Fast Fashion, Fast Pollution
The American-style shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon was buzzing with crowd, everyone has their own agenda to get their shopping done. A certain store is particularly crowded with young women browsing through racks of trendy clothes straight from the recently concluded New York Fashion Week.
With prices as low as RM10, it was easy to fill one’s shopping basket. Shelves from floor to ceiling, and every corner filled with racks of clothes in multitude colours with fancy details and prints are bound to attract those who love fashion.
A trendy young woman in black skinny jeans and blue-and-white stripes blouse paired with a pair of high heeled boots walked into H&M with the intention to buy a pair of jeans, because, what is the jeans limit one person can have? The answer is never enough. The blonde-haired woman proceeded to check out the latest arrivals, which were conveniently located at the entrance of the store.
Even before she reached the jeans section, 29-year-old Sara Mohamed has an armful of blouses and skirts that she thought she needed. She proceeded to put them in a basket for easier shopping. Before she knows it, she had bought three blouses, two skirts, a dress, and a nail polish that she grabbed while queuing to pay but no pair of jeans.
Contributing to Pollution
While the fast fashion industry size is hard to gauge, the fashion industry in a whole is worth $1.2 trillion, with nearly a quarter of the spend coming from the United States. The fast fashion industry caters to affordable apparel aimed at young women who has an affinity with fashion. Famous fashion retailers such as H&M, Zara and Topshop produce new merchandise every two or three weeks with low prices that stimulates consumer’s impulse to purchase.
As a result, young and trendy fashion consumers will be influenced to buy more to keep up with the trend. This will result in overconsumption, which then will lead to disposal of excessive clothing.
With clothes so cheap and easily replaced, consumers are not thinking twice about the ways to dispose their clothes, which had probably been worn once or twice before the trend ship had sailed. And because the clothing is cheaply made, it is so easy for the fast fashion apparel’s quality to deteriorate after a few washes.
In Malaysia, the National Solid Waste Management Department found that the country is producing an estimated 8.4 million tons of waste per year. In 2012, the Peninsular Malaysia alone generated 25,000 metric tons of municipal solid waste daily and textile waste constituted 4 per cent of the total waste, which is equivalent to about 1,000 metric tons of textile waste per day and the number is continuously increasing.
This number is not just in Malaysia. Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year, and clothing and other textiles represent about 4 per cent of the municipal solid waste and this figure is also rapidly growing.
The rise of fashion globalisation
To look into why this buy-and-trash culture is evolving, we must look into how the fast fashion scene came about. In the last 30 years, the textile manufacturing industry has moved to less developed countries. China’s rapid growth over the last two decades has been largely contributed by its textile producing and exporting industry, with the top export goods including clothes, clothing accessories, textile yarns and textile articles.
In 2015, China emerged as number one in global textile exporter with a value of approximately USD 109 million with almost 35 per cent of the global market share. China’s offerings of low cost and vast labor, reduced commercial barriers and material supply availability are advantageous for the clothing manufacturing industry.
India is among the top three textile producing countries in the world with its market value of USD 18 million dollars in 2014. The South Asia country is also a leading cotton producing country, where in the 2014-2015 period, the cotton production in India amounted to around 6.4 million metric tons, just a hundred thousand less than China, the top producer.
Take a quick look at the label on your clothes. Most probably it was made in China or Bangladesh. Depending on the type of material, some brands are made in Morocco or Turkey. It is not uncommon for a fashion brand to produce their items from different parts of the world.
The fashion industry is competitive and coupled with inflation, the price tag to keep on producing materials while making profit is getting tougher. Top fashion companies such as Marks & Spencer and Zara, which used to source domestically have even expanded their sourcing strategies to countries such as China, India, Bangladesh, Morocco and Turkey to find manufacturers that can comply to their rigid requirement and standards.
Shifting the sourcing and production into less developed countries can ensure these fast fashion companies to sell their items with low prices but still making high profit. Low production cost can also mean low clothing quality.
Disposing Clothes
It was when she tried to unsuccessfully close the wardrobe doors that she realised she has too many clothes.
“It’s time to sort out this mess,” she thought.
Sara recently finished reading the best-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up book by Japanese minimalism guru Marie Kondo. She felt inspired to downsize her bursting closet of clothes so she set off to start decluttering.
Following Kondo’s first step of getting everything out in the open, Sara took every item available in her wardrobe and dumped them on her bed. Taking each item in both of her hands, instead of asking herself, “Does this brings me happiness?” as per Kondo’s book, she looked at her clothes and to her dismay, found out that the clothes have either been ripped apart or have looked old.
“I am what you can call a fashionista. I love clothes and I try to keep up with the trend. My favourite brands are H&M, Forever21 and Zara. These brands are usually affordable and I can easily keep up with the latest fashion,” confessed the social media manager.
“In my line of work, I have to be presentable all the time as I am meeting clients on a daily basis. I cannot afford high-end brands, and fast fashion is my go-to whenever I need to pick up something new for an event or something,” she said.
At the end of her decluttering session, Sara had stuffed her unwanted, out of season clothes into five big black trash bags. She had thought of donating her clothes to charity shops or even tried to sell them online, but figured it will not have a high resale value.
“When you bought something that is already cheap, you can’t expect to sell it half of the price. It won’t make sense and no one would buy it,” she reasoned.
So she decided to donate her clothes that could still be worn to a nearby charity home.
Recycling Textiles
A recent study on the clothing disposal behaviour among Malaysians done by University of Science Malaysia found out that almost 79.5 per cent Malaysians prefer to donate their unwanted clothes to charity houses or prefer to give them away to others.
