Thrifting is the act of shopping for pre owned items, including books, toys, furniture, and almost every other type of household item. However, most often, people go thrifting to find clothes. Thrifting is a great way to find unique pieces at more affordable prices than fast fashion stores, which specialize in producing the latest trends at a rapid pace to meet high consumer demand.
Why Shop Secondhand?
But in addition to just finding hidden gems, shopping second hand is also an important step in living sustainably, not only for our own sake as individuals, but for the sake of the environment. According to Earth.org, the fast fashion industry causes some of the most detrimental damage to the environment, second to the food and construction industries.
If you’ve never shopped secondhand, it may seem like too small an act to make any type of change. But the first step to understanding the importance of thrifting and sustainable shopping is to understand the global damage that has been committed by its counterpart–the fast fashion industry.
How Fast Fashion Impacts the Environment
Pesticide Contamination
The World Wildlife Fund identifies cotton as “the most widespread profitable non-food crop in the world” and claims that about” half of all textiles are made of cotton,” including clothing. However, preserving the plants and ensuring a successful crop comes at a price. Cotton production is extremely chemically intensive and uses pesticides–such as organophosphates, pyrethroids, and neonicotinoids–to protect the crops from disease and insects. Although agricultural workers use pesticides to target specific organisms, spraying the chemicals can contaminate the air and water, while also damaging surrounding vegetation and endangering other non-target organisms that help balance the food chain. Not only is pesticide use dangerous for the environment, but it is also hazardous to human health due to potential air and soil contamination.
In another 2016 study, researchers focused on a group of Pakistani women who worked in cotton fields to analyze the potential health risks associated with pesticide use. The researchers concluded that the agricultural workers experienced side effects even though they were not directly involved in pesticide use. Daily exposure to the chemicals was enough to affect their health. The women reported a number of symptoms, including skin and eye irritation, headache, nausea, shortness of breath, gastroenteritis, weakness, dizziness, vomiting, blisters, fever, and stomach pain.
According to research, “As early as 1990… the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that about one million unintentional pesticide poisonings occur annually, leading to approximately 20,000 deaths.” In 2020, researchers conducted a literature review to examine and update previous research on pesticide poisoning. The study concluded that, more than thirty years later, unintentional pesticide poisoning is still a critical global issue that requires immediate action, as the fast fashion industry still continues to grow.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere. The main greenhouse gasses are water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and fluorinated gasses (HFCs, PFC, SF6). Although these gasses are naturally present in the atmosphere, human activity–including transportation, electricity, agriculture, industry, waste from homes and landfills–interferes with the natural emission cycle and causes more greenhouse gas emissions. And when greenhouse gasses are emitted in larger concentrations, it causes larger atmospheric concentrations, which can thicken the planet’s atmospheric blanket and increase its temperature.
Research claims that the fast fashion production process alone causes approximately 10% of global carbon emissions every year. Further, experts expect that greenhouse gas emissions will have increased by more than 50% by 2030. How do greenhouse gasses cause so much damage? Because, as research supports, about 57% of used clothing is discarded and ends up in landfills, and where it is either incinerated or left to degrade as waste products. As the material breaks down, the process releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, such as methane, which the United Nations Environment Programme calls methane “the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes 1 million premature deaths every year… Over a 20-year period, it is 80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide.” Methane emission accounts for about 12% of human activity-induced greenhouse gas emission in the United States, and for about 50-65% of emissions globally. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane emission in the U.S. and are full of unwanted clothing produced by the fast fashion industry.
Water Waste & Pollution
According to Fair Planet and the Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE) website, the fashion industry is the second-largest water consumer and polluter, consuming one-tenth of the world’s industrial water.” The amount of cotton used to make one t-shirt requires about 3,000 liters of water and 8,183 liters to make one pair of jeans. In order to meet the high demands of the fast fashion industry and produce enough clothing to satisfy consumers, cotton farming and irrigation uses large amounts of surface and groundwater, depleting the planet’s natural freshwater sources.
Not only does the fast fashion industry exhaust the planet’s water sources, but it is also responsible for its contamination from textile dyeing and synthetic fabric production. According to The Conscious Challenge, it can take 200 tons of fresh water to produce one ton of dyed fabric. Additionally, textile dyes contain harsh synthetic chemicals, and the water used to treat the fabrics then becomes polluted. Then, the chemically infected water is discarded back into local water sources, such as lakes and rivers, and eventually ends up in the oceans. Therefore, not only does the textile dyeing process consume large amounts of water, but it is also responsible for 20% of global water pollution, making it “the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture.”
What You Can Do to Make a Difference
So how can you help reduce and combat these environmental complications? Thrift your clothing! Instead of supporting and purchasing from fast fashion brands that overproduce clothing and prioritize quantity over quality, buy second hand. When you donate to and buy from and second hand thrift stores, materials are reused and recycled, rather than discarded into a landfill. Also, thrift shopping helps to conserve and protect the planet’s natural resources–such as water–by slowing down the process by which clothing and other materials are consumed. Small changes can make a big difference.
Did you know any of these facts about environmental damage caused by fast fashion? What was the most surprising?
