FASHION'S IMPACT ON WATER POLLUTION
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Those are cute jeans! Are they new? EcoWatch says that over 300 million pairs of jeans get made every year. You know what's not cute though? The mercury, lead, copper and other chemicals dumped into the rivers after production. Of all the chemicals produced globally, 23% of them are used by the fashion industry according to SustainableFashion. It takes 1 kilogram of chemicals to make 1 kilogram of clothing. Just in Asia alone, 2.5 billion gallons of toxic wastewater is produced by their textile industry annually, which has contaminated nearly 70% of the continent's rivers.
The fashion industry is contaminating our waters on a global scale throughout all stages of production. Forbes first mentions the runoff from cotton fields during the early stages of production, growing the material. This phase has its own effects on land and agriculture. The runoff is known to cause an algal bloom in rivers. Then we have textile dyeing and the chemicals used during fabrication.
We are aware of the water consumed by the fashion industry to produce our clothing as mentioned in an earlier post - 1.5 trillion liters annually. Most of which is dumped back into waters untreated. WEForum states that textile dying is the second largest polluter of the world’s waters. It’s at fault for 20% of industrial water pollution globally.
Then we have plastics. It’s genuinely confusing that this issue is not more widespread. We’ve all heard the uproar on plastic straws. Almost everyone is aware of the detrimental impacts of using them, how much they affect our oceans and the wildlife in them, right? Phys.Org says that an estimated 9 million tons of these plastic straws end up in oceans each year. Though it’s a fraction, there are still 500,000 tons of microplastics released into the oceans each year from clothing. This may not seem like a lot in comparison to the war on straws, but that comes out to 50 billion plastic bottles. This is still a very significant number of very small plastics that will never biodegrade.
The World Economic Forum also concluded that these microplastics make up about 31% of all plastic pollution in the ocean. Their article written in 2020 notes that clothing production has doubled in the past two decades. Unfortunately, this number appears to only be going up from here. It’s important to understand the effects we have on our environment as a consumer and decide how we can make smarter choices to leave our world a better place than we found it. So, did you really need that new pair of jeans?
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