The fashion industry is rapidly changing, with new trends, fabrics, and styles emerging daily. For many individuals, fashion is essentially about shaping and expressing personality. However, fashion becomes a hazard to society when we purchase more than we need and fill our wardrobes with trendy clothes. It is estimated that Americans alone throw away over 14 million tonnes of textiles each year.
Climate change and global warming have stunned the whole world, and people are more concerned about the environment than ever before. The younger generations, in particular, have become global ambassadors of a greener Earth, promoting environmentally friendly lifestyles and emphasizing the importance of the environment above materialism.
Considering the textile industry alone accounts for around 10% of the global population, textile designers and fashion gurus strive to reduce their carbon footprint and produce eco-friendly or sustainable materials. Sustainable fashion is a hot new term getting popularity in some of the best online women’s magazines as it plays an important role in reducing environmental and social hazards.
What is Sustainable Fashion?
Sustainable fashion includes everything related to eco-friendly clothing materials, garments, and accessories. The goal of sustainable fashion is to aid society and the environment by lowering the environmental effect of chemicals, carbon emissions, and other pollutants while stressing the conservation of water and other critical resources used in textile production and fashion design.
Importance of Sustainable Fashion
People prefer buying new clothes, and this is why most of the clothing materials we use are produced using brand-new resources. This not increases the consumption of plant and animal-based resources but also contributes to water and energy wastage, excessive use of chemicals and dyes, and environmental pollution. Customers are increasingly becoming aware of the hazardous effects of buying excessive amounts of new and synthetic garments and fashion accessories. Sustainable fashion has emerged as a viable alternative to clothing needs without contributing much to the environmental pollution and wastage of resources.
Benefits of Sustainable Fashion
Sustainable fashion focuses on promoting quality clothing products made from long-lasting materials. It promotes simpler lifestyle use of eco-friendly materials to save the environment from toxic chemicals and CO2 emissions. Let’s look at the benefits of sustainable fashion and why it’s here to stay:
Reduces Carbon Footprint
The fashion and textile industry produces a mind-boggling amount of greenhouse gases annually, contributing directly to climate change and global warming. This is mostly due to the high levels of oils and petroleum products used to produce synthetic or mixed materials like nylon, polyester, acrylic, and even cotton-based products with a percentage of synthetic fiber.
Using sustainable clothing helps reduce carbon emissions as they use natural or recycled fabrics. Such fabrics require minimum or no chemicals, less water, and little energy. Sustainable clothing made from organic materials is biodegradable and offers amazing environmental benefits.
Saves Natural Resources and Environment
The textile industry uses a staggering amount of water, energy, fossil fuels, and chemicals to produce new fabrics. In contrast, sustainable fashion encourages the use of recycled fabrics which do not require new resources or additional fossil fuels and dyes. This is why sustainable fashion is an important source of minimizing textile production wastes and reducing water contamination and environmental pollution.
Saves Animal Lives
The love for leather and fur has taken the lives of millions of animals on Earth. Leather apparel, shoes, handbags, wallets, and countless other fashion items are made out of animal skin. It’s a common perception that leather is just a by-product of meat, but this is not true. For example, some of the most famous luxury brands use snake and alligator skins for designer handbags. For this purpose, they allegedly peel off a baby alligator’s skin mercilessly while they’re still alive.
Sustainable fashion aims to end animal suffering by introducing synthetic and natural alternatives. You may come across improvised creations like bags made from recycled seatbelts, polyester made with trash, bamboo fiber for fabrics, silk from yeast, and fabric produced from pineapple leaves.
Saves Water
The fashion industry alone is responsible for 20% of water wastage. Sustainable fashion, on the other hand, emphasizes using recycled materials and, in turn, saves essential natural resources. This results in less used, wasted, and contaminated water.
Supports Impartial and Nontoxic Work Environments
Textile industries face constant criticism for their rigid work hours for workers and exposure to toxic chemicals. The health and safety conditions are unacceptably poor. The impartial behavior is evident in the wages, working hours, extra shifts, and non-existing worker unions.
While eco-friendly fashion restricts exposure to harmful chemical substances, it also advocates healthy working conditions and fair compensation for its employees.
Help Us Improvise on Clothing
Those who advocate a greener Earth and eco-friendly lifestyle are aware of the negative aspects of textile production and the fashion industry. They take solid steps to protect the planet and all its inhabitants from the devastating effects of pollution and resource depletion.
By adopting sustainable fashion, we can learn to squeeze our wardrobes and improvise on the available options. The new trends in sustainable fashion promote using used clothes or recycling multiple old clothes into one fabulously designed outfit. It’s up to us to choose whether we want to be the reason for environmental destruction or part of the solution.
Find out the Latest Trends in Sustainable Fashion in Hustle Mama Magazine
Sustainable fashion is here to stay! Follow Hustle Mama Magazine, one of the best women’s magazines online, to find out the latest trends in sustainable fashion and clothing. Keep yourself updated with unlimited news and tips on health, beauty, relationships, fashion, the business world, and more.
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