Each time you drag a new item of clothing into a virtual shopping basket, you may be supporting an industry responsible for 10% of global CO₂ emissions – not to mention widespread social harm. Fast fashion, the industry trend which whisks the latest catwalk designs into stores by way of polluting factories and sweat shops, is incompatible with the changes needed across all sectors to avert environmental breakdown. So what can you do about it?
Before we get into that, though, Just Stop Oil protesters have blocked fuel terminals across the UK in an effort to force the government to heed expert advice and halt new oil and gas extraction. You can read more on the changing nature of climate activism in a recent issue of Imagine here.
To really understand how fast fashion hurts the planet, it helps to follow the course a single garment takes. Mark Sumner, a lecturer in sustainability at the University of Leeds, charted the journey of a t-shirt from the field to your wardrobe. He reported that “it takes one-and-a-half Olympic swimming pools of water to grow one tonne of cotton”, and this is often in regions plagued by drought where farmers may only have “10 to 20 litres of water a day for washing, cleaning and cooking”.
“But the negative impacts only begin with growing the fibres,” Sumner says. Spinning and knitting the cotton into fabric generates 394 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, he estimates. Adding colour to that fabric uses yet more fresh water, which is often washed into waterways untreated afterwards – harmful chemicals and tiny fibres included.
“In Cambodia, for example, where clothing comprises 88% of industrial manufacturing, the fashion industry is responsible for 60% of water pollution,” Sumner says.
The dyed fabric is washed, dried and prepared for garment making. The whole energy-intensive process costs about 2.6kg of CO₂ per t-shirt – “the equivalent of driving 14km in a standard passenger car,” according to Sumner.
As you’ve probably guessed, the environmental calamity doesn’t end there.
“Over the past 15 years, clothing production has doubled while the length of time we actually wear these clothes has fallen by nearly 40%,” say Samantha Sharpe, Monique Retamal and Taylor Brydges, researchers at University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia. Their recommendation for people concerned about the fashion industry’s ballooning climate impact is simple:
“It would mean each of us cutting how many new clothes we buy by as much as 75%, buying clothes designed to last, and recycling clothes at the end of their lifetime.”
And for clothing manufacturers and retailers:
“It would mean tackling low incomes for the people who make the clothes, as well as support measures for workers who could lose jobs during a transition to a more sustainable industry,” they say.
