Sustainable fashion
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Sustainable fashion is a term describing efforts within the fashion industry to reduce its environmental impacts, protect workers producing garments, and uphold animal welfare. Sustainability in fashion encompasses a wide range of factors, including cutting CO2 emissions, addressing overproduction, reducing pollution and waste, supporting biodiversity, and ensuring that garment workers are paid a fair wage and have safe working conditions.
Designers highlighting their designs at Eco Fashion Week Vancouver Canada, 2011
Traditional textile manufacturing in Teotitlán del Valle. Clothes made with techniques like this are considered more sustainable than fast fashion.
Protesters holding a placard linking fast fashion to climate change
The fashion industry, particularly manufacture and use of apparel and footwear, is a significant driver of greenhouse gas emissions and plastic pollution. The rapid growth of fast fashion has led to around 80 billion items of clothing being consumed annually, with about 85% of clothes consumed in United States being sent to landfill.
Production of cotton requires a large amount of water, and also produces wastewater.
1913 image of cotton production in the United States.
Eutrophication in a water source
British women in World War II cutting salvaged clothes and rags for recycling.