The Issue Of Sustainability Of The Apparel Industry Essay

The primary purpose of this essay uses persuasive writing to get her point across. Informing the reader about the eco dangers of buying outsourced clothing material. Most people often want the cheaper alternative without going to the flea market or charity clothing banks. But all the clothes get worn down, shrink, fade or just deteriorate in the end because the fabric is unsustainable. Resulting in the t-shirts and jeans to be tossed away and put into a landfill. Where they have been found to transmite “more than three million tons of carbon dioxide emissions”. (Siegle, 7)

How fast fashion is affecting the environment is a very serious topic since this type of consumerism in the United States is heavy on supply and demand, and because of that shoppers want it all and want it now which is basically fast fashions motto. The way to make these pieces of clothing heavily rely on cheap materials that can be made quickly, so that is polyester and cotton being made in big factories that emit out toxins into our earth. Cotton being one of the most used fabrics takes a lot to be made into a single garment. Uzbekistan which is the 6th biggest producer of cotton had faced many conflicts during production since cotton uses so much water to be made it has dried up the 4th largest lake the Aral Sea because of how much we need to produce cotton fashion. (Prospectjournalucsd) Buying these cheap garments that become unwearable after 5 times (Forbes) of wearing it usually gets thrown out after and producing more waste that gets put into our waterways since theses garments shed easy and through washing them can “find their way into oceans and on the shores everywhere.” (Sweeny) So with the help of shoppers, being able to cut down on the purchase of fast fashion can help aid in keeping the ecosystem in order.

80 billion clothing items are produced every year. About two million tons of clothes is thrown away every year. The clothes often cannot be resold due to lack of quality. Only about 10% of clothes are resold. ¾ of the clothing’s manifested from fast fashion labels will end up in a land fill after a year after it is put out for consumers to buy.

In this article, Barenblat outlines some of the key reasons as to why fast fashion is detrimental for women and the environment. The author supports her claim by suggesting fast fashion is expensive for the planet, encourages young women in poverty to work in sweatshops, and leads to million tons of landfill each year. This information in the article is useful because it provides relevant statistics on the damages caused by the clothing industry.

The True Cost, by Andrew Morgan, was a truly eye opening documentary on what price workers who make our clothes have to pay in regards to their health, finances, and sacrifices they have to make. Most of us purchase clothes and do not think twice about where they came from, who made them, and impact it is having on our society. Stores such as H&M and Forever 21 sales clothes for very cheap prices; however, the more the prices are reduced, the more the environmental costs are raised. Our society revolves are materialism and most believe our clothing portrays who a person is, to a certain extent. If this is the case, our clothes may be saying more about ourselves than we think, if we are wearing clothes that workers in other countries are paying a price for.

Nordstrom has continued to improve their dedication to the environment, steps such as: reducing carbon dioxide released into the air, using organic cottons and investing time and money into the discovery of more sustainable fabric clarification. Although many of these steps may seem like obvious choices so many large companies are still struggling to make the leap nordstrom has shown in these areas. The hunt for more sustainable fabrics is in hopes to lower the unlawfully logged forests and continue to encourage other brands, which they outsource from to be aware of how and where their fabric materials are made. The ethical decision to improve their own environmental practices and inspire other brands to do the same shows they care about the recent changes in society and are willing to form to these

In the book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, a journalist and the author, writes about the lack of ability of disposal we currently possess for the massive amounts of textile waste. She wrote, “The rate of disposal is not keeping up with the availability of places to put everything that we're getting rid of and that's the problem." Millions of tons of textile waste are generated globally per year. There are many efforts to cut down the amount of waste by recycling, shredding, and exporting to developing nations. According to the United Nations, The US is the leading exporter of second-hand clothes. Very poor nations like India benefit greatly from imported second-hand clothing. These methods to cut back on textile waste are proven to work, but they don’t solve the problem, they just lessen it. Part of the problem with fast fashion and textile waste is that many of the clothes being mass produced are made out of cheap petroleum-based fibers. H&M received a lot of backlash for this, spurring them to release a more eco-friendly line of clothing, using organic cotton.

