Content area
Full Text
Fast fashion led to the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh. We can do better.
WE CAN'T GET enough fast fashion. Globally, we consume more than 80 billion pieces of clothing each year, many of them hypertrendy, low-cost items that move from runway to sale rack at breakneck speed. Fashion is a trilllon-dollar-a-year Industry that Increasingly relies on rock-bottom retail prices. The amount of made-ln-Canada clothing worn by Canadians has plummeted over the past 50 years. Clothing companies now outsource much of their manufacturing to factories in developing countries to keep prices low and trend-turnover high.
What fuels our hunger for fast fashion? A love affair with clothes. A desire to be ontrend. The quick pick-me-up of a shopping trip. And of course, advertising and media. From short hems to long, and pointy toes to round, we're under constant pressure to buy the latest look. Most of us can't afford to follow fluctuating trends with expensive Items, so we resort to ''convenient'' fast fashion. Those clothes won't last as long as high-quality items - but if a t-shirt cost only $10 and Is now considered out of style, back to the store we'll go!
While our fast-fashion fling might seem cheap and fun, there are serious long-term social and environmental consequences.
Water and Carbon Footprints
A water footprint measures the amount of freshwater used and/or polluted during the production or supply of goods and services. The fashion industry has one ofthe highest water footprints among manufacturers. On average, it takes 2,700 litres of water to make one cotton t-shirt. That is enough water for one person for 900 days.
An estimated 17 to 20 percent of total industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing and treatment - and approximately 8,000 synthetic chemicals are used throughout the world to turn raw materials Into textiles. Many of those chemicals will be released into freshwater sources. For every one tonne of textiles produced, 200 tonnes of water are polluted. That's the equivalent of 5,640,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water pollution from the textile industry every year.
Moreover, the average Canadian tosses 32 kilograms of textiles Into landfills annually, most of which has not been reused or recycled (see "The Afterlife of Clothes," page 26). Clothing in landfills leaches...