Damage caused by our love of fast fashion

Fast fashion essentially means a lot of companies use cheap labour to manufacture cheap clothes, leading to the workers who produce it not being paid a fair wage.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact locations and factories it is made in, even the brands themselves. The screening of the documentary Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts revealed that the clothes are mainly produced by poorer people in factories, who are paid as little as £2.50 per day for making garments sometimes worth hundreds of pounds. 

Our fast fashion isn’t always produced in clean conditions on a production line, sweatshops are also a big producer of our beloved trends. Sweatshops are small factories, usually one room, where people sit for up to 18-hour long shifts and produce whole garments, unlike factories with a production line.

They are paid less than factory workers yet endure harsher conditions. Many of them sleep on the floor of the actual sweatshops as they cannot afford their own basic accommodation. 

The lowest level of garment producing ‘factories’ are found in slums.

There, it is common to find slums made up of unstable materials stacked on top of each other and within them there are workers producing clothes. The conditions are dirty and unhygienic as many of the slums have raw sewage flowing through them making it an unsafe and unethical workspace. Furthermore, many of the employers in the slum also employ children as there are very loose laws surrounding child labour in less fortunate countries meaning they are cheap to employ and can do intricate sewing on garments as they have small hands.

What effects does fast fashion have globally? 

Fashion has been classed as the second most polluting industry on earth, after oil, with its worth being $2.5 trillion.

Fast fashion is also a significant user of cheap, toxic textiles dyes, causing an environmentally negative impact of clean water globally, making it also the second biggest polluter of water, right behind agriculture.

The speed at which garments are produced also means that more and more clothes are disposed of by consumers, creating an extensive amount of textile waste.

As well as this, 700 gallons of water is used to make ONE cotton shirt, an amount of water which could last a person 900 days.

It also takes 80 years for clothes to break down in the landfills and the fashion industry produces 10 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions every year.

What can we specifically do as consumers to help the problem?

The obvious things that we as consumers can do to help are, donating and buying from charity shops and second-hand websites, wearing clothes to their full potential, raising awareness on social media where there are many adverts for fast fashion websites and raising awareness in schools, as well as upcycling your clothing to give it a new life.

Key leaders of sustainability are second-hand clothing websites such as Depop, eBay and Gully Garms. eBay and Gully Garms are a great way to find and buy second hand and mostly great quality clothing for cheap prices (depending on the product)h. 

However, not everything on there is second hand, there are a lot more smaller companies appearing on Depop who sell brand new clothing and use the platform to get their business off the ground, where they don’t necessarily have to mention where they source their fabric from as well as who makes the garments, making it hard to know whether it is sustainable and ethical.

Burned sweatshop garment factory after fire disaster

Nevertheless, second-hand websites are still a great way to shop ethically and sustainably as well as with known sustainable companies such as Lucy and Yak, a small company based in Brighton, who pride themselves on being an ethical company due to the way they work with factories to help them gain certifications that will allow them to produce more sustainable clothing. As well as, having their factories become GOTS certified which provides evidence that the cotton is made sustainably and ethically by being audited by a third party.

However, it is important to acknowledge the argument that if we stop purchasing clothing from the companies who use poorer countries to produce their clothing, then we will force the workers who make it out of jobs.

Although this is partly true, instead of not buying the clothes completely, we as consumers should raise awareness to prompt brands through either social media or by campaigning, into paying those workers better wages to produce our cheap, fast fashion, rather than largely profiting on it themselves.

There have been many companies set up by people we can support, such as Minney Safia, the founder and CEO of ‘People Tree’. She has set up the Fairtrade company in Japan as a means of making sure ‘that at least some garment workers in Bangladesh and India could escape the horrors which are widespread in our fast-fashion profit-driven clothing industry’.

She ‘developed the first Fair Trade supply chains and helped to create social and organic standards to improve the lives of over 5,000 economically marginalized people in the developing world’.

UK MPs want the government to invest in more research and development to create more sustainable fabrics that have a lower environmental and social impact, and boost UK textile recycling facilities. They are also calling for a review of VAT rules which currently make it more cost-effective for companies to destroy unwanted clothing than give it away, and investment in skills to bring more clothes manufacturing jobs back to the UK.

Our love for cheap, fast fashion has caused huge impacts environmentally as well as towards the producers lives due to the pollution it causes and the low wages the workers are paid. If we do what we can, including brands, to collectively help the issue from the many options I have spoken about, there will be a huge difference in bettering our environment as well as the lives of the people who make it.