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Writer's pictureThe Eyes Journal
Jun 23, 20207 min read

Greed, Pollution and Social Injustice: COVID-19’s effects on an exploitative industry

The fast fashion industry has experienced a meteoric rise in the last few decades. Its alluring marketing campaigns seep into every digital platform a consumer accesses, and with prices ever cheaper, delivery ever quicker, and abundance of new styles ever higher, who can resist? It encourages a culture of disposable, single-use outfits by tapping into our fundamental psychology of peer popularity and competition that inculcates last year’s style as uncool, bordering socially unacceptable, even embarrassing.


Zara was the first giant of fast fashion, by developing a novel business model: produce new designs all year, and make them only available for a brief period. This increased the frequency of consumer visits to stores, and the buying of clothes before designs sold out. The high-profit new model was soon adopted by competing brands to change consumer relationships with clothes; the average person today buys 60% more items of clothing than they did 15 years ago, but they keep the clothing half as long as they used to (McKinsey and Company 2019).


Graph taken from Ellen Macarthur Foundation (2017). Data from Euromonitor International Apparal and Footwear 2016 Edition, and the World Bank, world development indicators (GD, 2017)

This strategy is ingenious. Although wardrobes in developed nations are saturated, fast fashion tempts consumers with a constant need for newness, by accelerating the pace of new trends and seasons every year. The decreasing prices eliminate the need to mend, renew, recycle, both for consumers and brands. This is complemented by the millennial busy lifestyle, with less time to dwell on the implications of what we are buying – and thank goodness, for if you do care to take a minute to dwell, both ethically and environmentally, this industry sucks.

Negative Environmental Impacts


Fast fashion is responsible for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the carbon footprint of international flights and shipping combined (Ellen Macarthur Foundation 2017). Current projections predict that by 2050, the industry would take up 26% of the global carbon budget required to keep the world below 2 degrees of warming (UNFCCC, IPCC). The industry’s carbon emissions are from fibre production (for example, oil to make polyester, or agricultural emissions of cotton farming), energy used in clothing production in factories, shipping and transport, incineration of textile waste, landfill etc. While emissions can be seen as an environmentally global issue, the industry is also responsible for local polluting of places which grow the clothing fibres, house the clothing factories, and receive our textile waste. The use of toxic chemicals (bright colours, prints and fabric finishes) is the second greatest polluter of clean water globally after agriculture. This pollution includes hormone disruptive, carcinogenic and other toxic chemicals that are a health issue for workers and consumers alike. Non-biodegradable microplastics/fibres from polyester also make their way back up the food chain to people’s plates. ‘The True Cost’ 2015 documentary on fast fashion shows cotton as causing serious birth defects in farmers’ children due to the high levels of pesticides required to grow it. Cotton also uses unsustainable amounts of water – 93 billion cubic metres annually – often in water-scarce areas, increasing risks of drought.


Graph taken from the Ellen Macarthur Foundation (2017). Data from Circular Fibres Initiative analysis.

The diagram above implicates the fast fashion business model as ludicrously unsustainable, another industry hurtling in the opposite direction of environmental sustainability, encouraged by a neoliberal infinite growth model. Land used for clothing manufacturing could otherwise produce food or absorb carbon. A large majority of fabric, nor a substantial proportion of clothes that make it to market are worn; in fact, returned apparel from online orders are often thrown away as it is cheaper to manufacture more clothes than repackage and redistribute them. Optoro has estimated that clothing returns contribute 5 billion pounds of waste, and 15 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Establishing environmentally friendly fashion models at all levels of the supply chain is necessary for sustainability, which would require a transformative switch from the models currently followed.


