Fashion is a racket. As of 2014, the market value of the global apparel industry was valued at $3 trillion, with about $385 billion attributed to the U.S. alone. The industry employs millions of people worldwide in a multitude of positions, from manufacturing to retail.
Yet, as landfills become a growing global concern and many U.S. citizens are calling for more sustainable lifestyle choices, it is in our best interest to take a good hard look at the impacts of clothing on our planet. I recommend watching "The True Cost," a documentary about the impacts of our obsession with and consumption of clothing on this planet and the people who live here, to really understand what I'm talking about.
In modern times, we are so far removed from the days when the clothes on a person’s back were made by a seamstress, a mother or by that person, we don’t even think about clothes coming from people at all. We don’t consider the person who stitched the buttons on a blouse. We don’t consider the people who spun the cotton to make the denim from which our jeans were made. In addition, we often don’t stop to consider the ridiculous amount of resources that went into making a single T-shirt before we lift it from the store shelves.
The fashion industry thrives off of people who buy what they want on impulse. When I order cute dresses online, rarely do I think about the amount of water, fabric, dye and human labor that went into making it, and I never contemplate the amount of waste and pollution that result from having these clothes shipped to my front door. Vogue’s Maya Singer put it best when she wrote: “I want that! Click. A couple days later, a package arrives on your doorstep.”
The fact is, the wardrobe is not viewed as a finite thing in this culture. It is an ever-changing fixture in our lives: perfectly good materials are given away or, more often, tossed in the garbage once they’ve outlasted our interests.The problem is, clothes don’t just “vanish.” Nothing does. Instead, the clothes we buy, along with the labels, packaging, and scrap materials that go along with them, exist until they decompose.
For a 100% organic cotton sweater, that might not be too bad, and the materials used to make such a sweater can be treated and re-used in other clothing. As for the rest of the materials — the plastic bags and packages that ship with online orders, the plastic hangers that we throw out because we don’t need any more, the polyethylene shopping bags that hold our new purchases from the moment we check out until the moment we toss them out — the time it will take for the inorganic substances to actually disappear is longer than the time it will take for generations to die out.
This is a serious concern. The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world. Even aside from the real-time negative impacts of a consumer-driven, environmentally indifferent fashion supply chain (like water pollution and deforestation), the impacts the industry has had on the planet could become even more dangerous over time. According to scientific consensus, if we don’t stop doing what we’re doing, we are going to reach a time when the earth simply won’t be able to support our lifestyles anymore. Beyond that, the planet won’t be able to support life as we know it.
I’m not here to tell you to stop buying clothes. There are, however, more sustainable ways to live a fashionable lifestyle. For one thing, we could all be more conscious of how much we buy, and how much we waste. Do you really need another white button-down shirt when you have eight more in your closet? If we as consumers would think before we buy, we could limit the scale of clothing manufacturing. In addition, some brands are already making efforts to eliminate toxins from their manufacturing processes and, in some cases, even incorporate recycled materials (like plastics removed from oceans) into “new” clothes. It is our responsibility to hold companies and ourselves accountable for the massive environmental footprint our clothes have left behind.
It’s time we all took the time to consider the true costs of fashion.
Kayla Beard is a senior studying journalism with a focus in web design at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. How do you feel about sustainable fashion? Let Kayla know by tweeting her @QKayK.
