The Catch-22 of Fast Fashion

September 22, 2021adminloginCulture (archive), h21

By Anya Patri and Nitya Sharma

The fast fashion industry is one of the world’s greatest Catch-22’s. While the industry is deeply flawed, its necessity cannot be understated. In a world of seven billion, where people need clothes three hundred and sixty-five days a year, supplying those clothes sustainably is near impossible. While incremental changes to shopping habits can be made by individuals, the question is raised: Can the world survive without fast fashion? This article unpacks both sides of the fast fashion debate to reach a common ground.

The Dangers of Fast Fashion:

First and foremost, fast fashion has a detrimental impact on the environment. The textile industry is overwhelmingly responsible for water consumption, carbon emissions, and microplastics, all of which are vastly damaging to the planet. Large fashion industries and corporations need equally numerous resources, including fibers and water, to keep up with

production. This uses up thousands and thousands of gallons of water on jeans and other articles of clothing. The fashion industry also consumes large amounts of energy, including petroleum gas and other contaminants. It has a high carbon footprint in addition to that, as it is responsible for nearly 10% of the world’s emissions to date (1). Perhaps most damaging of all, fast fashion involves the processing and creation of millions of microplastics that are embedded within textiles. Microplastics, tiny plastic fibers that are not biodegradable, make up an entire 30% of the pollutants found in the environment. There is no way to escape environmental degradation with fast fashion, and it is an ongoing issue not often addressed.

Another issue with fast fashion is that it encourages unethical labor and the exploitation of workers. The industry of fashion and textiles in America is based around the overseas production of materials in places such as China and Bangladesh. However, there is no way to find out how ethically sourced your clothing is. A lot of items from Zara or Forever 21 are created in sweatshops and factories where workers are subjected to inhumane conditions and menial compensation, if any. Labor regulations and child labor laws are often infringed in order to create the clothing sold at retailers nearby. Numerous allegations throughout the past decade have forced some companies to source their manufacturing more ethically, but there are still many corporations that still enforce exploitative practices today (2).

Fast Fashion spurs on consumerism and waste. The textile industry creates immense amounts of waste after clothes are used and with the resources used in manufacturing itself. As fast fashion is cheap and disposable, it is not as sustainable in the long run due to the short amount of time it is usable. Due to the lack of longevity in the making of these clothes, they get thrown away very quickly, leading to buildups in landfills. Industrial waste is an issue as well, as textile dye is a ubiquitous pollutant that drastically alters marine life and ecosystems. Consumerism under the American branch of capitalism is unsustainable as well, especially in terms of the fast fashion industry. The constant stream of the consumer’s money goes to corporations rather than laborers, and the separation of workers from the means of production is a common blight in industries like these. The emergence of the fast fashion industry has created essential societal benefits which drastically contrast its plethora of environmental and moral issues. This raises the question: Can consumption ever be ethical?

Why We Can’t Escape It:

The fast fashion industry draws many parallels with the fast-food industry; They both market cheap products, employ millions of people for meager pay, are bad for the environment, are typically low quality, and are an unwise investment long term. Yet both fast fashion and fast food are consumed by nearly every American. In the age of Reformation and Keto, why is this the case? The answer is complex and requires the shedding of biased judgments and simple condemnation of billion-dollar industries. Using simple math, the conundrum becomes clear: If the average person bought just five articles of clothing per year, twelve times less than the actual national average, by the time said person is 78, (average life expectancy in the US) they would have accumulated 390 pieces of clothing. Assuming the average person is not a hoarder, over time these clothes will be donated to thrift stores, handed down to family members, or simply thrown away, however, clothing disposal is not the issue at hand, production is; 2,700 liters of water are required to produce enough cotton to make a single cotton T-shirt. To try and combat the water requirements for cotton, many companies now use synthetics such as polyester. Unfortunately, the amount of carbon dioxide generated by the production of a polyester T-shirt is more than double that of a cotton T-shirt, 5.5 kilograms compared to 2.1 kilograms. Pants become an even trickier issue; The manufacturing of a single pair of denim jeans produces over 44 pounds of carbon dioxide and requires nearly 1,800 gallons of water. To put that into perspective, even if the average human bought 5 pairs of clothing per year, that clothing would release approximately 10,000 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere, and use approximately 600,000 liters of water. Of course, this is excluding the energy and water requirements of washing those clothes for multiple wears.

The statistics presented above are for a single consumer; There are over seven billion consumers on the planet. The garment industry employs 80 million of those 7 billion people, particularly in factories in developing nations. If we were to entirely eliminate fast fashion, what would happen to those millions of workers who already live in near poverty? What would happen to the low-income consumers who do not have the time it takes to thrift or cannot afford sustainable fashion? Who would bridge the gap between the ever-increasing demand for clothing and stalled production? Would sustainable companies simply become fast fashion? The answers to these questions are unclear, as are the solutions to fast fashion. While as an individual, you can make small changes to your lifestyle, sustainable clothing companies exist in a niche, one that cannot be afforded by most people. Thrift stores provide a space for more affordable shopping, but still, encourage mass-production and rely on a constant supply of discarded clothing. Thrift stores also lack the trendiness of sustainable companies, and more importantly, the convenience of having seemingly unlimited duplicates of the same product. Fast fashion companies are not evil, they are simply bridging this gap, bringing standardization, convenience, affordability, and fashionability to the table.

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