Sustainable Fashion’s Rise Against Fast Fashion
For those embracing a sustainable lifestyle, have you considered the environmental impact of your wardrobe? If your clothing is cheap and trendy, you may be buying unsustainable apparel and supporting fast fashion.
Fast fashion is a popular style trend that promotes low-quality apparel priced far below market value. The money consumers save comes with a high price for both the planet and the workers who make these clothes. The dangers of fast fashion range from pollution to worker exploitation.
But you can fight back by choosing sustainable clothing, especially since there are now more options than ever before — and the number of available options only continues to grow. These eco-friendly choices are well worth the investment. Plus, better quality clothing outlasts and outperforms cheap fashion.
What is Fast Fashion?
What is fast fashion, and why is it problematic? Fast fashion refers to a growing number of apparel makers who mass-produce clothing that showcases the latest style trends and sell it for the lowest price possible. If a celebrity sports a new style of dress, fast fashion manufacturers will hurry to imitate the look and churn out as many knockoffs as they can.
These manufacturers cut corners as much as possible. They take no note of responsible waste management, sustainable manufacturing processes, or even worker’s rights. This lack of responsibility is detrimental to our planet in many ways.
The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion
How does it create harm? Cheap industry is usually toxic for the environment and clothing creation is not exempt. It’s hard to overstate the environmental cost of fast fashion. It affects the earth in a variety of ways, all of which contribute to an already dire issue.
Water Pollution and Microplastics
The textile industry creates about 20% of industrial water pollution. This includes fabric creation and the dying process. Fast fashion is made with cheap synthetic materials, adding to the problem.
The creation and care of this apparel releases microplastics into the environment, further polluting our water sources. Microplastics make up a significant amount of modern ocean pollution, destroying marine ecosystems and poisoning ocean wildlife.
Textile Waste
One of the worst problems with textiles is waste. About 85% of this clothing winds up in landfills every year. Fast fashion is such poor quality that it is practically disposable. Many of these products quickly end up in the trash.
Some countries are treated like landfills for global fast fashion waste. For example, Ghana receives 15 million discarded clothing items every week.
Carbon Emissions
In 2018, the U.N. reported that 10% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the fashion industry thanks to its toxic manufacturing processes. That is more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. With the rise of fast fashion, this number is likely much higher today.
Resource Depletion
Fast fashion is primarily made from cheap fabrics like polyester, which requires fossil fuel for its creation. Polyester also takes a long time to biodegrade. During that time, the fabric vents microfibers that also pollute the planet.
Worker Exploitation
Producing fast fashion requires cheap labor, meaning laborers are underpaid and overworked. Textile workers in this industry in Bangladesh, primarily women, only make $113 per month. Worse, many workers complain of sexual harassment, violence, and working safety issues.
How can you help stop the spread of fast fashion?
Fighting Back with Conscious Consumerism
You can push back the tide of fast fashion by practicing conscious consumerism when shopping for clothes. By making ethical and sustainable fashion choices for professional and everyday attire, you create a high-quality wardrobe that will last. There are many ways to ensure your wardrobe is ethically made, including:
- Be sure that you choose reliable brands that support sustainable practices.
- Look into fashion options that seem too good to be true to see if they are fast fashion.
- Take good care of the pieces in your wardrobe to ensure they last.
- Repair clothes that need adjustments rather than replacing them.
You can also choose some great alternatives to further ensure that your wardrobe is eco-friendly.
Choosing Sustainable Alternatives to Fast Fashion
When eliminating fast fashion, educate yourself about the different fabrics and options available. Additionally, you can make some great changes by investing in classic pieces that you can mix and match rather than spending a lot on trends that go out of fashion. Be sure that your choices involve slow fashion.
Slow Fashion
Sustainable clothing is, by definition, slow fashion. As opposed to a fast and cheap mass-production process, slow fashion is handmade by artisans with an eye on sustainability in both textile choices and process.
Many of these pieces are handmade. This is an excellent way to go beyond classic wardrobe pieces and invest in rare or one-of-a-kind statement items that support local artisans.
