The influence of short fashion cycle

The Influence of Short Fashion Cycle
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The Influence of Short Fashion Cycle
Introduction
This essay highlight the environmental impact of the fast fashion industry. The fashion industry is increasing rapidly, with a dramatic change in consumer trends (Karlsson & Ramasar, 2020). However, this increase is negatively influencing the environment. It is because fashion creators are using the environment to create apparel and double up environmental crises. For example, a regular T-shirt produces 2.6kgs of carbon emission during its production (Hickcox, 2018). The literature is full of such astonishing facts. This essay aims to bring fundamental changes in the fashion industry to treat environmental issues.
Though modernization leads to development, it is harming the ecosystem. This essay analyzes the impact of fashion in the beginning. Later on, the environmental cost in terms of pollution is reviewed. Lastly, the analyst list down recommendations based on active sustainable players and opinions of different analysts.
The Role of Fast Fashion
When a producer uses cheap material to churn out a clothing collection, a rapid production takes place. This rapid change is known as fast fashion. According to Blanc (2016), fast fashion does not produce fashion trends, and it embraces them in society. The fashion industry is growing with an explicit rate of 6.16% (Graph 1). The fashion trends have become famous, but fashion creators are unknown. Therefore, fast fashion is taking over the industry by churning out high-end clothe from cost-effective material. As a result, the fast-fashion producers use costing as the fundamental of their business strategy.
Graph 1: Growth in Apparel Industry (Statista, 2020)
Some major fast fashion brands are ZARA, H&M, Forever21, among many others. These fashion producers copy luxury fashion brands and create clothes of similar design but using cheaper material. As the material is cheaper, the prices are also lower. Here, luxury fashion brands are the ones who create new fashion with sufficient material for their specified niche. Fig 1 illustrates the difference and similarities among luxury fashion brand and fast fashion producers,
Fig 2: Product Comparison between Zara and Yeezy
The illustration indicates the business strategy of fast-fashion producers. Convincingly. Their role in the fashion industry is to increase accessibility to fashion and styling. It seems that the fast-fashion producers are trying to assist societies by making them afford high-end clothes at lower rates. However, the fast-fashion creators are debasing the environment with their contribution to the fashion industry. According to Davis (2020), the textile industries yield one-fifth of the world's industrial water pollution using more than 200,000 chemicals.
The role of fast fashion under environmental disruption is that it promotes pollution. For example, slow fashion or luxury brands charge heavily for their one product resulting in seasonal purchases. However, fast-fashion producers encourage people to buy and discard clothes more frequently. As a result, the time, energy, and natural resources used to produce the clothes wastes away fast. Subsequently, what seems optimistic is a negative contribution to the world. The population and the producers of fast fashion must consider environmental issues for their actions.
Impact of Fashion on Environment
Fashion industries influence the environment through carbon emission, water pollution, air pollution, and intensive wastage of resources. According to Niinimäki et al. (2020), fashion industries emit 10% of global carbon dioxide annually. This contribution is critically influencing the atmospheric pressure of the world. Besides, the fashion industry uses trillion liters of pure water during the manufacturing period. This feature is also a negative addition to the environment. Most importantly, fashion producers use chemicals harmful to the environment and the people working through those chemicals.
Primarily, Niinimäki et al. (2020) estimated that textile industries use 1.5 trillion liters of water in a year. Besides the intensive usage, the textile industries also dump chemical waste into the oceans (Messinger, 2016). Convincingly, the textile producers are not only consuming water, but they are also spoiling it. Water is an essential resource for the environment, and the fashion industry is treating it as a universal advantage. This measure highlights the apparent irresponsibility of textile industries towards sustainability.
Other than water production, fashion creators are also critically affecting the atmosphere. Fashion producers harm the atmosphere in two ways. First, production sites such as textile factories produce a hefty amount of carbon dioxide. During the process, carbon produced are by-products of various chemical reactions. Second, textiles require heavy transportation to reach designated channels. Thus, fashion producers destruct the environment through massive transportations. The role of fast fashion doubles up this destruction. For instance, Fletcher and Tham (2019) stressed that the burgeoning demand for clothing requires air-cargo shipments. Transportation reduces the duration of transportation, causing 100% more carbon emissions than ship-cargo. This measure indicates a choleric feature of fast fashion in speeding the environmental destruction.
