In 2022 IBIS World ranked the Global Apparel Manufacturing industry as the fifth most prominent industry in the world. With a market size of $826bn and employing over 9.5 million people. But the fashion industry combined has a value of around $2.5 trillion, employing over 75 million people. So thinking such a large industry is not impacting the world climate change issue would be foolish. So how much does it impact? The fashion industry is the second largest industrial polluter, with 10% of total carbon emissions. We quickly dismiss sustainable fashion as a new fad created by super-sensitive Gen-Z. But the amount of textile waste the fashion industry produces is why conscious people opt for sustainable clothing options.

 

If we look at the recent data, the production in the fashion industry doubled between 2000 to 2014, and people bought 60% more clothes in 2014 than they did in 2000. This data doesn't seem problematic until we add that the life of clothes also decreased by 50% in these 14 years. That means the textile waste also drastically increased. According to UNECE, 85% of the textile goes to landfills annually. This is just the beginning of the impact the fashion industry has on our planet, and this is why environmentalists are pushing people towards sustainable fashion and promoting more and more sustainable brands.

 

If these data didn't help you picture the amount of textile waste created by the fashion industry, here is another way to imagine it; according to UNEP, in 2018, equal to a garbage truck full of clothes is either burnt or dumped every second. On the one hand, sustainable clothing is made by focusing on the impact it might have on the environment if it ends up in a landfill, and that's why sustainable brands use materials that won't affect the environment adversely at no point of their life cycle, whereas the rest of the brands use about 60% of the materials made from plastic. Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2017 put the danger of using plastic materials in our clothes in a better perspective when they said around 500,000 tons of microfibers are disposed of in the ocean every year while washing the clothes, which is equal to 50 billion plastic bottles.

 

When people choose sustainable clothing, it isn't for the purpose of luxury but for the purpose of necessity. If we do not switch to sustainable brands, the chances of earth's survival will plunge drastically. Because the amount we pay for our clothes is much more than just a few bucks. According to UNEP, it takes 3781 litres of water to make one pair of jeans (from producing cotton to delivering the final product to the store). Now multiply this with the jeans that you own. Isn't it scary that something that means just a piece of fabric to us has done so much damage to our environment already?

Sustainable brands might seem expensive, but they constantly invest in finding a better way of producing sustainable clothing fabrics that generates the least amount of textile waste and pays a fair wage to their workers. These brands are working towards reversing the damage the fashion industry has already done.