Mainstream and online clothing outlets provide customers with chic, affordable approaches to style, and major savings. But at what cost?
Unfortunately, the cost, in part, is an extremely harsh impact on water, and a complex destructive impact on the environment.
The rise of fast fashion has grown significantly in the past three decades. It’s been reported that the production of clothing has doubled in the last fifteen years, due to a growing middle class worldwide. From 2000 to 2014, the average consumer increased their clothing purchasing by 60 percent. Contemporary business models have, as a result, had to constantly create new ways to deliver cheap clothes, in an ever-increasingly short fashion cycle.
This heightened demand invariably affects the environment. Manufacturing a pair of Levi’s jeans, for example, produces greenhouse gases at the same rate as driving a vehicle for 80 miles. That same pair of jeans? On average, it takes about 3,781 litres of water consumption to make, which translates to three days’ worth of a household’s water needs. For more eye-opening facts about the manufacture of fast fashion and blue jeans, in particular, watch RiverBlue, a documentary film which screened at the 2017 Water Docs Film Festival.
Without proper regulation, water waste will continue to climb, which only serves to create additional problems such as the emittance of more greenhouse gases. This is only evident in manufacturing, where 20 percent of industrial water pollution stems from the production process.
One of the main culprits of water waste, in relation to the fast fashion manufacturing process, is the consumption of cotton. Cotton accounts for about 30 percent of all textile fibre depletion and generally uses an abundance of water throughout apparel production. It takes 2,700 litres of water to make just one, basic cotton shirt. This is enough to meet the average person’s daily drinking water needs for two-and-a-half years.
Globally, the world uses five trillion litres of water annually for fabric dyeing, enough to fill two million Olympic-sized pools!
Matters only get worse in the post-purchasing process. For example, washing clothes, with regards to the current supply and demand for the fast fashion system, releases half a million tonnes of microfibers into our oceans annually.
Unfortunately, the trajectory for fast fashion apparel production only seems to be climbing. The World Resources Institute anticipates that, by 2030, the global middle class will increase to 5.4 billion from three billion in 2015. As such, the projected demand for clothes will require three times the amount of natural resources, such as water, to be used.
All this said - the current system of fast fashion is not at all sustainable, and requires serious transformation.
Corporations and relevant apparel businesses have to reconfigure the way fashion is produced. Both Ellen MacArthur and Stella McCartney, of the Ellen McArthur Foundation, have pitched the idea of a new textiles economy. This would, ideally, redesign the fast fashion industry with a positive vision, where garments are designed to last longer, be worn more, and prevent toxins and pollutions from being released. New materials would also have to be discovered and that would allow for new business models to take precedence.
By continuing the research and discourse of how water is being used at the expense of selling low-cost pieces of clothing, solutions are bound to arise.
For the most part, the answers are there. It’s just a matter of ensuring industries transform their practices and prioritize water sustainability methods in the future.