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Shelley Rogers: Out of fashion

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From Sept. 9 to Oct. 3., the bi-annual major Fashion Shows will appear in due succession in New York, London, Milan and Paris. On high display, top designer brands will dazzle the world with the newest styles for next year’s Spring and Summer wardrobes.

The wheels of the $2.7 trillion industry will turn once more.  But as quickly as dreams are spun on the runways of the world’s fashion capitols, an alternate reality that is as dark as the fashion shows are bright and glittering will continue to feed off the glamour and the hype.

The average person associates fashion with beauty, creativity, self-expression, and social desirability.  But poisoning the air, degrading the soil and defiling the oceans is not beautiful.  Behind the glamour and loveliness paraded on the catwalks during these Fashion Weeks there lies an enormous contradiction.  Here are some of the brutal facts:

The fashion industry produces 150 billion garments, almost all of which (87%) will end up in landfill or an incinerator. Only 1% will actually be recycled.

Textile waste is exported from the U.S. to other countries where landfills smolder and pollute the air.

The apparel industry is responsible for 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions – the equivalent of Germany, France and the U.K. combined.  Unchecked, fashion production would account for 26% of all carbon emissions by 2050.

Fashion is one of the most polluting of all industries due to highly toxic dyes and heavy metals flushed into fresh water sources, harming people, destroying livelihoods and damaging ecosystems.

The majority of clothes are a mixture of cotton and synthetics including polyester which are petroleum products. Up to 40% of fashion’s carbon emissions are from the production of polyester and polyester production is expected to grow by 47% over the next 10 years.

When synthetics are washed they send millions of microplastics into the oceans – in fact 35% of all ocean microplastics are from clothing. Microplastics infiltrate the food chain and in a study in March of 2022 at Vrije University in the Netherlands researchers found plastic polymers in the bloodstreams of 80% of those tested and of that group 50% had PET microfibers that are found in our synthetic clothes.

The industry razes 150 million trees for cellulosic fabrics.  Cattle grazing has contributed to deforestation in the Amazon and the leather produced from that region has been traced to global fashion brands’ shoes and bags.

Non-organic cotton farming heavily depletes and degrades soil, consuming more pesticides than any other crop. These affect the health of farmers and populations nearby. The toxic farm runoff contaminates fresh waters, wetlands and aquifers and threatens biodiversity and eco-systems.

The true cost of fast fashion’s cheap clothing is extracted from the industry’s factory garment workers. Workers are paid less than the minimum wage in countries in the global south which does not nearly constitute a “living” wage.  Today 40 million people are living in ‘modern slavery’ with fashion the 2nd biggest contributor to this. Child labor common.

The average person today buys 60 percent more items of clothing than they did 15 years ago, but keep them for only half as long, and the average garment may be worn as little as ten times before disposal.

The fast fashion industry is expected to continue to grow as a result of a shifting population and consumption patterns.  By 2030, one estimate suggests that clothing consumption will grow 65% as 3 billion people move into the global middle class, and a recent report estimated the world is on track to triple clothing production by 2050.

Once clothing is discarded, it must be sorted for distribution.  Today this is still done by hand.  And while there are innovative technologies that can break down the fabric of used garments into their separate types of fibers for feedstock used to make new clothing, many companies are still in the pilot stage awaiting business investment or looking for help to scale their systems to the colossal size necessary. Fully scaled, these technologies could drive 80% circularity in the fashion industry.

In a 2020 survey in the U.K., over half of Gen Zs, the most environmentally concerned demographic, reported buying “most of their clothes” from fast fashion brands. Focused on Instagram and TikTok, price and convenience are key to their shopping habits. Fast fashion companies shadow them, trolling the internet through a ‘search engine optimization’ for indicators of up-to-the-second trends and then as quickly as possible churn out new styles – in the case of fast fashion brand Shein, thousands every day – and with meteoric speed, deliver them to their ‘zoomer’ customer’s doorsteps.

Whereas most major industries such as the automotive and agriculture industries are heavily regulated, the $2.7 trillion fashion industry is almost entirely unregulated and as a result, brands have had no real incentive to change. But fast fashion has come at too high a price. Accountability and systemic change are critical to reducing the irreversible footprint this industry is making on the planet.

Hopefully, that may be about to happen.

Earthday.org is part of the Act on Fashion Coalition supporting The Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (the Fashion Act) introduced to the New York State Legislature in January of this year. From the regulatory vacuum where it exits, the fashion industry will for the first time be forced to account for its emissions, water and plastic use, chemical management, to map its supply chain and disclose its social due diligence. The Fashion Act will, with legally binding environmental standards, create a coherent framework and vision for the transition to a sustainable sector of the economy. Globally, similar legislation and regulations are being proposed. And even a few manufacturers have begun to institute more sustainable processes.

Given the almost limitless destructive power of this industry, it’s time to send a message that “Fast Fashion” is “Out of Fashion”.

Shelley Rogers directs Earthday.org’s global campaign to redesign the fashion industry and reduce its impact on the planet. Thanks to American Forum for sharing this op-ed.

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