So Last Season: The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion and Textile Waste Exports

CARMEN BERRY    |   LAST UPDATED: NOVEMBER 19, 2024

Due to a dependency on microtrends in American fashion culture, the last ten years have seen a dramatic increase in the production of single-wear garments—which has contributed to an excess of textile waste and consequent health impacts for the individuals who work in the textile manufacturing industry. 

By analyzing fast fashion through a climate justice framework which acknowledges the disproportionate environmental harm inflicted onto marginalized communities, consumers can make conscious decisions about their individual consumption and advocate for systemic changes in the fashion industry.

Unsustainable fast fashion

Rapidly changing fashion trends have encouraged the growth of so-called “fast fashion” factories, where hastily constructed plastic garments are quickly produced in the hopes of keeping up with social media trends in order to maximize profit. The effect of trend cycles on climate justice has created a reliance on fast fashion companies whose unsustainable business practices have devastating environmental health impacts, which is why consumers need to fight fast fashion by prioritizing sustainable purchasing habits and decreasing fast fashion consumption.

This leads to the unfortunate justification for near-suffocating rates of fashion launches, because trend cycles are so unpredictable—profit is fully dependent on virality. Once a style or motif becomes popular, its initial impact is degraded by constant exposure on social media until it becomes obsolete. The life cycle of a garment is tapering due to the impact of influencer culture on consumer spending habits, and this negatively affects both our self-identity and our shared environment.

The act of discarding a garment brings about its own environmental challenges as well—currently, up to half of American textile waste is shipped to nations overseas. With many of these countries having less developed municipal waste systems which are responsible for overseeing landfill procedures—this has the potential to increase the environmental damage and health impacts of these products.

Every aspect of the creation of fast fashion garments is unsustainable, from the creation of plastic-derived textiles to the construction of pieces by underpaid and overworked exploited laborers. When a good is created without longevity in mind, even if they are manufactured sustainably, which these fast fashion garments are decidedly not—they will never be fully sustainable because they are created to be thrown away.

Ethical and sustainable fashion practices

Many fast fashion companies utilize exploitative labor practices in the Global South which creates an unequal human health impact on communities of color. Unregulated labor forces increase health risks for those who work in these sweatshops—and the discarding of textile-production related byproducts increases plastic pollution which affects waterways, food production systems, and contributes to landscape degradation.

Many organizations, such as the International Labor Rights Forum are working to hold large corporations accountable for their unjust manufacturing by spreading awareness regarding the unethical treatment of workers and the environmental impacts of textile waste, but we as individual consumers can do our part to fight textile waste by repairing and mending clothes, buying second hand and practicing mindful spending habits.

By not overconsuming fast fashion items, an individual can work to minimize their eco footprint and reduce the demand for these fast fashion garments. An example of a way to reduce individual clothing waste is to implement a “capsule wardrobe” which is an assortment of minimalist, high quality clothing items which can be paired in various ways to help individuals satisfy their need for cute and trendy clothes without microtrends.

In conclusion, adopting more sustainable wardrobe practices not only helps us move away from fast fashion, but also significantly lowers our individual carbon footprints and waste production. By making mindful choices about our clothing consumption, we contribute to a more eco-conscious lifestyle, benefiting both the environment and future generations. 

Each small change in how we shop and care for our clothes can lead to a collective reduction in environmental harm, encouraging a shift towards a more sustainable and ethical fashion industry.

Bamboo 101 for Your Household

ByElizabeth Weiss

 JAN 23, 2025

Families that are striving to live greener can make many small choices that add up to a big impact. Bamboo is a sustainable household option, if you pick the right products and places to implement it. Where does bamboo work best? Where will it have the most potential to do good? Are there any drawbacks to using bamboo?

The Pros of Bamboo

You hear “bamboo” and think panda bears, China, and oodles of bamboo forests just waiting to be munched up. This beautiful grass with a hollow stem, however, offers far more than just a source of sustenance for an endangered species. Bamboo is a sustainable, renewable, versatile material — it’s also vastly underused in the United States.

Deforestation contributes to plant disease, soil loss, erosion, and problems with the water cycle. When trees are cut down, the regulation of the climate and ecosystem are upended. Bamboo, however, is a viable alternative as one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It can mature in just a couple of years, compared to fully matured hardwood, which takes 30 to 50 years. Some species of bamboo can grow a whopping 35 inches in a day.

Bamboo doesn’t need as much water as trees to thrive and this hardy plant is so tough it doesn’t need chemical protection to discourage pests or boost growth. Plus, bamboo is antifungal, antibacterial, 100 percent biodegradable, and decomposes naturally in the environment. What’s not to love?

