Greenwashing and Fast Fashion

I remember reading the other day that scientists found out we had officially surpassed the 400 ppm concentration of carbon dioxide in our air. This was viewed as a tipping point in climate change that may now be irreversible. Hearing it really jolted me, as very recently in the last few months I have been consciously making an effort to make my lifestyle more sustainable. Usually when we hear ways to make our lives for environmentally friendly, we think of things like recycling more, switching to energy efficient appliances, or eating organic. These are great, but one thing we often don’t think of as having an environmental impact is the clothes we wear. Through this blog, I am looking to research the ways companies use greenwashing in the fast fashion industries in such a way that consumers aren’t really aware of the environmental degradation their purchases often support. I’ve elaborated on these two terms below:

Greenwashing

Greenwashing is a strategy used by companies to make themselves appear more environmentally friendly than they actually are. This is often used as a ploy to get people to buy their products because they are “sustainable” and give the illusion that a consumer’s conscience can rest more easily now that they’ve bought a product that appears to have a low environmental impact. This can show up in many different forms, like a green leaf on packaging, a statement saying a product is “99% natural” or in the form of clothing chains like H&M offering recycling programs at their stores. These are prime examples of greenwashing because the companies often don’t actually do anything more sustainable in their business. For example, it would take H&M twelve years to recycle the amount of clothing they produce in forty-eight hours, so the recycling really does very little to reduce their environmental impact.

Fast fashion

I’ve already mentioned H&M’s recycling program, but this company is also a prime example of something called “fast fashion”. This phrase is used to refer to an industry in fashion built on extremely trendy, constantly changing clothes that are exceptionally cheap and usually poorly made. We’re all guilty of supporting fast fashion, whether you’ve heard this term before or not. How many times have you bought something from Forever 21, H&M, Zara, or another cheap clothing brand only to wear it one or two times before it fell apart, stretched out, or shrank? I have definitely done this myself more than a few times before and usually justify it with “It was cheap, so it doesn’t matter!” However, in reality, fast fashion has a very high price tag – it’s just not as clear as the price you pay at the register. Fast fashion’s high price comes from environmental destruction and sacrifices workers’ and women’s rights in many developing countries as they usually live in slums or squalid conditions, and often work long hours only to be paid rock bottom wages, so we can get rock bottom prices.

I believe that you can’t blame someone for the choices they make if they haven’t been educated on the implications of those choices in the first place, and I’m hoping this blog can educate not only myself, but also other people, about these practices because many of us simply are not aware of them.

Some sources for further reading:

http://greenwashingindex.com/about-greenwashing/

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/19/consumers-greenwashingfashion.html

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/09/old-clothes-fashion-waste-crisis-494824.html

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/09/old-clothes-fashion-waste-crisis-494824.html