When you buy a t-shirt, 713 gallons of water go down the drain. Now, multiply that by every t-shirt in your closet. Water is used at nearly every step of the garment production process. According to CNN, the fashion industry uses 21 trillion gallons of water annually, which is enough water to fill 37 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Crops like cotton require hundreds of gallons of water and use more insecticides and pesticides than any other crop in the world. In major manufacturing cities like Savar, Bangladesh, water runs black with dye. The toxins in the water make it impotable and pose serious health challenges to the population living in the area. Additionally, textiles like polyester and nylon shed synthetic microplastics that end up in the ocean, where fish ingest the plastic. Then we eat those fish along with the microfibers of our old clothing inside them.

Fashion brands are starting to acknowledge their role in harming the environment and human health. This wake-up call is largely due to a growing consumer conscience for buying ethically and sustainably. Instead of attacking the problem at the beginning of the production cycle, however, many fashion brands are turning to greenwashing. As a marketing ploy, greenwashing falsely signals to buyers that a brand’s products are good for the environment, and it makes consumers believe they are doing more to help the environment than they actually are. In reality, the only thing that is getting cleaner is a consumer’s conscience.

Greenwashing has become such a customary business practice that it is hard to detect with the untrained eye. Even branding as simple as using green colors can make a customer believe that a company is concerned for the environment. Brands also use vague keywords like ‘sustainable’ and ‘eco-friendly’ that are not backed up with any transparent information about the sourcing or production of the item. Take H&M for example, which released their “Conscious Choice” collection with vague allusions to sustainability: the items must be made with “at least 50% of more sustainable materials.” Nevermind that H&M is a fast fashion empire that churns out hundreds of other non-“sustainable” products weekly. Truly sustainable brands – and those that aspire to be – should be fully transparent about what their products contain.

Apart from the intentional vagueness surrounding a brand’s sustainability practices, greenwashing encourages consumers to buy more. Endless consumerism is antithetical to sustainable fashion because it encourages so much waste. Patagonia is a rare example of a brand that has encouraged its customers to not buy its products unless they actually need them. See their “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement. Fast fashion brands that rotate through inventory every two weeks encourage high levels of consumption by keeping trend-oriented customers coming back for more. What happens to those clothes that you bought a year ago that are now completely out of style? They go in the trash, or to the thrift store if we are lucky. They are probably falling apart anyways; after all, most companies don’t produce clothes to last, they produce clothes to maximize profits. 

As a society, we are becoming more aware of how our consumer practices are hastening environmental decay. However, brands still manage to win us over with simple marketing schemes that are easy to poke holes through. When we see the word ‘sustainable,’ we feel like we can check that socially conscious box in our minds. But really this just makes our shopping habits more palatable. Clothing cannot be split up into good and bad categories based on its environmental impact. Yes, some textiles are worse for the environment than others, but they can all end up in landfills. For this reason, the real answer to sustainable fashion is buying less. When we buy less, we pollute less water and throw away less clothing. Buying less also means buying higher quality clothes that are built to last. Suddenly trends aren’t so important anymore. 

Exiting the fashion consumer cycle is liberating. You can see the influence the fashion industry has on our behavior. It uses ever-evolving trends to make you think you always need something new. Then greenwashing comes in to make you feel okay about those purchases. This illusion of care for the environment is dangerous and deceptive. Industry regulations on production transparency and marketing need to be strengthened to encourage a more honest and truly sustainable industry. It is a dangerous game when consumers think they are solving fashion sustainability when, in reality, they continue to be part of the problem.