Environmental Impact of Fashion: An Overview

Humans started wearing clothes 170,000 years ago. Yet, it has never been a source of problems until the last few decades. Thanks to bad manufacturing practices and over-consumption, we’ve turned clothes into a significant source of pollution. In the spirit of fashion month, let’s take a look at the environmental impact of fashion.

Environmental Impact of Fashion’s Manufacturing Process

It’s known that the fashion industry is one of the top polluting industries, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Every stage of apparel production causes pollution.

Raw Materials

The industry uses a variety of materials, but cotton and polyester are two of the most common materials used. So this post will focus on these two materials. Both come with hefty environmental costs.

Cotton

Cotton farming is notorious for its high use of water, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. A pair of jeans requires between 5000 to 10,000 liters of water to produce! In India, cotton farming has led to drought and widespread health problems among the farmers as a result of the chemicals used. Apart from runoff from the pesticides and herbicides used on the farm, chemicals used to process cotton pollute water sources too.

However, it’s worthy to note that pesticides and herbicides pollution isn’t unique to cotton farming. Humans have been wearing cotton clothes for thousands of years. Cotton as a fabric is sustainable and good for our skin. It’s the ways we farm, process, and use cotton that make it bad for the environment.

Polyester

Polyester’s plastic. It’s made from crude oil, a non-renewable resource. The extraction of crude oil uses a lot of toxic chemicals and releases a lot of toxins into the air. Some of the chemicals include benzene, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. All of these are toxic, and many of them can cause cancer and genetic mutations.

Even though polyester can be made from recycled plastic, most of them are derived from virgin plastic for two reasons. Firstly, some recycled plastic isn’t good enough to be made into clothes. Secondly, virgin plastic is often cheaper.

Be it cotton farming or extraction of crude oil for the creation of synthetic fabric, they both come with huge environmental costs. And I haven’t even mentioned the dyeing process…

Dyeing Process

The textile industry is responsible for 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution. Not only does the dyeing process require a large amount of water, but it’s also the second-largest polluter of clean water worldwide. Many of these dyes and the chemicals used in the process are toxic, carcinogenic or mutagenic.

10 to 15% of dyes used are released into wastewater. These dyes affect the reoxygenation abilities of the water, and their pigments prevent sunlight from reaching aquatic plants. To make things worse, they’re designed to be stable when exposed to heat or light – so they’ll remain in the environment for years, poisoning aquatic systems.

Dye pollution has destroyed farmlands and made groundwater undrinkable for entire cities.

While ways to reduce the release of dyes and other chemicals into the wastewater exist, they involve costs that some textile factories can’t take on because of their low profit-margin. Often, they’d choose to move their factories to locations with more relaxed regulations.

Waste

It’s estimated that between 80 to 100 billion pieces of apparel are produced each year. We know that around 8000 chemicals are used in the apparel and footwear industry to create products from raw materials. Can you imagine the amount of chemical waste that translates into?

All that waste eventually ends up in the oceans too.

Apart from chemical waste, the fashion industry also generates 92 million tonnes of material waste every year. It’s the equivalent of 4% of the world’s waste.

What’s more, 60% of clothes are made from synthetic fibers like polyester, acrylic, nylon, and spandex. So, these clothes are going to contribute to microfiber pollution, then they’re going to sit in the landfill for eternity. They aren’t biodegradable.

The Garment Workers

Behind every cheap price tag is a group of exploited workers. They’re forced to work long hours in crowded and often unsafe situations for very little pay, so we can get the cheap clothes that we covet after but don’t need.

At work, they’re exposed to toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing process, often without protective gear. They breathe in the fumes and come into contact with the chemicals, either directly or through the fabric, depending on what process they work on.

Back home, these workers and their families likely use contaminated water for their daily needs.

People say that we’re providing people in developing countries a chance to get out of poverty. But we didn’t need to exploit them to help them. Besides, if helping them destroys their environment and health, are we still helping them?

The price of fashion is too high.

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A Note About Recycling Clothes

While recycling your clothes is better than throwing your clothes, it’s crucial that we don’t rely on recycling to reduce the environmental impact of fashion.

Recycling itself generates pollution, and whether it’s cotton or polyester, you can only recycle the material so much before its structure becomes too weak to be used. It’s also very difficult to recycle blends of different materials.

Besides, there’s the problem of microfiber pollution. And we’re already recycling a gazillion plastic bottles and containers!

In most cases, polyester gets down-cycled into things like rugs, fleece or fluff for insulation. And that’s it, it has come to the end of its use. At least cotton can be composted.

As with everything else, the key to reducing apparel waste is to refuse, reduce, reuse (or donate), then recycle. In that sequence.

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Reflections

Sometimes, I wish that I didn’t know about these things. Then I can be happy when I get a “steal” at one of the fast fashion stores.

More and more, I’ll find myself peering under clothes for its material tag to find out what it’s made of.
When a color catches my eye, it makes me wonder if a river in India is tainted with its dye.
A cheap item makes me wonder who was exploited to produce it.
Then I’ll look at the damn store, and wonder how much of those clothes will end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Do I wish I’d remained ignorant?

No. I have no inclination to remain part of the environmental impact of fashion. Every time we buy from a company whose background and ethics we’re not sure about, we could be part of the problem.

But rest assured, it’s not that bad, we can still feel happy about “quality steals” we find at secondhand shops or ethical clothing shops!

Don’t feel guilty, feel empowered.

Knowing the sort of impact the fashion industry has on the environment can make it feel like we’ll never be able to shop at ease again! Hell, can I ever wash my synthetic fiber clothes without feeling guilty again?

Well, please don’t feel guilty. I never meant to create guilt or put the blame on anyone. All I want to do is to create awareness.

None of us are perfect here. We’ll never be completely environmentally friendly (I’m definitely not), but we can counter bad practices with good ones. And this is what this blog is about!

Ultimately, the root of the problem is over-consumption. The more we buy, the more the fashion companies will supply, and the more pollution will ensue.

While it’s absolutely right that manufacturing practices have to be improved, our high consumption of fashionable clothing will still put a strain on the environment with good manufacturing practices.

Hence, we’ve to find a way to curb our collective appetite for clothes, and we’ve to find a way to tell apparel companies that it’s not cool to do what most of them have been doing.

Things we can do to solve these fashion problems:

• Curb your appetite for clothes
• Shop secondhand clothes
• Have clothes swap parties
• Wear your clothes out
• Be aware of the problems and share the knowledge
• Vote with your money: support ethical brands that use sustainable practices and are fair-trade certified

For an in-depth post on how we can reduce our carbon footprint for clothes, drop by Dark Blue Journal on next Tuesday, 17 September 2019 @9AM EST!

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