Upcycled Fashion
This is a method of creating clothing by repurposing fabrics and other apparel materials to create new clothing. The process creates a unique item and eliminates problems caused by manufacturing and transportation, thereby reducing waste.
The downside is that this process releases more microfibers. It also often uses more energy than making new items, so use caution with upcycled fashion.
Organic Clothing
Choosing cotton clothes that bear the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certification is an excellent way to practice conscious consumerism. Additionally, organic T-shirt printing is a great response to fast fashion. Organic cotton farming uses less blue water and is also free of GMOs and harmful pesticides. This clothing is softer to the touch, too.
If you’re looking for colors, sustainable dye processes are more challenging. Water-based inks are more sustainable than traditional clothing dyes but require more energy for processing. They also are not available to use on every fabric. That said, an organic T-shirt with printing is a much better selection than fast fashion, allowing you to show off your style.
Recycled Synthetic Fabrics
Organic cotton is a great choice, but it’s not practical for every outfit, such as athletic wear or swimwear. In these cases, you should consider recycled synthetic fabrics manufactured from waste products, including PET water bottles, old fishing lines, or garment scraps. Once collected, this trash goes through a chemical process that helps turn it into yarn. While it’s not the cleanest process, it eliminates the need for crude oil. Thus, it has lower carbon emissions than traditional clothing manufacturing and helps reduce waste.
When buying recycled synthetics, choose a brand that is transparent about its sustainability efforts. Some brands falsely claim that their apparel is eco-friendly, so be sure they are doing what they promise. Additionally, recycled synthetics release microfibers when washing, but you can buy a microfiber filter to prevent this.
Sustainable Swimwear
Swimwear is generally made of synthetic fabrics that are not environmentally friendly. Fortunately, several sustainable swimwear brands use recycled synthetics for their products. They are manufactured from several materials, including recycled plastic bottles, organic cotton, and renewable bamboo.
Trustworthy brands include the following:
- Megan Mae Miami carries luxury swimwear from reclaimed ocean plastics.
- Patagonia also uses recycled fishing nets and is fair-trade certified.
- September uses landfill plastics and other recycled materials in their swimsuits.
- Wolven creates unique pieces from recycled bottles.
- Jade also makes clothing from recyclable plastic and goes the extra mile by using biodegradable packaging.
Sustainable Accessories
Accessories, like shoes and bags, can also be sustainably sourced. Typical leather-replacement options used today include cork, which is biodegradable and pesticide-free, and Piñatex, which is made from the leaves of the pineapple plant. There are many options to choose from today, but there are several exciting new trends in sustainable clothing.
Grown Leather
Lab-grown leather is an exciting new fabric that safely creates imitation leather. It uses a process known as biofabrication, which is a safer alternative to leather derived from cattle and other animals. The tanning process for animal hides requires a large number of toxic chemicals that create highly unsafe working conditions, as well as numerous pollutants.
Biofabrication does not rely on the toxic chemicals and harmful pollutants required by traditional tanning processes. Instead, it uses biological components, like animal DNA or collagen, to engineer different products and solutions.
The company Modern Meadow, for example, uses lab-grown animal collagen to create nanofibers that form the basis of their product called Zoa, which looks, feels, and even smells like traditional leather but without any animal products. The product is safely grown in a highly controlled, contaminant-free atmosphere using equipment typically used to mass produce food and medical-grade products. In the future, cutting-edge DNA technology may replace more products that come from animals.
Conclusion
Wearing earth-friendly clothing helps you be the best you can be. The old adage of waste not, want not speaks to conscious consumerism, which we can practice daily with informed apparel choices. From proper garment care to avoiding fast fashion, we can make sustainable fashion a trend.
Embracing slow fashion can also make an impression on your friends and family, allowing you to lead the way to eliminating fast fashion and adopting a sustainable style. These simple changes lead to a bright new future, where less wasteful clothing contributes to a sustainable planet.
About the Author
Amanda Winstead is a writer focusing on many topics including technology and digital marketing. Along with writing she enjoys traveling, reading, working out, and going to concerts. If you want to follow her writing journey, or even just say hi you can find her on Twitter.