Hello ethical fashionistas! Today’s post will be quite different as I am going to be relooking at our responsibility as individuals in the fast fashion industry. In our previous post of ‘Thrifting as a Solution’, the post talks about how more responsibility should be placed on the companies in the fashion industry. Although I still stand by this opinion, in this post, we will look at ground up changes that people like you and I can do to turn the tide. If everyone were to start questioning the ethics behind the clothes we wear, a significant amount of changes can be enacted as individual actions are turning into a collective.
With the advent of globalisation, it has definitely brought the world closer to us. For example, we are able to import items from all over the world right to our doorstep. Unfortunately, the downside to this is that the effects and impacts that we have on the environment while we constantly consume these items are also being distanced from us too. For example in the textile industry as mentioned in the True Cost Documentary (a documentary shedding light on fast fashion), back in the 1960s, America used to make 95% of their clothing. However in the present day, 3% of these clothes are made in America while the rest is being outsourced to countries in Asia. This shows that the majority of the production processes of clothing is outsourced to other countries and most of them are the economically disadvantaged countries. Hence, it is easy to forget and not consider the impacts and effects that an item has on the environment and people. For example, 70% of global coal exploitation is involved in the international trade of goods yet it is not being accounted for as they are being embodied in the process (Wiedmann & Lenzen, 2018). Additionally, with the present consumerist culture we are living in, it is being perpetuated to us that the more we consume, the better we will feel about ourselves. Yet the burden of this rapid consumption is being shifted to places far away from us. At the end of the day, it will be a vicious cycle of rapid consumption and the destruction of the natural resources of our planet.
In the fast fashion industry, prices of clothes have fallen but the production process of these clothes remain the same. People in countries like India, Bangladesh, China etc are working in sweatshops for long hours and for very low wages. Additionally, they are working in unsafe working conditions in order to meet the demand for these clothes at such a cheap price. One example would be the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh which can be regarded as the deadliest disaster in the garment industry’s history (The New York Times, 2013). Specifically, the building collapse has taken away more than 1000 lives alone. This is just one example to show the perils of the fast fashion industry.
After all that has been said? What can an individual like you and I do? In this section, I would like to talk about dematerialisation. It is essentially the process of cutting down on the quantity of products consumed, and therefore the environmental costs of their production, transport, use and disposal, without affecting the quality of one’s life. Clothes as have been mentioned before, take up a massive amount of water to create. Even one pair of jeans takes up 10850L of virtual water to manufacture (Hoekstra & Chapagain, 2007). This is excluding the amount of actual water that will be used after the manufacturing phase. If one were to consume 4 pairs of jeans per year, this will essentially mean that 43,400L of virtual water will be consumed solely for the category of jeans. Imagine how many items an average consumer consumes per year, from a range of food to daily necessities to clothes, electronic products etc, the list goes on.
Hence, the main point of this post is to show that as consumers we should be more conscious of our consumption. I have to acknowledge that it is impossible to immediately cut out every aspect of our consumption. The key here is to consume more consciously. More often than not, the consumption now is that of frivolous material goods and is what underpins our lives. However, if we were to be more conscious about our consumption, we could possibly change our consumption to something more virtuous and ethical. The video below explains this very clearly and how consumerism even came about in the first place. Hope you will enjoy it!
References:
Hoekstra, A. Y., & Chapagain, A. K. (2007). Water footprints of nations: water use by people as a function of their consumption pattern. Water Resources Management, 21, 35-48.
The New York Times. (2013). Report on Deadly Factory Collapse in Bangladesh Finds Widespread Blame. Retrieved 5 October 2020 from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/report-on-bangladesh-building-collapse-finds-widespread-blame.html
Weidmann, T. & Lenzen, M. (2018) Environmental and social footprints of international trade. Nature Geoscience 11, 314-321
