income” and “the emergence of the ‘fast fashion’ phenomenon.”
Our generation has come of age in this era of fast-fashion. Most of us are accustomed to buying our clothes at stores like H&M or Forever 21 because of the affordable prices and rapid turnover of trends. The perks of fast fashion seem almost too good to be true, but going below the surface level appeal reveals that these cheap prices and quick product turnover come at high costs for people and our environment. In the long-run, our current fast-fashion model is highly unsustainable.
The evolution of the fashion industry into what we know it as today began with a company called Inditex, the trailblazer for fast fashion. Of their eight current brands, Zara is the most widely known. What originally made their business model unique was their use of vertical integration, which streamlined the design, production, and retail processes. This vertical integration shortened the design to retail cycle and cut costs in production that would later translate into lower clothing prices for consumers.
As fast fashion has evolved into what it is today, more and more production has moved outside of the US. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 56.2% of all clothing purchased in the United States was made stateside in 1991; but by 2012, only a shocking 2.5% of clothing purchased in the U.S. was made in the country . As more and more clothing is manufactured outside of the US, and less Americans work in clothing production, the number of people working in fashion production around the world has significantly increased, with an astounding one sixth of the world’s population working in the fashion industry.
One sixth of the world’s population is working in the fashion industry.
As glamorous as ‘working in the fashion industry’ might sound, safety remains a serious concern as a vast majority of workers regularly work in hazardous conditions. In 2012, a massive fire at a garment factory in Bangladesh that produced clothing for chains like Walmart killed 112 workers. According to NPR, the casualties were a result of the building’s lack of emergency exits, inadequate safety standards, and managers that prevented many workers from escaping the burning building. In addition to concerns around the safety of working conditions, many workers are not paid a living wage. Considering their options that they have, it is decided to fix precautionary measures in all the units in order to survive even when worst scenario is faced in the future. By this initiative, ultimately, while some boast how overseas clothing manufacturing has contributed to the growing economies of countries such as Bangladesh, the fashion industry meets its product demands through the exploitation of foreign workers.
Not only does sustaining the ever-growing fast-fashion industry rely on exploiting the labor of workers in developing countries, but the cheapest clothing manufacturing processes cause extreme pollution in the environment. According to the World Bank, the fashion industry contributes to 20% of all industrial water pollution and releases 10% of annual carbon emissions. Maybe some of this pollution would be justified if it meant that all of this clothing was put to good use, but “of the more than 100 billion items of clothing produced each year, some 20% go unsold.” These unsold items are either incinerated or dumped into landfills. And most clothing produced nowadays contains synthetic fibers, meaning they will remain intact in landfills for thousands of years to come.
What seems most necessary to solve the problems of the fashion industry is for consumers to become more conscious of all the costs that go into making their clothes, not just the one on the price tag. “Today’s textile industry is built on an outdated linear, take-make-dispose model and is hugely wasteful and polluting,” Ellen MacArthur said in an interview with The Guardian. “We need a new textile economy in which clothes are designed differently, worn longer, and recycled and reused much more often.”