Compiled and written by Natalie Walsh, a sustainability focused designer.
Quick Links:
Impacts of the Fashion Industry
Sustainable Fashion Tips & What you Can Do
Local Bay Area Repair, Sewing, and Creative Resources
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Repair is protest. Repair is love.
It’s a small act of resistance.
Against consumerism. Against overproduction. Against our unsustainable and exploitative culture of disposability.
It’s also an act of love.
For the materials that comprise it, and their cultivation. For the countless hands who made the garment, generally underpaid and overworked.
I repair to honor them.
And I repair for me, as a way to fix something small in a broken world.
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A short synopsis of where the industry stands and where it’s going. This is to provide context for what you can do, and why you should care 😊.
The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry, contributing 8% of all carbon emissions and 20% of all global wastewater, with an anticipated 50% increase in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. ****Thanks to the rise of fast fashion, clothing production doubled in 15 years, and clothing consumption has increased at a similar rate while the number of wears per item has fallen 40%. Infrastructure to recycle textiles is still nascent and fractured, so currently most discarded clothing ends up in landfill, incinerated, or shipped to the global south.
Roughly 65% of textiles are made from synthetic petroleum based fabrics rather than natural fibers, and that too is on track to continue its rapid growth. In this way the fashion industry is directly supporting fossil fuel infrastructure, and all of its negative effects from the pollution at points of extraction to end of life concerns once clothing is discarded.
The fashion industry is highly exploitative on both ends of the fashion production pipeline.
On the production side, garment workers are rarely paid adequately it at all via forced labor, and often work in unsafe conditions. The most recent example of this was Rana Plaza, when over a thousand garment workers were killed due to gross negligence. Even clothing made in the USA is subject to dubious practices as a result of poorly enforced labor laws. To get involved in human rights focused fashion activism, Remake is a great organization.
On the disposal side, clothing from the global north rarely ends up finding a good home after it is discarded. Because of the proliferation of cheap clothing, many of the items donated to places like Goodwill are not sold, but rather shipped overseas. They end up in thriving second hand markets like Kantamando in Ghana at best, but more likely than not end up in landfill, the oceans, or incinerated creating a system of waste colonialism. Learn more from the Or Foundation.
There are many health impacts as a result of the fashion industry.