Well, back to China.

The Potential Cons of Bamboo

It’s important to consider where your bamboo products and household goods are sourced. Although bamboo cultivation offers a great opportunity for U.S. farmers, the United States imports most of the bamboo we consume. When bamboo is imported — pre- or post-production — it’s authentic bamboo, but what about the environmental impact caused by trekking these items across the globe? Imported bamboo products are likely to have a hefty transportation carbon footprint, so it’s important to weigh that aspect when you’re considering how these items fit into your lifestyle.

How bamboo is processed also makes a difference in its true sustainability. If a product hasn’t been chemically processed, like most bamboo products sold in solid form, you should be in good shape. Bamboo fabrics, however, are a different story.

Clothing and Fabrics

Bamboo is hard. Turning this plant into a soft fabric like viscose rayon takes chemical processing involving sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. These chemicals are dangerous to a one-time wholly natural material, and they produce chemical runoff and make a major ding on the environment.

Nevertheless, there are greener bamboo fabrics, most notably bamboo lyocell, which is made using a closed-loop cycle so nothing toxic leaks into the environment. Just think twice and consider sourcing and manufacturing before buying bamboo towels, sheets, cleaning cloths, or clothing.

Household Goods

What you use to make your food, eat your food, and clean your food and dishes makes all the difference in your health and wellness. Some sustainable bamboo kitchen items include:

• Full Circle bamboo dish brush and ceramic soap dispenser

• OLA Bamboo utensil and straw set

• Bambusi collapsible bamboo dish drying rack

• NatureZway bamboo vegetable brush

• LeafLife stainless steel and bamboo tea steeper and water bottle

Personal Hygiene

Taking care of your body is about more than just the products you use, it’s about the tools you use to deliver that care, including:

• EcoTools bamboo makeup brushes

• Laluztop organic bamboo hair towel

• Nudoku biodegradable bamboo toothbrush

• Nipoo wooden hairbrush with bamboo bristles

• Who Gives A Crap bamboo toilet paper

Flooring

Solid strand bamboo flooring is an attractive, uniform option for the home. It consists of a solid slate of bamboo, unlike engineered flooring that includes only a thin top layer of bamboo. The only question is, what about the glue? “There will always be a fair amount of glue used to make bamboo flooring, since the grass will be made into strips that need to be formed into planks,” says building biologist Corinne Segura. “Most glues are fairly eco-friendly with low offgassing. You can find flooring without formaldehyde, but all replacement glues still have some offgassing of VOCs.”

While bamboo flooring can be sanded and refinished many times, just like real solid wood, it doesn’t do well in high or low humidity. And if you live in an area where water damage is a threat or large spills happen on the regular, warping could occur.

Ultimately, bamboo in solid form is the most ideal incarnation of this grass and, if you look hard enough, you can find a versatile list of household goods or personal care products made of sustainable, eco-friendly bamboo.

What's the Difference Between Global Warming and Climate Change?

Though they are used interchangeably, the terms are indeed different.

David M. Kuchta

Published January 15, 2025

The terms “global warming” and “climate change” are often used interchangeably. In the scientific literature, climate change and global warming are inextricably linked, even if they are distinct phenomena. The simplest explanation of that linkage is that global warming is the chief cause of changes in our current climate.

Here, we define both of these concepts, describe how they are measured and studied, and explain the connection between them.

What Is Global Warming?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has defined global warming as "an increase in combined surface air and sea surface temperatures averaged over the globe and over a 30-year period."1 For over a century, research has been conducted to measure and pinpoint the precise causes of global warming.

Measurements Throughout History

Earth's average surface temperature has risen and fallen throughout our planet's history. The most complete global temperature records, in which scientists have a high level of confidence, date back to 1880.2 Before 1880, observations come from farmers and scientists who, as early as the 17th century, recorded daily temperatures, rainfall measurements, and first and last frosts in their personal diaries. This data has often been found to be accurate when compared to instrumental data.3

For long-term data, paleoclimatologists (scientists who study ancient climates) rely on historical variations in pollen counts, the advance and retreat of mountain glaciers, ice cores, chemical weathering of rock, tree rings and species locations, shoreline changes, lake sediments, and other “proxy data.”

Scientists continuously refine the accuracy of the recorded data and how it is interpreted and modeled. Temperature records vary by region, altitude, instruments, and other factors, but the closer we get to the present, the more certain scientists are about the facts of global warming.

