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Essay on impact of fast fashion
Essay on impact of fast fashion
Impacts of fast fashion and technology
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Many people are aware that most things nowadays are manufactured overseas; however, there isn’t much thought about what it takes to produce the simple things we buy and use every day. A basic shirt purchased at a low price has priceless consequences. The fast fashion industry is growing rapidly and offers a continuous cycle of cheap garments designed for the dump. In the film Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard explains the linear process from extraction to disposal that applies to the fast fashion industry that affects the environment, production workers, and the amount of consumer waste.
The environmental impact of making textiles and clothing is damaging to natural resources and is unsustainable. Buying a cotton shirt seems like a good choice to most consumers because its material is produced from a plant. What people don’t know is that cotton is the world’s dirtiest crop due to the heavy use of insecticides and pesticides. “Cotton covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land yet uses 16% of the world's insecticides, more than any other single major crop” (Organic Trade Association, 2011). In addition to the ground pollution from crop production, coal burning factories and textile mills leach chemicals into the air and water. As Leonard (2007) discusses, the factories being built overseas not only pollute their water, land, and air but pollution also ends up coming back in water and wind currents. Water is contaminated with countless toxic chemicals and used in excess to grow and produce textiles for clothing production. A great example of this abundant waste is that one t-shirt requires 2,700 litres of water to produce. Fast fashion is damaging the environment on a global scale and that is just the beginning of this flawed system.
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...oices and “vote with my dollar” to make a small change. There are many ways to recycle, upcycle, and renew old clothing that could make a small difference such as donating, buying second-hand or vintage clothing, altering and updating, and using old materials for rags. As Beth Greer (2013) outlines in her article “The Truth About the Clothes We Wear,” we should look for “organic cotton and fair trade products, avoid polyester and nylon because they are made from petroleum, and avoid any garment that is advertised as being anti-shrink, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antistatic, anti-odor, anti-flame, anti-wrinkle, or anti-stain. These all contain chemicals not tested for safety on humans.” Unfortunately it will still take decades before there is enough change to start reducing the amount of damage created by this industry but I hope to see this change in my lifetime.
When you go to the mall to pick up a pair of jeans or a shirt, do you think about where they came from? How they were made? Who made them? Most consumers are unaware of where their clothes are coming from. All the consumer is responsible for is buying the clothing from the store and most likely have little to no knowledge about how it was manufactured, transported, or even who made the clothing item and the amount of intensive labor that went into producing it (Timmerman, 3).
In China, Kelsey Timmerman spent time with a couple who worked at the Teva factory, traveled to the countryside to meet the couple’s son, insert name, who hasn’t seen his parents in three years due to his parents working long hours and it being expensive to take a train ride. In the US, the author visited one of a few clothing factories in the US to talk to the workers about his shorts, and the decrease of American garment factories. Timmerman wants the consumer to be more engaged and more thoughtful when mindlessly buying clothes. By researching how well the brands you want to buy from monitor their factories and what their code of ethics details, you can make a sound decision on if this is where you would want to buy your clothes. The author writes about brands that improve employers lives like SoleRebels, a shoe company who employs workers and gives them health insurance, school funds for their children, and six months of maternity leave. Brands like soleRebels that give workers benefits most factory workers have never even heard of help improve the lives of garment workers and future generations. From reading this book, Timmerman wants us to be more educated about the lives of garment workers, bridge the gap between consumers and manufacturers, and be a more engaged and mindful consumer when purchasing our
The e-waste trade is an exploitative industry in which electronics, circuit boards, old TV’s and desktops that are of no more value, get dumped into third world countries such as Ghana, Vietnam, Malaysia, Pakistan, Hong Kong, and many others. The people of these third world countries than burn the electronics in order to collect the remains and scraps of copper and iron that can be sold for money. The smell and burning smolder of plastic from the computers and old TV’s are incredibly toxic, slowly killing the children, women, and men that burn these e-waste remains in order to create a living for themselves. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim all have theories that can be applied and related to this trade of e-waste. Adam Smith’s theory
While climbing up the social hierarchy through the lavish purchasing of clothing, many Americans are inadvertently promoting inhumane wages and working conditions for millions of garment factory workers. In the Conditioning Center, the elementary class repeats, “We always throw away old clothes”. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better.” (35).
In Packer’s essay, the used clothes are selling in a higher price in Uganda than they were bought from the Thrift Shop, and that is where the profits coming from. Natelie L. Hoang from Claremont College pointed out that used clothing is increasingly becoming the major source of garments in many African nations. In Uganda in particular, they account for 81% of the country’s total clothing purchases. BBC News stated that the imported clothes are so cheap that the local textiles factories and self-employed tailors can't compete, so they either close down or don't do as well as they could. Therefore, the local government tries to ban second-hand clothes, because they want to give a boost to local manufacturing, and help the
As a country becomes more involved in industrial movements, it results in creating more waste than usual and sometimes it runs out of space to...