The study learned that sustainable clothing disposal behaviour among young consumers in Malaysia is influenced by philanthropic motive, instead of environmental factor. However, when the consumer has a positive attitude towards clothing disposal, they are more likely to dispose clothes in a more sustainable manner.
Clothes that did not make it to charity homes or friend’s closets go inside the recycling bin. In Malaysia, the clothes that you discarded into a recycling container would most probably end up at the Brackwell Malaysia factory in Port Klang, Selangor. This company specialises in recycling used apparel and household textiles.
Chris Hughes, the company’s marketing director told The Star that they received at least 60 per cent of what arrived at the factory are wearable items, and some 40 percent are recycled. The factory export some 300 tonnes of usable items to Africa as well as India, Pakistan and the Pacific Islands where the people could not afford new clothing as often as Malaysians.
“It’s not possible to recycle everything, so we do have some waste but we try to keep that to below 2 per cent,” said Hughes.
Recycling textiles may sound better than straightaway dumping old clothes to the landfill, but even natural fibres like cotton, linen and silk can produce potent greenhouse gas methane as they degrade.
Contributing to Pollution
Natural materials can’t go through compost even though they were made of natural fibres. Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition told Newsweek that natural fibres go through a lot of unnatural processes such as bleaching, dyed, printed on, and scoured in chemical baths on their way to becoming clothing.
“Burning clothes in incinerators can release toxins into the air,” he said.
The rise in the fashion industry leads to the demand for man-made fibres, especially polyester. Polyester is a synthetic fibre derived from coal, air, water, and petroleum and is very cheap to produce. Again, check the label on your clothes - most of our clothing these days have a certain percentage of polyester.
The manufacturing process of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is that it is an energy-intensive process that releases hazardous waste which affects the environment. Polyester is essentially a type of plastic and will take thousands of years to biodegrade. Not only man-made fabrics contributed to pollution, but also natural fibre such as cotton. Cotton-producing countries such as the United States and India used a huge amount of pesticides that are not eco-friendly and cotton is a type of crop that is highly dependent on water.
Wearing only natural fibre will not make much changes either. Nikolay Anguelov, author of The Dirty Side of the Garment Industry, in his book said that fabric accounts for only 13 per cent of the cost of any piece of clothing, “so a switch doesn’t make much of a difference.”
The fashion industry’s carbon footprint is huge, only second to the oil industry. The toxic chemicals used in manufacturing clothes such as bleach and dyes can be potentially flowed into local water, emitted dangerous waste that could possibly affect the neighbouring environment.
Now that fast fashion companies are manufacturing outside their countries, there is a concern of the energy used for transportation. The produced clothing would have to be shipped by air, significantly increasing carbon dioxide emission.
Enter Greenwashing
A word modelled after whitewashing, greenwashing is a form of marketing tool that is used to promote an organisation’s products, aims or policies that are environmentally-friendly. It could be seen as how an organisation is spending more money and time on advertisements that it is being “green” than what they are actually spending on actual environmentally-friendly practices.
Consumers of the clothing industry are becoming more fashion and environmentally-conscious and these fast fashion companies have received enough backlash to launch sustainability programs.
Take H&M for example. The Swedish fashion giant introduced its Conscious Collection line in 2012. The annually-launched line featured clothes made from recycled polyester and organic cotton. The company clothed A-list celebrities in their Conscious Collection to market their brand and just recently, they collaborated with rapper M.I.A during World Recycle Week to encourage shoppers to bring their old, unwanted clothes to H&M stores, which they will recycle and use in new clothes.
In H&M 2016 Sustainability Report, its CEO, Karl-Johan Persson was quoted saying that the company is taking a circular approach to how fashion is made and used.
“That includes a more effective use of resources, support of innovations within recycling technologies as well as an increased use of existing or new sustainable materials,” he said.
The report showed that in 2016, H&M used 26 per cent recycled or sustainably-sourced materials and that they are the second largest user of recycled polyester.
But how does a company, which produced over 600 million new garments each year, be sustainable despite their best efforts? Fast fashion companies are dependent on a strategy of planned obsolescence, a purposely implemented strategy that ensures the current fashion trend will soon become out-of-date. This will guarantee that consumers will demand new trend in the future, thus naturally supporting demand.
H&M practically invented fast fashion. With their current trend-cycle of catapulting two to four seasons per year into 52 seasons per year, it goes without saying that most of the clothes will end up in the landfills, as shown in the statistics above.
Some may criticised this article by saying that at least H&M is doing something for the environment. Since 2013, the company has collected close to 40,000 tons of used clothes to be recycled and they are aiming to collect at least 20,000 tons in 2020. H&M also offers 15% discount voucher for shoppers who brings back unwanted clothes to the store, which will encourage more spending. It is a marketing tool that seemed to be working for the company as they are also making profit out of this practice.
The Guardian sustainability journalist Lucy Siegle in her article ‘Am I a fool to expect more than corporate greenwashing?’ Published in April 2016 said that it would probably take H&M 12 years to use up 1,000 tons of fashion waste.
“Meanwhile if 1,000 tons is recycled, that roughly equates to the same amount of clothes a brand of this size pumps out into the world in 48 hours,” she wrote.
Restructuring Business Model
The fast fashion eco-friendly programs are not helping to create less pollution. It might be a minor improvement, especially with them lessening the waste in landfills, but ultimately, the problem lies in their business model. As long as the business model is unsustainable, fast fashion will never be sustainable.