The next time you spot a must-have bargain fashion knockoff, you might want to consider more than its price tag before you pull out your credit card. Fast fashion pieces at budget-friendly, trend-driven stores like H&M, Zara, Topshop and Forever 21, are far from eco-friendly and can even impact drinking water.
Much of the cheap trendy clothing at these stores is shipped to the US from all around the world. Often, clothes is and produced from conventional cotton grown with pesticides on irrigation-based farms that can strain water supplies. Even the dyes used can lead to water pollution.
Take a simple cotton graphic t-shirt made in China, for example. In an article in Miller-McCune magazine, Chris Wood writes: "Only about 10 percent of dye wastes are recycled, and about a third of the rest flows directly to the environment. In provinces like Xinjiang, this waste is a major contributor to industrial and municipal pollution so severe that nearly 1 in 4 of China's 1.3 billion people drink contaminated water every day."
Not all foreign cotton producers are quite so bad. For example, cotton farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use six times less pesticides and fertilizers than those in China. But that hardly means the environmental impact is zero.
Now that $19.99 price tag has a higher cost, right? Are cheap fashion trends really worth ruining another countries water supply over? Not to mention the fact that the poorly made clothing often only lasts a season--or as long as the trend continues--before getting thrown away to spend the rest of its life in a landfill. So, next time you're in the mood for shopping, consider where your clothing comes from, what it's made out of and how long it'll stay in your wardrobe's rotation to determine its real cost.
Photo by jamesmellor on flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Much of the cheap trendy clothing at these stores is shipped to the US from all around the world. Often, clothes is and produced from conventional cotton grown with pesticides on irrigation-based farms that can strain water supplies. Even the dyes used can lead to water pollution.
Take a simple cotton graphic t-shirt made in China, for example. In an article in Miller-McCune magazine, Chris Wood writes: "Only about 10 percent of dye wastes are recycled, and about a third of the rest flows directly to the environment. In provinces like Xinjiang, this waste is a major contributor to industrial and municipal pollution so severe that nearly 1 in 4 of China's 1.3 billion people drink contaminated water every day."
Not all foreign cotton producers are quite so bad. For example, cotton farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use six times less pesticides and fertilizers than those in China. But that hardly means the environmental impact is zero.
Now that $19.99 price tag has a higher cost, right? Are cheap fashion trends really worth ruining another countries water supply over? Not to mention the fact that the poorly made clothing often only lasts a season--or as long as the trend continues--before getting thrown away to spend the rest of its life in a landfill. So, next time you're in the mood for shopping, consider where your clothing comes from, what it's made out of and how long it'll stay in your wardrobe's rotation to determine its real cost.
Photo by jamesmellor on flickr under a Creative Commons license.
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