Sustainable Clothing: Nine Great Reasons To Change

Sustainable clothing means avoiding “fast” fashion, exploitative and unfair practices and manufacturing that causes pollution and damages the natural environment. So here are nine great reasons to change how you get your fashion:

Move to sustainable clothing because …

Cotton uses huge amounts of water

Reason 1: One cotton shirt can use around 2500 litres of water, a pair of jeans 8000 litres. The water used to grow India’s cotton exports in 2013 could have supplied 85% of the country’s 1.24 billion people with 100 litres of water every day for a year. Read about it here.

Reason 2: The Aral Sea, once the Earth’s fourth largest inland sea, has shrunk to a “desert” due to pollution and the water demands of the cotton industry. Read here.

Move to sustainable clothing because …

The fashion industry exploits poor people

Reason 3: Forced labour exists in nine countries producing 65% of the world’s cotton – Benin, Burkina Faso, China, India, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Europe is the biggest single destination for Uzbek cotton. Read about it in Ethical Consumer magazine.

Move to sustainable clothing because …

Cotton pollutes the Earth

Reason 4: Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture. See this article in The Independent.

Reason 5: Cotton covers around 2.5% of the world’s cultivated land yet uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, more than any other major crop.

Move to sustainable clothing because …

The fashion industry is a major cause of climate change

Reason 6: The apparel industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions and remains the second largest industrial polluter, second only to oil. Read this article from Forbes.

Move to sustainable clothing because …

The fashion industry is wasteful

Reason 7: More than 150 billion garments are produced annually, enough to provide 20 new garments to every person on the planet, every year – read more here.

Move to sustainable clothing because …

Fashion is polluting our oceans and waterways

Reason 8: The fashion industry is the second biggest polluter of freshwater resources on the planet – read here.

Reason 9: Plastic microfibres from synthetic clothing account for 85% of the human-made material found along ocean shores, threatening marine wildlife and ending up in our food supply (read here).

Other articles you may enjoy:

Green Fabrics to Make Your Fashion Choices More Sustainable

How an Arid Desert Land Now Exports Water

Featured image by Dom Hill on Unsplash.