The story of a £4 Boohoo dress: cheap clothes at a high cost | Business | The... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...ap-fast-fashion-workers-planet
cost clothing environment sustainability habits crisis
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the £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections on to the market in short time at pocket money prices, with social media celebrity endorsement to boost high consumer demand. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.
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But behind the price tag there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. “The hidden price tag is the cost people in the supply chain and the environment itself pays,” said Sass Brown, a lecturer at the Manchester Fashion Institute. “The price is just too good to be true.
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nvironmental degradation, the textile industry creates 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year, more than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of water, and creates chemical and plastic pollution – as much as 35% of microplastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing.
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Socially, the booming fast fashion industry is often built on low wages paid to women working in factories abroad but also increasingly in the UK
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In the UK, we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe – five times what we bought in the 1980s, which creates 1.3m tonnes of waste each year, some 350,000 tonnes of which is dumped in landfill or incinerated.
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Yet despite the overwhelming evidence gathered by the environmental audit committee (EAC), ministers this week rejected every recommendation for tackling abuses across the fashion industry, including a ban on incinerating or landfilling stock that can be recycled and a 1p charge on each garment to raise £35m a year for better clothing collection and sorting, a move supported by many in the industry.
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But the response of the government was met with anger by many within the industry, where ethical fashion firms come up against others who produce at lower costs on the back of exploitative wage structures and environmentally damaging production models
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“It is a vastly damaging industry that has been spiralling unchecked for far too long. The Earth and the people on it are exploited and damaged at every single step of the chain, and this culminates with unimaginable mountains of unused excess stock or badly made broken waste clothing with nowhere to go other than landfill or incineration.”
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But others are less sure that voluntary measures will tackle what they say is a systemic power imbalance between brands and manufacturers, which leads to worker exploitation, or address the enormous environmental footprint of their trade.
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“The fundamental problem with much of fast fashion is that its social and environmental costs are not taken into account. The environmental costs of materials and fabric are mostly offshored. The production that takes place in the UK often only pays half the legal minimum wage.
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“So who is accountable for water and chemical pollution abroad, precarious work and employment, the undercutting of compliant manufacturers, the pollution from delivery and lack of recycling at home? Brands might find it difficult to make £5 fast fashion dresses and be socially and environmentally sustainable.
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Commit to wearing every piece 30 times. If we doubled the amount of time we kept clothes for, we would cut our fashion emissions by 44%.
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Get smart about fibres. Cheap cotton and synthetics come with huge environmental footprints. Cotton uses unsustainable amounts of water and pesticide. Go for hemp blended with organic cotton and silk and lyocel/modal.
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Treat cotton as a luxury fibre. Buy products certified as organic to be free of the pesticide burden and plan to keep them for years.
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Wash clothes less often. The average laundry cycle releases hundreds of thousands of tiny fragments of plastic from synthetic fibres into waterways. Put jeans in the freezer and remove dirt when frozen. Fleeces have been shown to release the most plastic fibres
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Delete shopping apps from your phone and swear off insta-shopping for fashion. Go shopping for clothes in a shop.
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f dry cleaning is a must, use an eco-friendly process: conventional dry cleaning harms the soil, air and wate