# The impact of the fashion industry on our planet > https://tree-nation.com/projects/inside-tree-nation/article/15801-the-impact-of-the-fashion-industry-on-our-planet - **Author**: Tree-Nation - **Published**: 2022-01-17T10:41:21.000000Z #CarbonCatchers #EcoEducation #FashionIndustry The fashion industry has rapidly grown throughout the years, with the need for global apparel overriding environmental and social consequences. The industry contributes 10% to global emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined (World Bank, 2019). The industry, valued at 3 trillion dollars, is accountable for 2% of the world’s GDP (Fashion United, 2021), and this global demand is not slowing down with fashion business owners valuing profit and convenience over the need for sustainability and circularity. Fast Fashion The environmental impacts of fashion are mainly due to the rise of fast fashion; ‘A cradle-to-grave business model in which low-quality clothes, shoes and accessories are mass-produced at low costs, with shops stocking new ranges more than every season,’ (Edie, 2021). Fast fashion allows for mass consumerism with the planet paying the price. Fast fashion has grown exponentially over the last few years, with an EU report stating that fashion companies expanded their collections from two collections per year in 2000, to five collections in 2011 (European Parliament, 2019). This quick turnaround of clothes from the catwalks to the high street contributes to the throwaway waste culture built on a linear economic model. The result of this throwaway culture aligned with limited textile recycling infrastructure has led to 73% of textile produced going to landfill or being incinerated, with only 12% being recycled globally (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). This quick turnaround directly contributes to society's explosion in consumption and in 2017, textile handling and production generated emissions of 645kg per person in the EU (European Environment Agency, 2019). Aligning with the consumer gap, comes the wealth gap, with 86% of personal consumption carried out by the richest nations in the world, and only 1.6% contributed by the poorer nations (Toprak & Anis, 2017). Furthermore, a person in North America averages 20x more consumption when compared to someone in China or India, and 65x more than someone in Bangladesh (Toprak & Anis, 2017). Polyester The problems associated with fashion and its implicating emission output starts at the production-manufacturing line, with more clothes produced than demanded. The raw materials that are used to make these textiles are responsible for a large share of the environmental impact. The majority of clothes today are made from synthetic materials, derived from non-biodegradable, fossil fuel-based crude oil. It is estimated that 65% of all fibres originate from synthetic materials - mainly polyester (Textile Exchange, 2017), with 98% + of future fibre growth projected to be for synthetic fibres and 95% + solely being manufactured as polyester (Qin, 2014). Polyester brings with it a myriad of environmental harm. For starters, in 2015, 706 billion kg (1 trillion pounds) of greenhouse gasses were released through polyester textile manufacturing (Kirchain et al., 2015), the equivalent of 185 coal-fired power plants yearly emissions (Drew & Yehounme, 2017). The report further estimated that a single polyester t-shirt has emissions of 5.5kg CO2e, 3.4 kg more than a cotton t-shirt which releases 2.1 kg CO2e per unit. That is not to say cotton is environmentally advantageous as it still uses 2,700 litres (713 gallons) of water to produce a T-shirt (WWF, 2013). However, concerning CO2e, it is the textile of lesser impact. A further issue with polyester is that when it breaks down, it breaks down into microplastics, with polyester accounting for nearly three-quarters of the microplastic pollution found in the Arctic (Ross et al., 2021). This study further found when they sampled ocean water from the Arctic, it contained 73% synthetic microplastic fibres, with 95% of this being polyester. Therefore, it can be deduced that the fashion industry's mass use of polyester is having a direct impact on the contamination of the world’s oceans with microplastics. Water Pollution It is not just the microplastics that are impacting water pollution; textile dyeing is the second-largest polluter of water behind agriculture (Kant, 2012). Textile dying directly impacts the aesthetic quality of water (Ohgaki et al., 2005). Wastewater enters streams, ditches and rivers containing toxic substances such as mercury, and other arsenic hazardous components which toxify the waters harming the aquatic life and the surrounding communities that live by the river banks. This is because the various dyes that are used in the fashion industry have carcinogenic and mutagenic properties (Singh & Chadha, 2018), therefore having detrimental effects on workers engaged in the dyeing processes, and the aquatic animals that fall victim to the wastewater. The World Bank identified 72 toxic chemicals that end up in the waterways as a consequence of textile dyeing (The World Bank, 2014). The dyes used by the fashion industry exhibit high solubility in water, meaning that they are difficult to remove through conventional methods (Hassan & Carr, 2018). This dye, not only difficult to remove, then blocks the penetration of light needed for photosynthesis, which further affects the entire aquatic biota (Hassan & Carr, 2018). The unsustainable processes used for textile dyeing alone is responsible for 20% of the world's industrial water pollution (Kant, 2012), and uses 5 trillion litres (1.3 trillion gallons) of water (Drew & Yehounme, 2017). Global impact It is pretty evident now that the fashion industry is responsible for using up the world's carbon budget. When trying to identify the source of carbon emission output, it is easy to delegate it to the countries which are producing and manufacturing the clothes through their unsustainable practices. However, it is the people from developed countries that buy them. Fashion companies from more developed countries outsource work to people in developing countries, such as India and Bangladesh as they can pay them a much cheaper wage to produce large quantities of garments. For example, in Bangladesh, the legal wage is $96 per month (however, many people will get paid much less than this, with sweatshop wages being averaged at 3 cents an hour with the workers facing inhumane working conditions (The World Counts, 2021)). Many of the clothes produced for fast fashion purposes are made in developing countries, where workers work long hours in poor working conditions to produce garments that are exported to the western world. To put this into perspective, in 2018 the total value of U.S clothing imports equated to approximately $95 billion US dollars (Statista, 2020), and in 2020 ready-made garment (RMG) exports amounted to 83% of Bangladesh’s total exports (Statista, 2021). The world is connected, and the consequences of the production line cannot be sequestered to the countries that make them due to the global impact of climate change. However, what needs to be considered is the vulnerability of the locals who live where the production line of garments takes place. This is because they deal with the direct environmental repercussions of the fashion industry and it is their environment that perishes significantly at the hands of western consumerism. For example, Bangladesh is the second-largest producer of fast fashion after China (Bramwell, 2020), with the average workers making approximately $25 to $75 per month - a wage that is only getting lower (Khan et al., 2016). Additionally, as a direct result of effluent from surrounding garment factories, three rivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, have been declared ‘biologically dead’ (Iam Renew, 2019), with no life being able to survive in their waters. However, despite this Bangladesh’s ready-made garment export is booming, with the market projected to grow from $30 billion in 2019 to $50 billion in 2021 (Hossain et al., 2018). The fact is that the current linear model on which the fashion industry is based is not working. It brings with it irreversible environmental impacts, as well as the harsh exploitation of people from developing countries. With this need for change comes the movement of sustainable fashion; a movement whereby ecological integrity and social justice are prioritized by the brands, and a garment’s lifecycle is evaluated and accounted for. There can be a balance between the fashion industry and the environment, businesses just need to reevaluate their motivations behind their products, move away from linearity to circularity, and stop spending the very limited carbon budget that we have left. References Bramwell, L. (2020, July 3). Eco-colonialism: how Bangladesh is burdened by the impacts of fast fashion. The Meridian. Drew, D., & Yehounme, G. (2017, July 5). The Apparel Industry’s Environmental Impact in 6 Graphics. World Resources Institute. Edie. (2021). Fast fashion. 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