Most importantly, the chemical used for producing clothes is no different from water and air pollution. For instance, a single textile finishing company can use up to 500g of toxic chemicals per kilogram of textile (Ro, 2020). The textile producers do not stop here. They are in a constant search to wreck the environment. Likewise, the US and EU regions design various garments and send them to developing countries for production. The considerable communication gap results in tons of wastage (Gharib, 2018). Hence, the act explicitly adds the list of destructive measures the fashion industry use against the environment. In response, the fashion industry needs a fundamental change. The fashion industry must revisit its impact on the environment and reconsider its business strategies.
The Environmental Cost for Producing Fashion
According to Kumar (2020), there is an environmental cost for producing any product. In other words, a product needs raw materials, energy to produce, and transportation facilities to reach the consumers. Subsequently, the production uses the environment in different forms. It is no wrong to say that development is enhancing living standards across the globe. However, the development of fast fashion is adversely affecting global prosperity. It is because of the environment.
Most importantly, fashion producers have broken functionalism from fashion and induced entertainment in it. BWSS (2019) writes that fashion is more entertainment in the modern era. The consumers are unaware of how much environment they spend on buying one piece of cloth worn for months. For instance, a regular T-shirt produces 2.6Kg, and a pair of jeans yields 11.5kg of carbon emission. Fig 2 displays a detailed description of carbon emission at every stage. 50% of the T-shirt emission occurs during production and 4% during distribution. For the pair of jeans, the production comprises 57% of carbon emission. Carbon emission during the user phase for T-shirts and Jeans is 19% and 20%, respectively. Precisely, it takes 2.6 kilograms of the environment to produce one T-shirt and 11.5 kilograms for a pair of jeans. The worst part is, on average, the consumer will use both of the products for only two months. Subsequently, the product will produce another set of carbon emissions as soon as the user discards it.
Contrastingly, the consumer can keep their clothes for long-terms unless the fast fashion brands provoke them to buy more for less. The fast-fashion brands use consumer psychology to sub-consciously influence them for more buying and causing harm to the environment. The more fashion products are bought, the more environmental cost will occur. There is an intense need to cut the environmental cost and boost sustainability. If the wastage and destruction continue with fast fashion, the world will soon become morn for natural resources. Thus, fashion producers must find a sustainable way to foster their business and embrace the environment simultaneously.
More Fashion Results in More Wastage
Most of the reports and investigations highlight the adverse effect of fashion due to production. However, fashion harms the environment from its wastage as well. Subsequently, fashion producers from the EU and US outsource their production to developing countries such as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (Sullivan, 2019). During this outsourcing, the fashion producers communicate their designs and demand for elite production. Fast fashion producers declaim products that are not up to their requirements. This results in heavy wastage of textiles. Other than this, the manufacturers have used more resources to create products according to the vendor's demand. Hence, more fashion production is outsourced, the more waste it rises.
The fashion industry has changed dynamically in the last decades. Clothing has become cheaper, and trend cycles have doubled up. Most importantly, the advent of social media has induced the urge of looking trendy all the time. All of these attributes lead to a rapid increase in fashion desire. Excellent and easy accessibility has multiplied fashion waste. On average, in different regions, discard 96% of clothes ending as a significant part of landfills (NRDC, 2020). Subsequently, more fashion is increasing, and more fashion waste is getting bigger. This process needs to be terminated for the security of the environment.
Convincingly, the fashion and desires to look trendy are going too far. Though fashion is actively contributing to enhancing the way of living, it is eating up the environment, which is fundamental for living. Based on the highlighted facts, this section concludes that the fashion industry's advancement destroys the environment. The public must understand this issue and step ahead to mitigate environmental crises. This act can ensure a sustainable world for the future.
Emission from Industrial Sources
Concerning carbon emission, automobile industries trigger the most. However, the role of apparel industries in environmental destruction is as cruel as the automobile. According to Suhan (2018), the textile industry is becoming one of the biggest polluters on the planet. Textiles mills are producing about one-fifth of the world's industrial pollution. Chemical usage is the most significant contributor to this pollution. An apparel factory approximately uses 20,000 chemicals to convert raw fabric into a wearable item. One such toxic chemical is carcinogenic that results in extensive carbon emission. The role of carbon emission in harming the environment is not new. Besides, the fast fashion industries are fostering this environmental harm.
Carbon emission disturbs the natural atmospheric pressure, which invites several diseases. In other words, polluted air directly ...