Orlando resident Wednesday Terry, concerned about the environmental impact of fast fashion – the quick and cheap production of trendy clothes – wanted to fight back.
So a year ago, she launched her slow fashion crochet business, Colored Entropy. The Florida native knits colorful outfits and hats using only secondhand clothes and 100% cotton yarn.
In contrast to fast fashion’s short-term, disposable production of goods, her main goal is to produce longer-lasting clothing to “reduce landfill waste and also reduce microplastics,” and to offer consumers an alternative to clothes that are mass-produced quickly by low-wage workers.
“I really love the connection that handmade clothes give me,” says Terry, 25. “I want people to understand the harms of fast fashion and take better care of their clothes.”
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Invading Sea
On Wednesday, Terri launched her slow-fashion crochet business, Colored Entropy.
Fast fashion is low-cost for consumers, but it can be costly for the environment.
While traditional fashion focuses on releasing a quality line of clothing for each of the four traditional seasons, fast fashion has 52 “microseasons,” meaning new clothing lines are released every week, reports The Good Trade, a website focused on sustainable fashion. This quicker production process relies on synthetic fibers made from plastic, which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, that contribute to climate change.
Products that are cheaper to produce and cheaper to purchase are discarded more quickly, creating more waste in landfills around the world.
Gwenyth Diaz, a funeral director and full-time student at Florida Atlantic University, often bought fast fashion for its convenience and cheapness, but after realizing its environmental cost, she became opposed to fast fashion.
“If there’s one thing I can do to help the environment, it would be to be conscious of where I buy my clothes,” said Diaz, 24, a multimedia journalism major.
In its early days, fast fashion relied heavily on cheap synthetic fibers like polyester, a petroleum-based, plastic-like material that requires a lot of energy to produce, according to the Council of Fashion Designers of America. From drilling to chemical processing, polyester production emits high levels of greenhouse gases — 31.3 pounds for every 2.2 pounds produced.
Fast fashion is “one of the biggest contributors to climate change and global warming because it’s a huge, expanding, pervasive industry that takes over agriculture, people’s livelihoods, transportation, and uses oil to make polyester,” said Francesca Bellomini, 55, a fashion sustainability educator in Miami.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the fast fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions.
Even after fast fashion leaves the production and consumption stages, it can still contribute to pollution through microplastics, small pieces of plastic the size of a pencil eraser, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Washing fast fashion clothes is a major local concern because it releases microplastics into drinking water and marine ecosystems, according to Jacqueline Salmond, a sustainability researcher in Fort Myers. According to Greenpeace, just one piece of clothing can release 700,000 fibers in one wash, which then end up in local waterways.
“I think something needs to be done to make it mandatory to have filters in your laundry,” said Salmond, who now teaches a course on sustainability and environmental justice at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It’s a relatively easy thing to do.”
Salmond said local landfills, which also contain discarded fast fashion items, pose a threat to South Florida’s water system, and that microplastics from landfills could leak into aquifers, contaminating Florida’s groundwater drinking water and potentially polluting marine systems.
The fast fashion production process also places a heavy burden on human workers.
To keep up with trends, meet mass production demands and ensure maximum profits, companies are turning to sweatshop workers in developing countries who work long hours for low wages in unhealthy or dangerous working conditions, according to a study published in the Journal of International Development Studies.
According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, workers are often required to work 48 hours a week in dangerous conditions for “poverty wages” — the average hourly wage in Bangladesh is 33 cents, according to environmental news website Earth.org — and child labor is also very common in these stores.
A garment employee works at Arrival Fashion Limited in Gazipur, Bangladesh, on Saturday, March 13, 2021.
“From the time a product is designed to the time it hits the shelves of an H&M store, it passes through an average of 60 hands,” Bellomini said. “If a $5 product passes through an average of 60 hands, you know it can’t possibly be $5.”
Once purchased from stores, fast fashion items often have a short lifespan in the hands of consumers: On average, people only wear an item seven to 10 times before throwing it away, according to a report in the Anthropocene journal.
“It used to be that people would wear an item of clothing 30 times and then throw it away, but that’s gone down a bit,” Mr Salmond said. “Younger people might wear it once or twice.”
Belluomini’s biggest concern is “waste colonialism,” where thrift stores only sell around 10 to 11 percent of their stock, sending the rest to developing countries where the clothes end up in landfills or incinerated, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The slow fashion movement began as an attempt to reduce waste caused by fast fashion. According to Good On You, which rates sustainable and ethical fashion brands, the movement focuses on buying high-quality, ethically sourced and produced clothing that is made to last.
Investing in slow fashion creators and shops may be an option for those looking to reduce their fast fashion consumption, but the high cost of sustainably made clothes means they are out of reach for many, while fast fashion is generally much more accessible, offering cheaper options and more sizes.
“When you’re a college student, you don’t want to pay $50 for a T-shirt, so that’s pretty much all you can buy,” said Vivian Mark, a 19-year-old anthropology major at Florida Atlantic University. “Every time I buy something, I feel a little guilty, but at the same time, I need clothes so I don’t get naked everywhere I go.”
But there are more affordable options than fast fashion, and Salmond suggests buying clothes from thrift stores or learning to sew, so you can transform existing clothes into something “unique and special”.
Belluomini simply encourages people to keep wearing existing pieces in their closets rather than throwing them out.
Kristan Reynolds is a fourth-year student majoring in journalism and minoring in communications at Florida Atlantic University.
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom effort founded by the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
