The problem of fast fashion

Viewers express their shock at the trash in the comments. One comment from user Sarah Corley on Tik Tok read: “I don’t understand why businesses throw away good stuff. I don’t understand why they can donate the trash. I’m glad you found this stuff and donated it.” And many more consumers clearly wonder how companies allow these policies to continue, where unused products are needlessly thrown away. But the issue is not new.

In fact, many brands such as H&M, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Eddie Baur and Coach have been called to this feature over the years. In the year In 2010, H&M was under fire for dropping and even destroying pounds and pounds of new merchandise can not at all Rescued by scuba divers. New York Times He broke the story and soon became the second The most tweeted topic on Twitter.

In the year In 2020, Victoria’s Secret is known for dropping hundreds of dollars on bras and underwear. At the time, a representative of the company said that after the closing of the store, there were discarded pieces of furniture. This trash is a symbol of the fast fashion industry.

Fast fashion refers to the constant release of low-quality clothing products at low prices. Clothes are produced not for seasonal repeated clothes, but based on the fast changing trends in the fashion world, which should be worn only as long as they are in clothes. Items are priced so low that it’s hard for consumers to say no, and it’s easy to constantly cycle through less-than-ideal pieces from their closets for new and exciting styles.

Since the first scandals in the 2010s, the fast fashion industry has continued to grow. But has the industry changed practices at all?

According to H&M, at least when it comes to disposal they have it. In the year In 2020, H&M published the Sustainability Performance Report, which includes reports from all brands under the H&M Group, Weekday, H&M Home, Arket and others. The report indicated that H&M Group works on reducing operational waste, production waste and defective products. In the year In 2019, “92 percent of the waste handled in the H&M Group’s distribution centers is reused or recycled,” he said in 2019 and expressed concern about clothing waste, boasting that “we never send clothes to landfill and in very few cases destroy them.” There is no other option.” Items that degrade are typically incinerated. In the same report, H&M has set a goal of using 30 percent recycled materials by 2025.

In a recent statement Earth Island JournalAn H&M representative reinforced this message: “We would like to stress that under no circumstances should unsold clothing be destroyed.”

The company seems to have changed other practices as well. In January of this year Fast company H&M has announced a new environmental protocol that includes recycling unsold clothing, offering vouchers to return used clothing, and donating sustainably produced clothing. It looks like H&M is trying to solve the problem of fashion pollution in its production force – or at least it’s trying to make things look that way.

Other brands seem to be rethinking their models as well. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gucci creative director designer Alessandro Michele has revealed that the brand will focus on just two seasons of the year to limit waste. So far, Gucci is the only major high-end retailer to make non-trendy clothes sustainable, but it could be a step in the right direction.

This does not mean that the practice of discarding and destroying unsold goods has ended. In 2021, a British news outlet reported that an Amazon warehouse in Scotland was throwing away millions of items a year. And if Tik Tok videos are to be believed, department stores, malls and pet stores around the world are still throwing away and even destroying products. A 2021 video shows boxes and boxes of new shoes that have been cut or shredded so that people don’t reuse them. It’s something the Nike store has been doing for years.

One of the reasons these retailers destroy perfectly good products is because it costs money to send the clothes to clothing recovery centers where they can be turned into recyclable fibers. Another push to create an artificial scarcity mentality on their buyers is to keep their “buy it before it’s gone” business model and keep people from expecting unused products for free.

Of course, it’s not just unsold clothes that get thrown away. Consumers throw away large amounts of lightly worn clothing each year. The Environmental Protection Agency began tracking and recycling data on clothing and shoe waste in the 1960s. The amount of waste has grown exponentially over the past 60 years, but a noticeable jump since 1990 can be seen in this graph. Fast fashion, incidentally, also became a household word in the 1990s. In the year In 2018, the most recent data available, the US generated about 13 million tons of new clothing and footwear waste, and about 9 million tons ended up in landfills. The rest is recycled or incinerated. That year Compare that to 1.36 million tons of clothing and shoe waste in 1960. During that time, the US population nearly doubled, but clothing waste increased tenfold.

The environmental damage of this waste goes beyond the landfill. By some estimates, the fashion industry is responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Textile production requires a large amount of water and causes significant water pollution. One of the main microplastics polluting our oceans is laundry detergent. When fast fashion brands use cheap fabrics made from fibers like acrylic and polyester, even if the clothes are reused and recycled, those microplastics end up in the ocean.