Yves Saint Laurent once said “Fashions fade, style is eternal.” In the current world that we are living in, it does seem like fashions are fading a bit too fast.
Fast fashion has changed the dynamic fashion industry. But what does it mean? In simple terms, its when the clothes which are low priced and stylish but tend to go out of fashion rather quickly. These are based off on the trends at the fashion week and the styles that celebrities wear. With rising popularity of social media sites like TikTok and Instagram, people are getting influenced to buy such clothes. People have money to spend. Brands like Zara, H&M, Shein and Temu had skyrocketed with their sales. But how good is fast fashion in the long term and how good is it for the planet? Lets take a look at the environmental impact of fast fashion.
Lets start of by looking at the material that is used to make these clothes. These are made using polyester mainly, a textile fibre, which is a type of plastic. As we all know, plastic is not a very environment friendly substance. Researchers estimate that polyester takes about 200-300 years to degrade completely and in that period of time it can create a lot of negative impacts on the environment. Even though polyester can be recycled, it is said that each time it is washed it sheds 2.3 times more microplastics than virgin polyester. This goes on to contaminate the water bodies and then lead to harmful effects to all forms of living organisms.
One of the main reasons for the fast fashion clothes to be priced so low is said to be the cheap labour that is employed. The wages paid to these employees are not fair. It is also said that that children are often exploited and employed in these factories as its considered that producing these clothes is a job that does not require a lot of skill. The factories also use many chemical substances which can have negative impact on the health of the people working in them. Some of these factories have often been compared to sweat shops due to their unethical labour practices.
The other reason, why these are bad for the environment is because of the wastage that is a direct result of fast fashion. As the name suggests, these clothes keep moving out fashion rather quickly. A shirt which might have been trendy this week might not be so in a couple of weeks. This leads to people discarding these clothes rather quickly. Since, these are priced so low, people might not think so much when discarding as they can always go ahead and buy more at the same cheap price. What they do not understand is that in the long run, the companies are selling high volumes of clothes and profiting out of people, even though their clothes might be priced lower. When these are discarded, majority of the clothes are thrown in landfills. Atacama desert in Chile, has one of the biggest if not the biggest landfills which is largely made of these discarded clothes. When these end up in landfills, they end up degrading the land and soil of that area. They also end up emitting carbon and polluting the water sources.
With all that out of the way, what can you do to reduce the problems that we might be heading towards because of fast fashion? The first and foremost thing is to buy clothes which are of better quality and might be slightly expensive when compared with their fast fashion counterparts. These can be worn for a longer period of time and are of much better quality, which means they need not be discarded rather quickly.
The other action you can take is to donate the fast fashion clothes which you might already have rather than discard them. This is of immense help to the people who are underprivileged and will also lessen up the chances of them ending in the land fills rather quickly.
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