In 2012, I was a “nifty” woman awarded the label of a top 50 women in technology on twitter by Webbiquity.com – hey that’s pretty cool. But today, my disabled body cannot find a way to arrive on time, maybe 50 minutes late, but not an award-worthy statistic. 2017 Nifty Fifty Flake. Making lemonade from the lemons that fall far from the tress and slooooowly attempting an ascension to the locally driven retail and internet word search puzzle grabbing customers to my Etsy site. I rise or try to anyway, to arise to the transcendent world of low tech ecofashion. I recently wrote a post on my Etsy shop about the waste in the fast fashion industry, which I had no idea existed until I researched the surface of what I’m trying to accomplish by selling vintage goods. I knew it was good for the environment but I had no idea about how good.
Here’s the post for your reading pleasure and feel free to visit my shop at http://www.etsy.com/post/yeuxdeux.
- As much as 15% of fabric ends up trashed in the process of making clothes. (US EPA, 2016)
- 11.1 million tons of clothing are thrown away per year and the average American trashes 63 pounds of textiles per year. (US EPA 2006)
- The average T-shirt wastes 700 gallons of water in manufacturing (US EPA, 2017)
Petroleum-based polyester and poly blends comprise most garments manufactured today in fast fashion found in stores like Target, H&M and others. The fabric proves very hard to recycle without losing quality and therefore goes mainly to the dump along with 15% of the other wasted materials mentioned above, winding up on the manufacturing plant floor. We won’t discuss the overseas manufacturing of garments in China and the Philippines where blue jeans create a special kind of illness uno themselves to the human capital creating the tight pre-washed garments that make your ass look great!
And for the back pocket of your jeans, here’s the fast fashion facts you may want to take with you to continue that dinner conversation you started back in the introductory paragraph of this blog post:
-
US consumers buy 20 million garments per year
-
That means every man, woman, child, and not to mention pets in some cases buy 63 garments per person per year.
-
That means everyone buys at least 1+ garment per week.The US EPA 2017