Exploitation along colonial lines


The fast fashion industry owes its success to the establishment of international, pollutive supply chains that imitate colonial relationships. Greater production of inexpensive clothing does not exist without exploitation somewhere along the supply chain. Although this happens in the UK (a 2017 Financial Times exposé found garment workers in Leicester being paid £3.50/hour), production is often exported overseas to nations with less stringent or badly enforced labour laws. Many people associate fast fashion with factories in the Global South after the Rana Factory collapse in Dhaka 2013, killing 1,134 garment factory workers, reached British media. Bangladesh relies heavily on Western fast fashion consumption; 84% of its exports are garments and 85% of its women work within the garment industry (WEIGO 2019). Workers struggle to survive on extremely low pay, suffering poor working conditions, excessive hours and a lack of access to trade unions. The Stitched Up 2011 report on women workers in the Bangladeshi garment sector exemplifies this: 80% of workers start at 8am and finish after 8pm, wages start at £25 a month, and rise to £32 for sewing operators (far below the living wage), and half of women spoken to had been beaten at work. Other reports highlight similar sweatshop models in other countries including China and India, making clothes for Primark, Asda, Tesco, Nike, etc (Fashion victims 2006, Taking Liberties 2010, Labour Behind the Label 2018, WEIGO 2019). Brands often claim they do not realise their products are made underpaid, because they contract a factory that often outsources labour to semi-legal factories or sweatshops for profit.


How the COVID-19 crisis has affected the fast fashion industry


In the current COVID-19 crisis, workers are in an even worse position than before. Times of crisis exacerbate existing inequalities, and fast fashion’s long supply chains provide the perfect conditions for this. As the western world sits at home under lockdown conditions, and millions are filing for unemployment, the demand for fast fashion has crumbled; in March there was a 35% decrease in the number of clothing purchases by consumers in the UK, the worst ever decline in UK sales (Financial Times 2020). The vulnerability of fashion suppliers in developing nations has given retailers the power to cancel millions of garments worth of orders leaving mountainous stacks of newly made garments with nowhere to go. Though previously destined for UK high streets, these clothes will instead fill developing countries’ landfill, as their styles will not be relevant for next year’s fashion trends. Across Bangladesh, companies have cancelled an estimated $3.5 billion of orders, and globally this rises to $24 billion (BGMEA, Workers Rights Consortium). Philip Green’s Arcadia group (owning Topshop, Dorothy Perkins etc) has been especially cruel in refusing to share the unprecedented economic pain with their suppliers, without fair negotiation. While some fast fashion giants have agreed to pay up to 70% of the cancelled orders, this still wipes out any profit usually made by suppliers which encourages further worker wage reductions and unsustainability in manufacturing models. When suppliers run on small margins, low wages and fast turnover, cancelled orders can lead to a humanitarian disaster. Furlough schemes do not exist for most of the world’s garment factory workers; order cancellations therefore become a matter of poverty, malnutrition, illness and potential death. In March and April, it is estimated that fast fashion giants have put 60 million low-paid garment workers’ lives at risk through dumping COVID-19’s financial burden on suppliers (Workers' Rights Consortium).


The COVID-19 crisis has had devastating environmental and humanitarian repercussions for certain developing countries, through the fast fashion industry’s construction of dangerously high paced and semi-legal supply chains, and its entirely unequal distribution of profits. But does the forced pause not signal the end for fast fashion giants? Perhaps slowing the rate at which it can operate will end consumers’ obsession for speed and novelty. Some retail experts, however, predict splurges bigger than Black Friday after lockdown eventually ends (Goodale, 2020). On the 15th June, huge queues outside fast fashion stores around the country waited for the shops to reopen their doors after lockdown restrictions were lifted; in Bicester Village, crowding was so great that 3,000 people signed a petition to close it. Due to the dependence of garment workers on big brands, as soon as consumers decide to start buying again, factories will immediately start making again, despite their unfair treatment from retailers during the crisis. So don’t worry, your favourite brands that send you emails every three seconds about a new hairband you cannot live without are going to be just fine. As long as no one brings up the means by which fast fashion giants will survive this crisis with barely a scrape, the industry will boom and prosper like never before.


It takes integrity, morality and perhaps some courage of big brands to make decisions against propping up environmentally-polluting, exploitative processes. And unfortunately, most of the biggest fast fashion brands have proved in this crisis that they possess none of those qualities. As Danny Sriskandarajah, Oxfam’s chief executive says, ‘We are in a climate emergency - we can no longer turn a blind eye to the emissions produced by new clothes or turn our backs on garment workers paid a pittance who are unable to earn their way out of poverty no matter how many hours they work.' Brands must be heavily regulated, and Western consumers must actively strive to educate themselves on the implications of what they are buying, to take responsibility for their roles in creating environmental and social injustices through their fast fashion purchases.


 

Author: Beth Davenport

 

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