There will always be that one or two patrons that are looking to save the environment and if the company can look to incorporate environmentally friendly designer clothing and accessories into the business, the business will be leading the future in clothing retail sales. For example, designer blue jeans become a designer purse; a designer silk shirt becomes a new designer pajama top. Reusing material is not a new idea however, creating new items from high-end designer clothing to create environmentally friendlier clothing or recycled designer clothing from the designer is, and if it is made exclusively for Christina’s Unique Clothing Store the company’s future is secured.

I watched the documentary, The True Cost which explores the communities around the fast fashion industry and follow a few workers to share their stories. In the film there is similar pollution in the community because of the factories similar to what you mention happens outside the Zara factory with the river changing colors based on the colors they are using in the factory. I am glad you brought up donating your clothes and how even though you think you are doing something good by donating them they do not always end up going to someone who needs them but sometimes in landfills which harm the environment since they do not decompose. About twice a year I will go through my closet and make a clothing donation, its upsetting to

I know what you’re thinking, because it's exactly what I thought: ‘How does fashion have anything to do with sustainability?’ It's easy to think that your sustainable just by putting your food scraps in the compost or recycling your plastics, but in reality it goes much further than that. It’s true that sustainability starts in the home but, all too often it slips our mind the impact our clothing has on the environment.

The fashion industry fuels the message that “the way to solve your problems is to consume more.” Therefore, making people buy things they don’t really need. Currently there are “80 billion clothes sold a year” and “40 million garment workers.” This industry encourages people to buy things based of their wants and not their needs, sometimes people buy clothes they never wear in their life so this means that these poor people working in sweatshops are getting abused and producing clothes for no reason.

GoodWeave is an organization which Target partnered with that prevented child labor in the manufacturing of their own brand woven rugs. The GoodWeave organization is aiming to stop child labor in the carpet industry and to replicate its market-based approach in other sectors according to their mission statement. Target’s goal is to provide their guests with the assurance that their rugs are responsibly sourced through the GoodWeave organization. Target partnered with the Natural Defense Council on Clean by Design, their mission is to reduce environmental impacts of suppliers abroad. Target saved in water, energy and materials from pilots in Chinese apparel textile mills. When that started happening, the saving of materials and such convinced Target to explore how the reducing can be applied to home textiles in 2015. The last of the goals was EcoSet, 420 tons of waste was created from adverting shoots since 2009 and it’s time to act and save that waste.

Factors such as economics, global, politics, socio-cultural, technology, and demographics may affect the performance of the company (Anderson, 2012).According to Patagonia, their love for the environment runs deep. They actively donate at least 1% of their sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups all over the world who work to help reverse the tide (Patagonia, n.d.). Additionally, by being in touch with their core values for over 40 years, they understand that some of their business activities such as lighting the stores to the dying of their products increase pollution. As a result, Patagonia works steadily to reduce those harms, by using recycled polyester and only organic rather than pesticide infected cotton (Patagonia, n.d). Considering this, the connection is created between the company and the external environment factors. These factors trickle down to the consumer who buys the product. The socio-cultural component is expressed throughout Patagonia. The socio-cultural component is concerned with societal and cultural factors such as values, attitudes, trends, traditions, lifestyles, beliefs, tastes, and patterns of behavior (Anderson, n.d). By Patagonia strategically managing all the aspects of creating an excellent corporation, it has always been their social responsibility to not only impact the consumers but corporations around them as well. Their mission will always be to change the relationship between the consumer and the products sold to them by creating clothing items that can withstand wear and tear for

Finding an exact definition for the terms “sustainable fashion”. “Green”, “Eco fashion” to a name a few, is close to impossible. We all have the impression everyone understands it the same way but it is false, it has different meanings for all of us.

My aim is to link up the environmental issue to the potential saleable fashion brand, as AllSaint. However, the brand announced to the DIVA magazine that, ‘… The