Hello and welcome back to Fashion Poll-ice! Today’s blog will be the first of our water pollution section and I will be covering one of the causes of water pollution due to fast fashion!
Fashion has become an important aspect for almost everyone nowadays and it is normal that you would want to keep up with the trends. This created a new industry which is fast fashion. The fast fashion industry has adopted a business model that has allowed “recurring consumption and impulse buying, instilling a sense of urgency when purchasing” (Niinimäki et al., 2020, p. 189) in which the production and consumption have significantly increased over the years. The fast fashion industry releases tonnes of pollution into the environment and it has multiple causes, leading to stresses in the environment. Before discussing the causes of water pollution due to fast fashion further, let us look at the manufacturing processes in making clothes first.
Clothes would have to go through processes like dyeing, bleaching and so on, as seen in Figure 1. These processes create lots of chemicals that are harmful to the environment through the change in the pH of the river, as well as producing substances that alter the biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) (Saran, Kumar & Yadav, 2019). These chemicals which are also known as textile wastewaters is defined by Saran, Kumar and Yadav (2019) as “characterized by high color, organic loads, and toxicity levels”. There will be traces of toxins in the chemical waste and the factories are supposed to process the chemicals before releasing them into the water bodies around it. However, factories would usually not process these chemical wastes that contain these toxins. Instead, these toxins that have exceeded the normal regulations would be dumped into the local rivers, causing permanent harm to the environment (Nabeerasool, 2019).
A possible reason that a factory would not be processing the chemical wastes could be due to the low-cost production process. To elaborate, factories do not have spare funds to process the waste before releasing them into the rivers (Niinimäki et al., 2020). It is therefore important to realise the damage that fast fashion brings from the continuous consumption of the clothes as it will only continue to result in more chemical wastes being produced and potentially result in continuous water pollution in the rivers.
After looking at one of the causes of water pollution by fast fashion, we now have to understand how the chemical waste from textile production could pose danger to those who depend on that river. This section will be covered in our next blog post, so do look out for it!
Hope to have you here next time!
References
Niinimäki, K., Peters, G., Dahlbo, H., Perry, P., Rissanen, T., & Gwilt, A. (2020). The environmental price of fast fashion. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 1(4), 189-200. doi:10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9
Nabeerasool, A. (2019). How is fast fashion polluting our water?. Retrieved 21 August 2020, from https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/how-is-fast-fashion-polluting-our-water/77704/
Saran, R., Kumar, R., & Yadav, S. (2019). Environmental Issues in Textiles. Advanced Functional Textiles And Polymers, 129-151. doi: 10.1002/9781119605843.ch5
