Some more fast facts about fast fashion. Each year the fashion industry:
👗 Uses 93 billion cubic metres of water (enough to meet the needs of five million people)
💧 Produces 20% of global wastewater
🛢️ Requires 31 billion litres of crude oil (over 12,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools). For every kilogram of plastic-based synthetic fibre produced, 1.1kg of oil is used.
👔 Consumes 43 million tonnes of chemicals
🚜 Uses 85.2 million hectares of land that have been converted to cotton or cellulosic production or livestock. (about 60 million football pitches)
👜 Responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions (more than all flights and shipping combined of which the fashion industry is also responsible and isn’t counted in its own total)
🐟 Dumps 500,000 tons of microfibre into the ocean (the equivalent of 3 million barrels of oil)
🗑️ Creates mall landfill with 80% of clothing disposed (every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned)
👚 Clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014
“If we carry on with a business-as-usual approach, the greenhouse gas emissions from the industry are expected to rise by almost 50% by 2030”. – Elisa Tonda, Head of Consumption and Production Unit at UN Environment
Sources: UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Ellen MacArthur A New Textiles Economy, JoinOurCo Mapping the Industry Report (2018), Pulse of the Fashion Industry report, Global Fashion Agenda (2017), Circular Fibers Initiative, Common Objective
