Despite the fact that you may have removed last season's hottest fashion trend from your wardrobe, the impact of that item continues to linger, from the energy consumed in manufacturing it to its prolonged existence in one of the nation's landfills. Because of the advent of so-called fast fashion, we are consuming and discarding more clothing than ever before, which is causing increasing worry about the whole environmental effect of our wardrobe choices.
In 2015, the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency has statistics, the United States created 11.9 million tons of textile trash, or approximately 75 pounds per person. The vast majority of this material ended up in landfills, according to the EPA. Since 1960, there has been a rise of more than 750 percent. As a point of comparison, the rise in the country's population over the same period was roughly ten times greater.
It is no coincidence that fast fashion retailers such as H&M and Zara, whose business strategies are centered on selling low-priced things in large quantities, are becoming increasingly popular. According to a spokeswoman, Zara, for example, publishes 20,000 unique designs every year, with new lines debuting throughout micro seasons in addition to play tic tac toe the regular winter/fall and summer/spring lines, among others. The method is intended to attract clients to visit the store on a regular basis in order to obtain new looks.
According to a research produced by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the company is keeping pace with larger industry changes, which saw apparel output more than quadruple between 2000 and 2014. According to the survey, the quantity of clothing purchased by the average person per year climbed by 60 percent during the same time period. According to a second research, fast fashion is manufactured in such a way that it can be worn no more than 10 times before being outdated.
"The clothing that they make still does not have any greater longevity," according to Elaine Ritch, a senior lecturer in marketing at Glasgow Caledonian University. "Even though many retailers claim to be addressing sustainability, the clothing that they make still does not have any greater longevity," she added.
The notion of "slow fashion" has arisen over the past decade as a type of counterpoint to the rapid fashion industry in response to this fact. The concept is to slow down the high pace of garment consumption and instead purchase fewer but more durable things.. Cat Chiang, the fashion blogger, Natalie Live, the owner of the clothing line The Tiny Closet, and Emma Kidd, a PhD researcher in the United Kingdom who organized a 10-week "fashion detox," are all champions of the concept.
Some of the reasons they are raising the alarm is that the detrimental effects of clothes reach well beyond the landfill site. The chemicals used in the production, dyeing, and treatment of many fabrics are so toxic that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates many textile facilities as hazardous waste producers. Furthermore, garments and footwear contribute to more than 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions connected with the adverse consequences of human-caused climate change in total.
When it was announced that Forever 21, the brand most associated with fast fashion, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it was followed by the emergence of brands that claim to be explicitly focused on quality. This suggests that shoppers themselves are growing tired of the constant upheaval in the industry. Which begs the question of how buyers can choose garments that are made to last in a culture that is accustomed to the transient.
