Fast fashion is the rapid production of items like clothing, jewelry, handbags, and other accessories. Brands that are considered fast fashion would be Shein, Temu, H&M, and many others. Fast fashion often uses very poor-quality materials in order to keep up with rapid production. These items have a very short lifetime and ultimately end up filling landfills.
Fast fashion uses cheaper materials like acrylic, crude oil, nylon, polyester, and rayon. Instead of making jeans with 100% cotton denim, they use a mix of cotton and elastane. These materials make it so that clothes only last a few wears, but take hundreds of years to biodegrade. According to Earth.org, The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics, “Clothing sales doubled from 100 to 200 billion units a year, while the average number of times an item was worn decreased by 36% overall.”
Due to this increase in cheap garments with short lifetimes, landfills have been overflowing. According to the U.S Government Accountability Office, Fast Fashion—Great for Your Wallet, Costly for the Planet, 66% of discarded textiles ended up in landfills. 60% of these contain microplastics, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“I don’t like it, I think that your clothes should not end up in a landfill faster than it takes to ship to you,” English teacher Ms. Kylee Wheeler said.
The average number of business days it takes for Shein to ship and deliver is 7-12. The average number of wears an item gets would be 7 wears according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It takes a minimum of 7 days to arrive and 7 wears for it to be discarded. Big companies like Shein encourage this short lifetime in order for customers to buy new items more in style, as replacements.
Fast fashion is a significant source of pollution and the second-largest consumer of water according to Earth.org. Excess product from things like textile dyeing is often dumped into ditches and rivers, resulting in even further pollution. When the microplastics in the garments begin to break down, they indirectly release gases like methane into the air and deposit microplastics into the soil. Those microplastics find their way into the water and rapidly pollute everything around them. The pollution is not just contained in the soil in the landfills but spreads due to rivers and other water sources.
“It’s a reasonable price for the clothing, but the labor doesn’t match the pay,” Junior Kallie Lai said.
Fast fashion also exploits its workers. According to the World Sources Institute, 75 million people make clothes, and 80% of those workers are younger women, ages 18 to 24. Despite these companies making billions of dollars, they refuse to pay their workers a fair wage. Garment workers in Bangladesh make 96 dollars per month. The Government’s wage board suggested that garment workers would need 3.5 times that in order to live a basic, decent life.
“I don’t like how they’re making children work,” Sophomore Kamihya Homa said.
A 2018 U.S Department of Labor report found evidence of not only forced labor but child labor as well in several countries, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam, and other countries. Children are often exploited because they can be paid much less than a living wage. They are also able to force them to work due to their inability to speak up for themselves.
Fast fashion deposits greenhouse gases and microplastics into the atmosphere, soil, and water. The clothing is made of cheap, nondurable materials that fall apart after only a few wears, but take hundreds of years to biodegrade. Fast fashion companies exploit their workers, not paying them nearly enough to live a healthy, enjoyable life, and they force children to work for their benefit. These companies, which make billions of dollars, refuse to pay their workers despite having the funds for it. Fast fashion is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and morally not okay.