As a majority of T-shirts are produced from cotton materials, they have large impacts on the environment. According to National Geographic (Jan 15, 2013), cotton requires 2,700 litres of water to be grown and produced alone, before being manufactured and transported to clothing stores, and eventually in your possession. Not
The planet earth as we know it had become completely trashed thanks to humankind, and the focus on technology and consumerism caused this issue to be too much that could ever be cleaned up. Buy-n-Large was the major corporation that caused the major focus on consumerism and less attention towards the planet, and their plan to “clean up earth again” while the humans were away on a cruise failed leaving the humans on the space ship in space for hundreds of years. The Buy-N-Large corporation had become so vital to everyone’s way of life, it was socially unacceptable to not be apart of it. This dependance on this corporation made people blind to the effect it was having on the environment. In Bodil Birkebæk Olesen’s article “When Blue Jeans Went Green”, Olesen explains the American social importance to cotton made denim jeans, this parallels the reliance the people in Wall-E had on Buy-N-Large in that their obsession is very similar. Olesen concluded with somewhat of the same warning Wall-E gave, if people don’t learn to give up some of the things that are important to them that are destroying the environment, the planet will suffer. While technology was supposed to be a positive thing by cleaning up all of the trash and allowing the human’s a place to live, the effects of
...d up in Salvation Army bins. The U.S. textile recycling industry enables Africans to dress well for very little money. In 2003, used clothing was by far America’s largest export to Tanzania, and it ranked fourth worldwide as a customer for America’s castoffs, with competition from countries such as Beijing, and the Republic of the Congo.”
Globalization and industrialization contribute to the existence of sweatshops, which are where garments are made cheaply, because they are moving production and consumption of those cheap goods. Industrialization has enabled for global distribution, to exchange those goods around the world. They can also set apart the circumstances of consumption and production, which Western countries as mass consumers, are protected from of producers in less developed countries. These factories are usually located in less developed countries and face worker exploitation and changes in social structures. Technological innovation allows for machines to take the place of workers and do all the dirty work instead of workers doing hours of hard work by hand.
2010: H&M becomes the world’s largest consumer of organic cotton and continues to increase its use of sustainable materials in the following years.
It is certain that people are getting more used to wasting products that are still reliable to use and, especially in fashion, not that many people are aware of the concept of sustainability. Although concept of recycling paper, plastic and glass has now spread a cross the states, people still doesn’t know how to recycle or reuse their clothing. “65 pounds of clothing and textiles a year are improperly discarded and only an eight of that goes to charities for reuse [1].” This indicates how unaware people are when it comes to taking care of their garments. Or rather, the way in which fast fashion industry promotes the value of cloth is very low, and it is because the fashion industry wants people to get rid of their clothing as soon as possible in order to sell their new colle...
Claudio, Luz. "Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry." Environmental Health Perspectives 115.9 (2007): A453-A454. Jstor. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Mostly when new footwear models are introduced to the market, they generally cause higher-than-average amount of waste during the production process (Nike Inc., 2016a, p. 38). Furthermore, some materials, for example leather in the textile industry, are in general difficult to recycle. According to Ramamoorthy et al. (2017, p. 1) even though companies try to recycle cotton/polyester blend woven fabrics after end of life, most of the fabrics end up in landfills. The problem of blend fabrics is that their fibre arrangement are often too complex to be separated economically for reuse. Furthermore, Nike uses over 16,000 different materials in their products, which makes the recycling process of each material used very complex (Nike Inc., 2016a, p. XXX). Therefore, it is reasonable that the company focuses on recycling the most frequently used materials that can be found in 98 percent of the products, namely leather, polyester, cotton and synthetic leather as sustainable materials are the greatest innovation challenge for
Sustainable fashion offers various benefits to both the consumer and the entire environment. For instance, it is noted that the entire process of sustainable fashion is worthy for the globe. In most cases, the fashion industry leaves behind a huge environmental imprint ranging from the pesticides in growing cotton to the landfill impact of clothes that wear out and the energy needed to manufacture every piece. Therefore, deciding on organic fibers or sustainable fabrics made from bamboo can also reduce the quantity of carbon emitted and chemicals brought into people`s lives. This shows how sustainable fashion if embraced can bring benefits to the consumer, the producer, and to the environment, which is very vital for future generations. Selecting clothes that contain the label “fair trade act,” during purchase emphasizes on sustainability in numerous ways. The first thing is that, it guarantees that the product was produced under safe working conditions. Further, it signifies that the person who produced it earned a fair wage since it is sweatshop free (Hethorn 123). The act of purchasing clothes considered as “fair trade” confirms that individuals and places mean more than the organization`s fundamental reason for its