92 million tons of textile waste are created each year, with an estimation of about 85% of those textiles ending up in landfills.
Fast fashion is one of the main contributors that’s poisoning our planet. This industry relies on low-quality or inexpensive materials, resulting in significant and intensive textile waste. The manufacturing, disposal, and use of polyester in these garments generate significant carbon emissions. This also contributes to soil and water pollution, releasing microplastics into the environment through their synthetic fabrics. “Approximately 35% of all microplastics are made of these synthetic materials,” Ngan Le, a student at Princeton University and contributor to the “Princeton Student Climate Initiative” (PSCI), said.
These plastics take an extremely long amount of time to degrade on land, and it takes even longer to break down in the ocean. Because these plastics stay in the ocean for so long, they disrupt the delicate ecosystem and food chain, getting eaten by fish, which eventually end up being cooked and consumed by people. Ingesting or inhaling these microplastics and air pollutants negatively impacts our health by causing cancer, reproductive issues, hormone dysregulation, respiratory issues, and impaired immune systems.
While fast fashion is destructive to our planet, some people might not be able to afford these expensive brands and clothing items, so they are pushed to buy cheaper clothes, often made with poor-quality and synthetic materials. People often buy from fast fashion brands because they are more affordable, are easier to access, and allow people with lower incomes or tighter budgets to keep up with trends. Because the clothes cost less, it helps to relieve any social pressures and classism a person may be experiencing.
A large quantity of these fast fashion brands exploit their employees through unsafe working conditions, insane work hours, and extremely low pay. These companies thrive on weak labor laws and poor legal standards. These low-wage factories often consisted of hazardous structures, poor ventilation, and intense exposure to toxic chemicals.
Women make up the bulk of these factory workers, along with a significant number of children. They often experience verbal abuse, physical abuse and harassment. The abuse they endure is often received from their supervisors and managers, causing these women and children to suffer immensely under these exploitative business practices.
In the long run, we are all guilty of purchasing items from these fast fashion companies for many different reasons, but for whatever those reasons may be, we can find other alternatives to buying affordable clothing.
In order to stop the immense product waste and harm to our planet, people need to start buying more durable, sustainable, and timeless pieces of clothing rather than these expensive and poorly made products that won’t last.
A very popular solution to this is thrifting and going to vintage clothing shops. Another way to cease fast fashion progression is to stop buying from brands that benefit at the expense of our planet and put people who work for them at constant risk.
