In the Era of “Fast Fashion,” New Research Reveals the Environmental Toll of Trendiness – The Debrief

In a world of ever-changing trends and constantly updated styles, it’s no surprise that people buy more clothes to keep their look fresh and up-to-date. According to the World Economic Forum, clothing purchases increased by 60% from 2000 to 2014, doubling clothing production since 2000. While fashion has been a part of human society since antiquity, recycling clothes is trickier than expected, and unfortunately, this challenge makes the fashion industry highly pollutive. Approximately one garbage truck full of clothes is dumped into a landfill or trash pile every second.

To understand the challenges around recycling clothes, researchers from the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, the University of Georgia, and Buffalo State University collaborated to examine various active wear (a type of fashion) companies worldwide, seeing if their location impacted how easy or hard it was to recycle clothes. Their findings were published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society.

“Activewear is an area of the fashion market that is growing dramatically as consumers become more aware of healthy lifestyles,” explained Professor John Bryson, Chair in Enterprise and Economic Geography at Birmingham Business School and a researcher on the study, in a press release. “Often these products and brands associate themselves with a broader environmental ethic – such as encouraging consumers to have a closer relationship with nature, which can be reflected in product advertising.”

Why is Fashion so Pollutive?

Experts have found that the fashion industry is responsible for around 8-10% of global emissions, as clothing factories require large amounts of energy to run and produce a lot of gases in the process.

Part of the reason for this high level of emission is due to “fast fashion,” a term that characterizes the fast turnover in clothing trends and the push for consumers to buy cheap, mass-produced clothing. Brands like Shein or Temu, both Chinese-based companies, are prime examples of fast-fashion businesses, as their factories quickly produce hundreds of items, which can be shipped overseas to fulfill the “instant gratification” consumerism culture, specifically in the U.S. Temu specifically caters to the “fast-fashion” culture, as its slogan: “shop like a billionaire,” suggests high-end but, in reality, cheaply made products for online shoppers.

Unfortunately, to continually produce new items, the fashion industry requires a lot of raw materials, including around 2.5% of the world’s total farmable land, about 342 million barrels of oil every year, and around 43 million tons of chemicals needed for dying clothes.

Because of the fast-fashion trend, individuals often buy more clothes than they need, causing many to throw away older threads or continue collecting new items until their wardrobe is overflowing.

Some companies have tried to decrease their fashion footprint by producing recycled clothing or offering consumer recycling programs. However, as researchers saw in the mentioned study, not all of these programs were created equal.

Recycling Comes Down to Location

“For our study, we examined 17 ‘eco-friendly’ activewear companies based in Europe and the US that had a post-consumer circular economy policy, such as returning clothing for mending, store credit, recycling or donation,” elaborated Bryson in the press release. “We wanted to see how geography impacted these ‘Waste Reduction Networks.’ These networks might be configured locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally.”

From their analysis, the researchers saw key differences in the companies’ Waste Reduction Networks, from customers getting store credit for recycling clothes to companies creating new clothes out of recycled items.

However, because customers could only recycle their clothing in person at a store near them, this limited the scalability of these recycling networks and offset the companies’ carbon footprints, as many of the companies studied also shipped domestically and internationally.

“It is not practical to think that a customer in the UK is going to pay for something to be sent all the way to Colorado, which would have an environmental impact,” added Professor Vida Vanchan, one of the researchers on the study. “These Waste Reduction Networks are only really effective for those who can easily access them.”

Moving Fashion Forward Sustainably

Besides implementing local recycling networks, the researchers suggested that companies could deal with international limitations by offering guides for consumers to mend or repair their own products.

“One way to help bridge this gap could be to work with intermediaries like e-Bay, Vinted or Depop which have enjoyed huge popularity with eco-conscious consumers.,” said Bryson. “Company-led post-consumer product initiatives need to be supplemented by investments in waste management systems that ensure that most of the clothing is recycled rather than landfilled, which will likely need support from government. These initiatives are to be welcomed, but they need to be more accessible to meet the scale of the environmental problem caused by waste clothing.”

The change ultimately has to come from the consumer, who can influence a shift in the fast fashion trend. Instead of buying the latest styles, consumers can make more environmentally friendly decisions by buying used clothes from thrift stores or recycled clothing.

While this may not make much of an environmental impact individually, consumers can collectively leverage their buying power for the better in ways that helps protect our environment, and our future.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry is the Science Communicator at JILA (a world-leading physics research institute) and a science writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with her on X or contact her via email at kenna@thedebrief.org