Fashion shouldn’t cost the earth.
Fast fashion is an environmental issue we have encroaching on our country. The top contributors to this issue are Shein, Temu, Zara and H & M.
“I did my senior speech on fast fashion. I’m strongly against supporting this issue because of the way that it impacts our environment,” Avery Bitton said.
Fast fashion is the business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high fashion designs, mass producing them at low costs and bringing them to retail quickly while demand is at its highest.
According to Vogue, fast fashion not only takes a toll on our environment and the planet we live on, but also the people putting in the work to make this happen.
Due to the availability of these items, previous purchases are being discarded faster, no matter how many times they are worn.
The discarding and production of these items is harmful to our environment.
According to Earth.org, fast fashion contributes to about 10% the total global carbon emissions. It also pollutes rivers and about 85 percent of the textiles go to fill our dumps each year which are already full to begin with.
This issue is only projected to rise. This means that by 2030 studies show that emissions will skyrocket by 60% if this issue remains untouched. That is just from textile manufacturing alone.
One of the victims of fast fashion is water. The fashion industry is the second largest consumer industry of water. It takes about 700 gallons of water to produce a single cotton shirt and about 2,000 gallons of water to create one pair of jeans. Imagine how much water it takes to create just the outfit you are wearing.
Textile dyeing is believed to be the second largest pollutant of water.
The consumption of clothing has grown by 400 percent more than it was twenty years ago and the average American generates about 82 pounds of textile waste per year.
The lead times from Zara, H&M and even Forever 21 are causing an obscene amount of waste. Lead times are how long it takes for a product to be designed up to being purchased. Zara had the shortest lead time with only two weeks, while Forever 21 followed not too far behind with 6 weeks and lastly H&M took about 8 weeks.
