Lily Bowers/Reuters A customer shops during the grand opening of the Forever 21 flagship store in New York’s Times Square, June 25, 2010.

Some parts of modern life are, at this point, widely known to cause environmental harm – flying overseas, using disposable plastic items, and even driving to and from work, for example. But when it comes to our clothes, the impacts are less obvious.

As consumers worldwide buy more clothes, the growing market for cheap items and new styles is taking a toll on the environment. On average, people bought 60% more garments in 2014 than they did in 2000. Fashion production makes up 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions, dries up water sources, and pollutes rivers and streams.

What’s more, 85% of all textiles go to the dump each year. And washing some types of clothes sends thousands of bits of plastic into the ocean.

Here are the most significant impacts fast fashion has on the planet.

Clothing production has roughly doubled since 2000.

REUTERS/Mansi Thapliyal Employees sew clothes at the Estee garment factory in Tirupur, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, June 19, 2013.

Source: McKinsey & Company

While people bought 60% more garments in 2014 than in 2000, they only kept the clothes for half as long.

REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily An Iraqi man looks in the mirror as he shops for clothes in preparation for Eid Al-Adha celebration in Baghdad, Iraq August 9, 2019.

Source: McKinsey & Company, Ellen MacArthur Foundation

In Europe, fashion companies went from an average offering of two collections per year in 2000 to five in 2011.

AP Photo/Luca Bruno Models Gigi Hadid, from front second left, Bella Hadid and Kaia Gerber wear creations with other models as part of the Max Mara spring-summer 2020 collection in Milan, Italy, September 19, 2019.

Source: European Parliament

Some brands offer even more. Zara puts out 24 collections per year, while H&M offers between 12 and 16.

Business Insider/Mary Hanbury Rows of jackets at Zara’s headquarters in Arteixo, Spain, October 2018.

Source: European Parliament

A lot of this clothing ends up in the dump. The equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second.

REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir A truck unloads garbage at a temporary dump on the edge of Beirut, Lebanon September 23, 2015.

Source: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

In total, up to 85% of textiles go into landfills each year. That’s enough to fill the Sydney harbour annually.

REUTERS/David Grey The Sydney Harbour lit by the setting sun, on a summer day in Australia, November 24, 2018.

Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE),World Resources Institute (WRI)

Washing clothes, meanwhile, releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year — the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

Jamie McDonald/Getty A man waits for his washing in a launderette during filming for the Adidas ‘I Kiss Football’ TV commercial in Potters Bar, England, June 12, 2001.

Source: UNEP, Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Many of those fibres are polyester, a plastic found in an estimated 60% of garments. Producing polyester releases two to three times more carbon emissions than cotton, and polyester does not break down in the ocean.

REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko An employee works on the production of polyester yarns at the company ‘SvetlogorskKhimvolokno’ in Svetlogorsk, Belarus, May 25, 2016.

Source: Greenpeace, WRI

A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics — very small pieces of plastic that never biodegrade — in the ocean came from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester.

Cheryl Ravelo/Reuters A boy in the Philippines collects plastic materials near a polluted coastline.

Source: IUCN

Overall, microplastics are estimated to compose up to 31% of plastic pollution in the ocean.

Reuters A giant green turtle rests on a coral reef at a diving site near the island of Sipadan in Celebes Sea, east of Borneo, November 7, 2005.

Source: IUCN

The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions.

Stringer / Reuters A man uses his mobile phone as he walks amid smog in Tianjin, China after the city issued a yellow alert for air pollution, November 26, 2018.

Source: UNEP

That’s more emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

REUTERS/Tim Chong A Cathay Pacific Airways Airbus A350 aeroplane approaches to land at Changi International Airport in Singapore, June 10, 2018.

Source: UNEP

If the fashion sector continues on its current trajectory, that share of the carbon budget could jump to 26% by 2050, according to a 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Reuters/Mark Blinch Workers make jackets at the Canada Goose factory in Toronto.

Source: Ellen MacArthur Foundation

The fashion industry is also the second-largest consumer of water worldwide.

REUTERS/P. Ravikumar/File Photo Women fetch water from an opening made by residents at a dried-up lake in Chennai, India, where taps ran dry city-wide in June 2019.

Source: UNECE



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It takes about 700 gallons of water to produce one cotton shirt. That’s enough water for one person to drink at least eight cups per day for three-and-a-half years.

REUTERS/Francois Lenoir A man drinks water near a fountain on a hot summer day in Brussels, Belgium, July 19, 2016.

Source: WRI

It takes about 2,000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans. That’s more than enough for one person to drink eight cups per day for 10 years.

Shoshy Ciment/Business Insider

Source: UNEP

That’s because both the jeans and the shirt are made from a highly water-intensive plant: cotton.

REUTERS/Luc Gnago Farmers work at a cotton market in Soungalodaga village near Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso March 8, 2017.

In Uzbekistan, for example, cotton farming used up so much water from the Aral Sea that it dried up after about 50 years. Once one of the world’s four largest lakes, the Aral Sea is now little more than desert and a few small ponds.

NASA An image of the Aral Sea as captured by NASA’s Earth Observatory on August 25, 2000 (left) shows the diminished shoreline from where the lake sat in 1960. In 2014 (right), the lake’s east lobe dried up for the first time in 600 years.

Source: Business Insider

Fashion causes water-pollution problems, too. Textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams, or rivers.

REUTERS/Jayanta Dey A worker dyes yarn at a textile mill on the outskirts of Agartala, the capital of India’s northeastern state of Tripura, April 19, 2008.

Source: UNEP, The New York Times, The Guardian

The dyeing process uses enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools each year.

REUTERS/Rafiquar Rahman The water in a ditch turns red as chemicals and waste are dumped into it from nearby tannery factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, May 14, 2005.

Source: WRI

All in all, the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution worldwide.

REUTERS/Andrew Biraj (Bangladesh Environment Society) A boy swims in the polluted waters of the Buriganga river in Dhaka, Bangladesh, May 14, 2009.

Source: WRI, UNEP

Some apparel companies are starting to buck these trends by joining initiatives to cut back on textile pollution and grow cotton more sustainably. In March, the UN launched the Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, which will coordinate efforts across agencies to make the industry less harmful.

Getty Images / Don Arnold A brand ambassador shops for dresses during the Boxing Day Sales at the David Jones Castlereagh St store on December 26, 2014 in Sydney, Australia.

Source: Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals, Better Cotton Initiative,UNEP

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