Fast-Fashion Brands, Definition, Environmental Impact
Everything to Know About Fast Fashion and How to Avoid It
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Fast fashion is often brought up as one of the biggest polluters on the planet. While it's true that there's a waste crisis with textiles, there isn't any one set of data that tells us just how bad it is. What we do know is that fast fashion is often made with plastic materials that are cheaper to produce. When washed or thrown into landfills, those plastics break down and end up in our water systems. What's more, many of the brands use synthetic dyes to create some of the quick and trendy pieces we see all over the internet.
The team at Fashion Revolution put it this way: "According to Fashion on Climate, the fashion industry contributes approximately 2.1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in a single year, equivalent to four percent of all global emissions," a spokesperson explains. They add that this figure is equivalent to the greenhouse emissions of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined.
"The challenging part is that 70 percent of fashion's emissions originate from parts of the supply chain that most people never see, and that includes activities before clothing hits the stores like raw material production and processing. Devastatingly, 120 million trees disappear into clothing every year, a figure set to double within the next decade," the spokesperson says.