Reference no: EM133430107

Discussion

"The documentary "Fashion's Dirty Secrets" was an interesting video for me, and I was shocked to learn some of the facts about the fashion industry's effect on our global emissions. I was aware that the production and transport of clothing is harmful to the environment, but this video deeply examines just how great it is, such as in the social experiment that was conducted where random people were asked to rank different industries from most polluting to least, most participants (including myself) thought the fashion industry was towards the less polluting end, but in fact it was #3 behind only the coal and oil industry. One story that really stood out to me was the depletion of the Aral Sea, due to the diversion of rivers to feed cotton farms, seeing the documentary crew standing on what was once the sea bed just 4 decades ago was a sad, yet magnificent scene, and it made me question how we allowed human exploitation to create an artificial desert the size of Ireland, all to fuel the wasteful fashion culture in Europe & North America... After watching the documentary, I considered my own habits with fashion, and I was largely unsatisfied as I had many bad habits such as buying exported clothing, fast fashion, and new clothing rather than thrifting or buying second hand. Although our personal changes will make very little difference in the overall global emissions, how we all decide to spend our money still influences the main polluting companies, so hopefully with collective awareness we can force these companies to change their practices.

I was surprised to see that my fashion footprint score was good and 70% lower than the average consumer. I expected my results to be worse because I usually buy my clothes from fast fashion sites like H&M, and Shein that contribute to increased carbon emissions through high carbon transport and turnover of poorly constructed material. After self reflection, my habits are good in some respects such as using cold water for laundry and air drying, but I think I could greatly improve by not buying fast fashion and instead thrifting.

My favorite outfit this season is a puffer jacket, hoodie, jeans and boots. All the pieces I'm wearing are produced in Asia, in order of Bangladesh, India, China and Vietnam. Fashion companies exploit unethical labor laws in these countries and invest all their production there for cheap fast labour, despite the inconvenience of having to ship everything again to their customer base in other nations. One potential solution for this, is to increase import taxes, and limit the annual weight of imported garments (Bick et al., 2018), this would aim to make the process of producing in other nations less practical and more costly than domestic manufacturing which should consquentially decrease the emissions from clothing companies, but this solution seems unlikely as consumers will oppose any bill that will raise prices in the short run. Unfortunately, this is a complex issue that will require many solutions, but we can still take steps to ensure we're doing are part in trying to influence change, mainly by not supporting fast fashion companies with questionable moral ethics and by practicing green habits like thrifting, repairing, and buying high quality clothing with transparent supply chains."