Letting Myself Think About Clothes (Not a Good Idea)

The waste and exploitation within the clothing industry is something I mostly try not to think about as I go through life. I also try not to support it in my purchases, primarily by infrequently buying used clothes. But once in a while it's good to be reminded just how terrible it is, and how recently it became that way.

Assaad Razzouk, author of Saving the Climate Without the Bullshit, has a recent podcast episode on this topic, which he summarized on Twitter:

• There are 75 million garment workers worldwide, less than 2% of whom make a living wage.
• They make 100 billion new items of clothing annually, most of which include plastic. Those microplastics end up everywhere, down to the placental level of humans and in wildlife around the world.
• In just 15 years, clothing production has doubled, with average per-person purchases increasing substantially while the number of uses per garment has decreased significantly.
• Fashion production uses a disproportionate amount of fresh water (especially for irrigating cotton) and produces an even higher amount of wastewater.
• There are 15,000 different chemicals used in the industry, with no good way of knowing their effect on our health.
  

The plastic aspect of this story is the one that comes back to me over and over again. Plastic fabrics are invisible to us, renamed as polyester, Dacron, Nylon, PolarFleece® (which can be made from recycled soda pop bottles, which I once thought made it a good thing!). 

Every time you wash your clothes made from these fabrics, you're sending microplastics into the water system. I'm personally sending them into the Mississippi River.

Giant petrochemical companies and their R&D departments spent years figuring out how to find new markets for oil, working it into the production of fabrics until it's very hard to buy clothes without it, even if you want to. 

Just as the companies have developed plastic packaging "solutions" and made them essential to convenience until almost no one questions their presence in everyday life, plastic fabrics are now the default. With the added bonus of built-in obsolescence, since most plastic-based fabrics don't wear well through multiple wash and dry cycles.

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Two earlier posts in the same vein:

Facts for the Clothes-Minded (from 2018)

The Overwhelming Tabs of June (from 2013) [the section labeled "cheap clothes are just cheap"]