Natural events such as asteroid impacts and major volcanic eruptions, for example, can have dramatic effects on global temperatures, leading to mass extinctions. Cyclical changes in Earth's position relative to the sun, called Milankovitch cycles, can influence global temperatures and have long-term effects on the climate over the course of thousands of years—though they do not account for the shorter-term changes witnessed over the last 150 years. Indeed, for the present era, a pattern emerges from the data: Earth's average temperature has risen much more rapidly in the past 50 years than during any past warming event.

The Greenhouse Effect

Starting in the mid-19th century, scientists began identifying changes in carbon dioxide concentrations as a leading cause of global temperature changes. In 1856, American physicist Eunice Foote was the first to demonstrate how carbon dioxide absorbed solar radiation. Her suggestion that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature” is now the common understanding among scientists on the causes of global warming, the phenomenon now known as the greenhouse effect.

By 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, could testify to the U.S. Congress “with a high degree of confidence” that there was a “cause and effect relationship" between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming. Hansen was speaking about recent global warming, but the “high degree of confidence” applies to paleoclimatology as well. By their very existence, since the emergence of life on Earth, carbon-based lifeforms have altered levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Human-Induced Causes

Humans have caused the most rapid and severe changes in global temperatures. Since James Hansen's 1988 testimony, the level of confidence in the anthropogenic (human-induced) causes of global warming has grown to be functionally unanimous within the scientific community.

Those anthropogenic causes are not new. As early as 1800, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt observed how deforestation raised regional atmospheric temperatures. Just as wildfires today release tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, controlled burns have been a source of added carbon for centuries.

Those traditional practices, however, are dwarfed by the number of greenhouse gases emitted since the beginning of the late 18th century with the development of the coal-powered steam engine. Coal burning expanded a hundredfold in the 19th century, grew another 50% by 1950, tripled between 1950 and 2000, then nearly doubled again between 2000 and 2015. Oil consumption followed an even faster growth curve, expanding 300-fold between 1880 and 1988, then growing another 50% to 2015. Natural gas use has risen the quickest, expanding a thousandfold between the late 1880s and 1991, then another 75% to 2015.

Fossil fuel burning, which emits greenhouse gases primarily of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, may have peaked in 2017, but still made up 82% of the world's primary energy use in 2021.

The parallel growth of fossil fuel consumption and the rise in global surface temperatures is striking. Greenhouse gas emissions have risen to levels that are “unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years” and are "extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” according to the IPCC.

A simple way to understand how fossil fuels contribute to global warming is to think of a blanket. Burning fossil fuel has wrapped the Earth in a blanket of pollution, which traps heat. The more fossil fuels we burn, the thicker the blanket gets, and the more heat can be trapped.

What Is Climate Change?

Climate is weather over a long duration. Changes in the climate created by human-induced global warming are having and will continue to have long-term effects. Those effects, once thought to begin occurring sometime in the near future, are increasingly visible today, with the most apparent being changes in weather patterns. But subtler changes to entire ecosystems also present a very serious threat.

Extreme Weather

Global warming has made the weather wilder and more unstable, as natural disasters have shown “exponential increases in recent decades” in both intensity and frequency. “Once-in-a-century” natural disasters such as wildfires, deadly heat waves, droughts, floods, tropical storms, hurricanes, blizzards, and avalanches have seen a 10-fold increase since 1960.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, over the last 50 years, half of all recorded disasters and 74% of related economic losses have been due to weather, climate, and water hazards like floods.

Attributing Weather to Climate Change

It is often difficult to attribute any particular extreme weather event to global warming. Natural variability in the climate is responsible for short-term, year-to-year changes in weather patterns, especially at the regional level. But the longer-term pattern of weather events reveals the hand of climate change.

What can be attributed to global warming is a changing climate, where warmer oceans and warmer air increase the likelihood and intensity of droughts, heat waves, storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events. Attribution of extreme events is more a question of probabilities than certainties, given that the circumstances involved often have no historical precedents.

But by comparing current extreme events to historical ones of different intensities and different atmospheric conditions, scientists can give increasingly rigorous explanations for the role that global warming played in worsening extreme weather.

While there is often disagreement within the scientific community about the level of influence climate change has on a single extreme event, there is a solid agreement that human-induced climate change plays a leading role.

Threats to Ecosystems

More deadly than natural disasters is climate change's threat to Earth's entire biosphere, the ecosystems that support life. Species that attempt to adapt to the changing climate often fail.

Coral, for example, dies as oceans absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide and become increasingly acidic. When peatlands and coastal wetlands dry out due to rising temperatures, their dead vegetation decomposes more quickly and releases greenhouse gases, contributing to a “cascading effect” where one calamity contributes to the next. Climate-driven “tipping points,” already underway, lead to major losses in biodiversity and undermine entire ecosystems.

