Why Fast Fashion Is Fueling a Growing Waste Crisis
Clip | 3m 48sVideo has Closed Captions
More clothes, lower quality and mounting environmental costs.
Americans now buy about four times as much clothing as they did four decades ago, fueling a global fast fashion industry with major environmental impacts. From textile waste and chemical pollution to microfibers and disposable trends, experts explain how the industry grew and why its footprint keeps expanding.
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Earth Focus is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal
Why Fast Fashion Is Fueling a Growing Waste Crisis
Clip | 3m 48sVideo has Closed Captions
Americans now buy about four times as much clothing as they did four decades ago, fueling a global fast fashion industry with major environmental impacts. From textile waste and chemical pollution to microfibers and disposable trends, experts explain how the industry grew and why its footprint keeps expanding.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipNarrator: Today, American consumers purchase roughly 4 times as much clothing as they did over 4 decades ago.
In Los Angeles alone, there are over 70 tons of textiles discarded annually.
Woman: 100 million pieces of garment are pushed out every single year.
And that doubles what it was in 2000, roughly.
Man: Fashion as an environmental problem is fairly recent.
It's gotten a lot of heat for waste that shows up in open dumps in the Atacama Desert in Chile, in West Africa.
If we do those lifecycle assessments of apparel and we get very consistent findings, the environmental hotspots are always material production, followed by what we call the use phase, which for apparel is basically washing and drying.
Man 2: The big issue is when we scale things up to the magnitude that we need for clothing our world population, that's where we get into some big problems.
There are many processes within the making of fabric, and there's also the question of new colors, new finishes.
All that requires having chemicals to be able to produce that.
You have to treat the fibers, adding chemicals, and then there's washing steps in between where those chemicals are synthetic or natural.
That has a significant impact on the environment.
There's a number of steps that modify the fiber surface so that you can actually have the dyes attach to the material.
As the fabric is being used and worn or even processed, they begin to shed these, these smaller particles.
So, these are materials that are being slowly released into the environment.
Narrator: To know how we got to fast fashion, we have to go back in time.
Prior to World War II, clothing production was still small-scale, happening in workshops and mostly in people's homes.
But the war created rations on fabric that made mass-produced fashion acceptable to the middle class, and clothing companies exploded across the country, churning out standardized items that we now take for granted.
Lin: I think fast fashion started with Zara.
That term came from a "New York Times" article that talked about at the time, you know, that brand basically able to include a collection in 15 days, which is unheard of.
So, normally in the traditional fashion world, it's like you have two collections a year.
But it did so well, they sold so fast, and that model worked so that you had tons of copycats, like small copycats to humongous, right, corporate copycats out there.
Narrator: Shopping malls dominated while reducing costs.
Going abroad and hiring local cheap labor were the norm.
Then came the internet.
With each passing decade, the amount of garments increased, but their quality, longevity, and labor costs decreased.
This dynamic reached its zenith with fast fashion in the early 2000s, when online shopping began to replace malls, and companies produced clothing at an unprecedented pace.
Lin: Right now, the average American owns about 110 pieces of clothing.
Now you can buy 6 seasons in a year.
So, I think that model of selling more cheaper clothing, more collections, more trends, all kind of fed on itself.
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