How the fashion industry is destroying the world and the lives around us.
With over $1.5 trillion in annual worldwide sales and 100 billion garments produced every year, the business of fashion is one of our biggest industries. It’s also one of our biggest contributors to the climate crisis; and that’s putting it mildly. In fact, the fashion industry is a tragedy of global proportions, playing out in two parts of the world.
There is the tragedy in the under-developed parts of the world, such as in Bangladesh, India and Ethiopia. This is where many of our clothes are made by local laborers, mostly girls and women, who work under impossible, slave like, conditions, often leading to despair, hunger, abuse, rape, and even suicide. To make things worse, the rivers, oceans, ground, and air around them are being polluted with poisons and toxins coming from the very factories they work in. All of which is financed by leading brands and retailers, who are paying these foreign companies and governments to make cheap clothes.
Fashion is a tale of two tragedies, taking place in two parts of the world.
There is also the tragedy in the developed parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, where these clothes are bought and worn. This is where fashion has often become an obsession, stemming from a bombardment of online and media messaging, resulting in a hyper buying of clothes. With it, clothes are being discarded nearly as fast as they are bought, only to end up in landfills, causing serious problems for our planet. And for many, it has resulted in mental distress in trying to keep up with the status quo, while in extreme cases has led to suicide, mostly with teens, who have sadly been misled by peer pressure into taking popularity and how they look too seriously.
To understand it all, one need only follow the trail of how fashion is produced from beginning to end.
Growing crops and raising animals
Every year, millions of tons of cotton, wool, leather, and other materials are produced on millions of acres of land to yield the textiles and fabrics needed to make the clothes we consume. The world has a limited amount of arable land (about 4.6 billion acres, to be exact). A quarter of our land is dedicated to grazing livestock. A third is committed to growing the food for that livestock. All this while hundreds of millions of people experience food starvation every day.
The agriculture acreage for cotton is much smaller — a little more than 2% — but cotton uses more pesticides than any other crop. The use of these chemicals is toxic for both the cotton workers and local bodies of water. 350 million people work in the cotton industry; most are underpaid, and many suffer each year from cotton pesticide poisoning. Side effects include pain, nausea, blindness, and even death.
Making the textiles, fabric, and clothes
The raw materials from growing crops and raising animals are then sent all over the world to create textiles, fabrics, and eventually clothes. The manufacturing process is typically resource-intensive. Much of the machinery is old, and countries rely on cheap fossil fuels for their power. To create a meter of cloth, it takes about .5 kWh of electricity. Now multiply that times the billions of garments produced annually. That doesn’t even take into account the electricity needed for lighting and air conditioning.
The dyes used in textile production are of equal concern. Without environmental regulations in most under-developed nations, water leftover from dying clothes is typically dumped back into the local water source. These dyes are toxic. In fact, the process of dyeing clothes is the second-biggest water polluter in the world. In addition to the dyes, manufacturers employ a number of dangerous chemicals to achieve “fashionable” results. Faded jeans, bleach stains, and anti-wrinkle treatments all contribute to water contamination.
Transportation and distribution of the clothes
Once the clothes are made, they are sent all over the world to distribution centers, warehouses, and all kinds of stops along the way before ending up in a retail store. After all, while China, India, and Bangladesh are the largest clothing producers, the United States spends the most money on clothing. Fast fashion travels thousands of miles before hitting the shelves at our shopping malls or landing on our doorsteps via Amazon boxes.
Transportation methods include trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes, each using fuel and contributing significant greenhouse gas emissions. From start to finish, a garment might rely on several modes of transportation. Raw materials are often shipped to mills via boat, which is the least energy-intensive. Yet once a garment is finished, consumer expectations for quick delivery demand faster and drastically more carbon-intensive air travel. Many experts estimate that the clothing industry overall is liable for up to 10% of the world’s total carbon footprint.
Selling the clothes
Once at the retail store, clothes are stacked, racked, merchandised, and even sexualized to sell to consumers. As people fall victim to seasonal trends, they are buying more clothing than ever before. On average, American households spend as much as $2,000 annually on clothes, and more than half of them are worn once or sometimes never worn. Statistics like these demonstrate how consumers are not buying for actual need; rather, the fast fashion industry is exploiting the feel-good sensations associated with shopping.
Wearing and discarding the clothes
Purchased clothes are then worn, usually for a very short time, thrown away, and new ones bought to replace them. More than 60% of all clothing is thrown out within a few years of its purchase. The U.S. discards 17 million tons of fabric waste each year. Compared with other commonly tossed materials like glass, paper, and plastic bottles, clothing has the worst recycling rate (just over 10%).
While there are thousands of landfills across the country, most are predicted to reach capacity in the next 15 years — and it’s not easy to create more. Living near a landfill can depreciate your property by almost 13%, as no one wants one near their community. Yet as the population climbs, global trash is expected to grow at alarming rates.
It is a sad story of the have's and the have not's, with over consumption and abundance in one part of the world, and not nearly enough and scarcity in another part.
The fashion industry is a tragic tale of the haves and the have-nots. It relies on a toxic, inefficient supply chain that exploits people on both sides of the world.
Here are some final thoughts and take aways.
It’s disturbing to consider that the fashion economy prioritizes hoodies, t-shirts and leather goods over human wellbeing.
Over one million people are injured annually working in textile mills, and millions more suffer from illnesses related to the industry.
Farms are poisoned to keep costs low and clean water is contaminated to make sure clothes are trendy.
People starve while livestock grazes on land that could grow food.
The planet heats up while many scroll through thousands of items debuted each week, marketed to make us doubt ourselves and look the other way.
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