Do You Know The Real Cost Of Your Wardrobes?
The need to dress up to be unique is old as the tribes from the 12th century. The need to show your status in how you dress is set into us as a society and enables us to show our worth and success on the outside.
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.(Miuccia Prada)
Miuccia Prada reflects in one sentence, the importance of the fashion industry. Clothes today are more than fabric designed to fit us. However, there is a cost behind each dress, pair of jeans, shirt, and sock that goes unnoticed by most of us.
That is the cost to the environment.
Fast-fashion brands like ASOS, Bershka, Next, Primark, and Topshop made a great impact on the market. Producing stylish clothing at a low price leads to creating pieces not lasting for a long time. With over 60 percent of the fabric used being synthetics, these fibers end up in landfills and pollute our world.
According to figures from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), it takes 10,000 liters of water to make a pair of jeans, from the production of the cotton to the delivery of the final product to the store. That equates to the emission of around 33.4 kilograms of carbon equivalent which's the same as driving 69 miles in the average US car.
If that is for just one pair of jeans, imagine the environmental costs for everything in our wardrobes.
The following statistics, published by the UNEP and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, give us an idea:
- Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water (enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people)
- Around 20% of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment
- Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill
- The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030
- If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years
- Every year half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, which is the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The problem is that microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that every year some 500 billion USD in value is lost due to barely worn clothing, not donated, recycled, or ends up in a landfill.
To make the Fashion industry more sustainable, all actors must get involved, from designers to manufacturers, critics, and consumers.
Everybody must become aware of what we buy. Taking these small steps can help:
- Search for manufacturers that used sustainable criteria to make the clothing before buying
- Consider quality over quantity. Cheap clothing often doesn’t survive the wash cycle
- Buy only what you need. (you only use 25% of your closet)
- Buy second-hand clothing
- Be a smart laundry manager — wash full loads and use non-abrasive detergents, for example
- Repair clothing
- Be creative and recycle garments after they wear out
- Donate what you no longer use
