What Is Fast Fashion?

The term fast fashion has undoubtedly come across your feed in recent years. Fast fashion often takes viral clothing trends and creates cheaply made, low priced dupes that not only hurt the environment but often are made by exploiting people with unethical labor practices and hurting the businesses who originally create these designs. 

These fast fashion companies promote overconsumption and push out thousands of new garments at an astonishing and unsustainable rate. The clothing industry employs over 300 million people globally. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation). In the past two decades global fibre production has almost doubled from 2000 to now 116 million tonnes in 2022, and is expected  to grow approximately another 30 million tonnes by 2030 if business as usual continues (Textile Exchange 2023). People are buying more than ever but product lifecycles have also never been shorter. Consumers bought 60% more garments in 2014 compared to 2000 but only kept the clothes for half the time as previous studies. (McKinsey & Company, 2016).

The fashion industry is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for 2-8 % of global carbon emissions. 85% of all textiles go to the dump each year (UNECE, 2018). Second hand stores are overflowing with pieces from companies like SHEIN and TEMU. Our planet cannot sustain the overconsumption these fast fashion brands promote. 

Some quick environmental facts about fast fashion:

• Less than 1% of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). 
• The equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017)
• 50,000 microfibers equivalent to 50 BILLION plastic bottles are released into the ocean each year from washing clothes (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017)
• An estimated 20% of industrial wastewater pollution globally comes from the fashion industry (Word Bank, 2020)
• The fashion industry is responsible for 2-8 % of global carbon emissions. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017)
• The textile industry comsumes 215 trillion litres of water per year - That’s 86 million Olympic-sized swimming pools! (Quantis, 2018)
• Less than 0.5% of 3.25 billion tonnes of resources each year to produce items from the global textile industry comes from recycled resources (Circularity Gap Report Textiles).

So what can we do to help? 

• Shop mindfully, consider if you really need a new top or if you already have something in your closet you can wear.
• Support small local businesses and look into their business practices. 
• Buy second hand or borrow pieces from a friend or family when you can.
• Don’t trash it, fix it! Learn how to hand sew with a simple sewing kit you can get from a craft or often local grocery store even! Repairing items that are becoming worn to extend their life cycle and keep them out of the landfill. 

 Stay tuned for more on what global organizations are doing to work towards a more sustainable fashion industry in our next blog post!