The High Environmental Cost of Fast Fashion

Those cheap jeans at H&M and the discount skirts at Forever 21 come at a very high cost to the environment. A report by Greenpeace Germany released before Black Friday, that infamous shopping day where consumers descend on stores in droves looking for deals, looks at the environmental cost of fast fashion.

The fast fashion industry is expanding rapidly. From 2000 to 2014, clothing production doubled, and sales rose from $1 trillion in 2002 to $1.8 trillion in 2015. They're forecast to hit $2.1 trillion by 2025. The average consumer now buys 60 percent more clothing items a year and keeps them for about half as long as 15 years ago. What that means is a huge volume of textile waste.

The environmental impacts of fast fashion range from chemicals used to produce textiles, which can pollute rivers and oceans, to high levels of both pesticide and energy use.

One of the biggest environmental costs associated with fast fashion comes from the use of synthetic fibers, which is rapidly increasing. Take polyester, which emits almost three times more carbon dioxide in its lifecycle than cotton.

Polyester is present in 60 percent of today’s clothing, and it can take decades to degrade. About 21.3 million tons of polyester was used in clothing this year, a 157 percent increase from 2000. Fossil fuels are needed to produce polyester, and the material's carbon footprint is almost three times that of cotton.

Since the 1980s, fashion retailers have been increasing the turnaround of fashion trends, which in turn increases the rate consumers throw away clothes. The life cycles of consumer products shortened by 50 percent from 1992 to 2002. But the current fast fashion phenomenon really began at the beginning of this century. Brands like Zara and H&M have seen what Greenpeace terms an “explosive expansion” since 2000 to become the biggest clothes retailers on the planet. And the fast fashion brands like these promote “leads to increased consumption of all clothes, including budget and basic items,” according to the report.

Solutions to the environmental problems of fast fashion

A McKinsey report released earlier this fall lists steps that both consumers and companies can take to make fast fashion more sustainable:

• Develop standards and practices for designing clothing items that can be easily reused or recycled.


• Invest in developing new fibers that will lower the environmental impact of making textiles.


• Encourage consumers to care for their clothes in ways that will prolong their use such as washing them in cold water.

The group said consumers must also slow down their rate of buying clothes by “focusing on the clothes that are needed and re-thinking the systems used to supply them, taking in all stages from their design to their re-use or recycling."

Creating a circular economy for fast fashion “is a fundamental component to a more sustainable industry,” Tamsin Lejeune, founder of the Ethical Fashion Forum (EFF) and CEO of Mysource, wrote in a blog post. But it only treats the “symptoms of the problem,” such as waste, and not the source. And that is “our addiction to buying and selling vast quantities of low cost products.” 

To address that problem, consumers need to be wiser in their purchases and companies need to re-think the strategy of turning out as many clothing items as they can.

Image credit: Flickr/Elvert Barnes