Of the 100 billion garments the fast fashion industry produces annually, 92 million tons of these clothes end up in landfills.
According to environmental researcher Greg Peters, that’s the equivalent of a garbage truck of clothes being burnt or buried in a landfill every second.
Fast fashion is clothing produced inexpensively and rapidly by thousands of corporations across the globe in response to quickly changing trends. It is a $60 billion industry, according to Zion Market Research, that has increased in prevalence in recent years to the detriment of the environment and the people working to produce these clothes in dangerous conditions for insufficient wages.
According to sociology researcher Kerrice Bailey, many adverse environmental effects like pollution, resource depletion, and waste production exist. This is partially from the significant amount of clothes people dispose of yearly, with many constantly feeling pressure to buy new clothes to keep up with the trends.
This pressure is exacerbated by social media, where people see what everyone else is wearing, and influencers share ‘hauls’ of everything they purchase shopping. They share Christmas, birthday, and back-to-school hauls, often purchasing entirely new wardrobes for each occasion with excessive amounts of clothes or items they may not even use or wear for very long.
These influencers glorify excessive spending, whether on clothes or other items, and people begin feeling as though they need new clothes or wardrobes for every occasion or to buy a water bottle every time a new one is trending.
For example, with the online popularity of the Stanley water bottle in 2023, their annual revenue jumped from $402 million in 2022 to $750 million just a year later, according to Statista.
These increased sales were heavily influenced by their popularity on social media, encouraging many people to buy five or even 10, ignoring that they are reusable, and purchasing large amounts of them defeats the purpose.
Purchasing necessary items is acceptable, but we are consuming resources at an unsustainable rate. Social media especially plays into the trend of overconsumption, which is so normalized, specifically in the United States. If everyone lived how the average American lived, we would need the equivalent of 5.1 Earths to sustain the resources everyone would consume, according to Earth Overshoot Day.
As such, sustainability needs to be a bigger priority; people should be encouraged to purchase only things they need and will use because we only have one Earth.
