The environmental impact of fast fashion: what is the EU doing?

By now most people know that fast fashion is a constant in the fashion world, in fact over the past 10 years it has been increasing exponentially.

Embodied by the multinational retail chains, it relies on mass production, low prices and large volumes of sales. The business model is based delivering clothes in a short time at cheap prices, typically using lower quality materials.

Fast fashion constantly offers new styles to buy, as the average number of collections released by European apparel companies per year has gone from two to five in just ten years.

Some may be aware that fast fashion has quite a severe impact on the environment.

But why is that? What are its effects on our planet really? Are there any solutions to the problem?

The first reason fast fashion has spread enormously during the last years is the reduction of cost. Fast fashion is cheap and in order to drive prices down further there are some environmental corners that can be cut.

This also has to do with the time it takes from designing a piece of clothing until presenting it into the shops’ windows. Once again, cutting environmental corners to ensure that things speed up is common practice in the fast fashion world.

Unsurprisingly it all starts at the production phase. Just think that 2700 liters of water are required to produce one t-shirt.

But things start even before that: the fibers that are used to produce the t-shirt are made themselves using oil, which pollutes the world quite severely.

We then arrive to the step of dye these fabrics to get bright colors and patterns, quite often these inks are toxic, to the point that they ofter are banned or at least quite strictly regulated in some countries. In some cases they even contain toxins that are bio-accumulative and some of them are even carcinogenic. In a nutshell they are bad for the planet and for us.

Fast fashion is a sever offender since it contributes to 35% of the microfibers in our Oceans, which of course are very harmful for the marine environment, as microfibers like polyester don’t biodegrade and eventually damage our whole food chain.

It is not just about producing the clothes, but our role as consumers is a key part as well. We are incredibly wasteful when it comes to clothing. Reliable and recent data on what happens to clothes once their owners decide to get rid of them are not readily available but most clothes in the EU seem to be still thrown away and burned in incinerators, or end up in landfill where they release methane.

Most textile raw materials and final products are imported into the EU, which means long delivery routes. This phase is also characterised by waste generated through packaging, tags, hangers and bags, as well as by a large proportion of products that never reach consumers as the unsold leftovers are thrown away.

Various ways to address these issues have been proposed, including developing new business models for clothing rental, designing products in a way that would make re-use and recycling easier (circular fashion), convincing consumers to buy fewer clothes of better quality (slow fashion), and generally steering consumer behaviour towards choosing more sustainable options.

In 2018, the EU adopted a circular economy package that will, at the insistence of the European Parliament, for the first time ensure that textiles are collected separately in all Member States, by 2025 at the latest.

The Packaging Waste Directive introduces targets for the recycling 60 % of all packaging by 2025 and 70 % by 2030. It also introduces material-specific targets for recycling, for instance, plastics, paper and cardboard packaging. The Landfill Directive requires Member States to reduce the share of municipal waste landfilled to 10 % by 2035.

In addition, the EU ecolabel for clothing and textiles, a voluntary certification programme, establishes ecological criteria guaranteeing limited use of substances harmful to health and environment, reduction in water and air pollution, as well as criteria for extending the lifetime of clothes.