Climate change research still contains unknowns and uncertainties. It is easier to understand the past than to predict the future of an entire planet's physical and biological systems. Yet the key uncertainty is less about the hard science of climate change and more about the social science of how humans respond to it.

What Is Zero Waste?

Zero waste, as ZIWA puts it is "The conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health." In other words, it is a lifestyle in which you do not send anything to a landfill. We, as humans, are over-consumers and don't value our belongings which in turn makes them disposable. According to the EPA the average American produces 4.4 pounds of waste a day - that's almost 1.5 trillion pounds of waste per year just from Americans. That's a lot! 

But how do you decrease that number? It's SIMPLE, reduce, reuse, and recycle♻️. 

You can start reducing your waste by thinking about if you absolutely NEED something before buying it. You really only need one general cleaner for windows, kitchen counters, bathroom, and floors - vinegar and water.

Reduce

Just by reducing your need for cleaning detergents you've decreased your waste at least 3 containers by reusing one spray bottle, plus you've decreased your cost by $50+ and it's harmful chemical free so your pets or kids stay healthy.

Reuse

Now-a-days there is almost always a reusable option for anything you could possibly need. Instead of plastic wrap there are reusable silicone lids in just about any size you can think of so you can cover bowls, fruit, cans, jars, etc to save for later then toss the lid in the dishwasher and use it over and over again. You will also save a ton of money in the long run by reusing than disposing.

Recycle

There are instances where you HAVE to buy something that is just not reusable -like canned foods - and it's not your fault but you can still make this into a zero waste situation. Just recycle the can after you've rinsed it out.

On average Americans already recycle 34.3% of their trash, however, this number should really be closer to 100%. You can help raise the percentage by only buying goods that can be recycled instead of thrown out.

Small Thoughts But HUGE Impact

It does not take a whole lot of energy to be zero waste. Next time you go to the grocery store, bring your own reusable bags instead of using the store's plastic bags, think hard about your need for something and if you do need something try to opt for the product in recyclable packaging or no packaging at all. By doing these three simple things you can make a huge impact. 

So let's work together to go from this

to this

Sources

Zero Waste Definition, Zero Waste International Alliance, 10/20/2018, 4/21/2020, http://zwia.org/zero-waste-definition/

All Credit

J&L Naturals

Ethical Fashion: How to Start Building an Eco-Friendly Wardrobe Today

Written by Georgia Douvall

AUGUST 12, 2024

Sustainability is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. You might have heard some distressing news about the next bad turn that the environment has taken, or simply been introduced to the horrible conditions that many fast fashion companies put people through. The good news is that you’re already making great strides in living a better, eco-friendly life.

Sustainable Production vs Greenwashing: The Difference

Being sustainable is certainly trending, so you’ll hear a lot of different companies try to show you their newest sustainable collection. Some might boast things like “vegan leather” or “made with recycled polyester”.

These are claims you need to be very wary of. For example, while some true vegan leather exists (it’s typically made out of food scraps like orange peels or even mushrooms) the vegan leather you’ll come across in your day to day is simply plastic. All plastics, regardless of whether they’re recycled or not, shed and lead to the growing microplastics problem that’s worked its way so far up the food chain we eat approximately one credit card’s worth of it in a year.

What to Look For When Shopping

Your options when it comes to sustainable shopping are not just second-hand or high-end. There are many middle-ground retailers like Carve Designs that offer pesticide-free organic cotton products that were ethically manufactured. These products cost the same, if not less, compared to other brands you likely already shop at.

Limiting Your Consumption

Buying less and buying better is the best way to be sustainable. This means that the goal is to buy fewer items throughout the year, but when you do, putting more emphasis on their quality. Look at the seams, the material, the manufacturing, and then once you deem it’s of high quality (a trait that’s becoming harder to find these days) then consider how it works in your wardrobe.

A great, easy way to lower your consumption is to simply wait. If you see a product you like online, make a mental note and leave it for 48 hours. If you still can’t wait to buy it and imagine so many different outfits you can make with it, then feel free to add it to your closet. If you barely manage to remember you even made a mental note, then you simply let yourself forget about it.

Invest in Clothes Care

Maintaining your existing clothes and knowing how to take better care of anything you buy in the future is how you keep your closet looking amazing. A good place to start is to actually be more mindful of what you put in the dryer. Cotton tends to soften in the dryer, for example, so if you want that crisp new shirt to stay crisp and sharp, wash on delicate only and hang up to dry.

It's also a good idea to invest in the right soap, learn to hand wash certain delicates and wools, and get a drying rack. Doing all this can help extend the life and beauty of your clothes, and is good practice for sustainable living.

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