Fast fashion is a business model focused on quickly replicating and mass-producing trendy, cheap clothing to meet the rapidly changing trends and customer demands, meaning it's low quality and bad for the environment. It also means the workers making the clothes are paid pennies and most likely have a horrible/unsafe work environment.
Fast fashion creates lots of waste, the cheap quality clothing doesn't last long, meaning it's thrown away quickly. It affects the environment because of the landfill waste.
Dean Botham. Photo from litterbins.co.uk (not my photo!)
Other reasons its bad for the environment are:
- Water consumption
- Energy use (producing and transporting the items, contributing to greenhouse gases)
- Chemical Pollution (Chemicals used to dye the items, finish the items, etc contaminate our water)
- Carbon emissions (Production and transportation contribute to carbon emissions)
- Microplastic Pollution (Synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester etc is used a lot in fast fashion because its cheap, meaning when the items are washed, they shed microplastics, which then enter the waterways)
- Climate change, water pollution, microplastic pollution and recourse depletion.
There is so many other things I could list, but these are the main.
Check out greenpeace.org.uk/news/fast-fashion-climate-change-pollution-violence/ for more
Made By SG wants to reduce waste as much as possible, and here's how we do it:
SAVE YARN SCRAPS - they do not get thrown away. Depending on the size, they can be used in other projects. If unusable, they'll be saved and used as stuffing in plushies I make as personal projects or for my keyrings.
SHOP SECOND HAND - I make use of my local charity shops. I buy second-hand yarn from there for more unique projects, and I also buy fabric from them, which is used to line bags.
REUSE - If you've ordered a physical product from me before, you've probably seen it come in a reused box/bag. I always keep used packaging (if it's reusable) to be used again. A future goal of mine is to also invest in recyclable shipping bags and paper tape so that if I don't have anything to reuse, then I have those.
I hope you learnt something!