French lawmakers have taken a stand against the growing issues stemming from the fast fashion industry. A new French law bans influencer-led fast fashion promotions and forces clothing brands to post environmental scores on every item sold, according to Mongabay. The lower the score, the higher the penalty they must pay.
The goal is simple — cut down on overproduction and make polluters pay for their reckless behavior. Anne-Cécile Violland, who introduced the bill, said clothing use has doubled in the past two decades.
“We need to stop overconsuming,” she told Mongabay.
That waste doesn’t just disappear once you buy the shirt. It haunts us in other forms, such as microscopic plastic fibers in the air, dyes in our rivers, or piles of fabric in landfills that can’t be resold. In 2021, over 900 million used clothes were dumped in Kenya. Many of them were so cheaply made that they just fell apart, ending up in dumps or pollution waterways instead of in someone’s closet.
Marine scientist Imogen Napper pointed out how much plastic is now mixed into our clothes. Every wash and every wear shakes loose threads that drift into soil, water, and even the air we breathe. People and animals both end up taking it in.
Markets that once made a living from solid secondhand goods are struggling too. Sellers are now buried in low-grade fast fashion castoffs. Even so, shoppers who avoid the worst of it save money and keep better-made clothing in use for longer.
Fast fashion‘s low prices come at another cost: underpaid workers making disposable clothes in dangerous conditions. Profits rely on lower labor standards as much as on producing more waste.
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And the issue doesn’t stop at one country’s border. In Ghana, coastlines are covered with layers of discarded clothing. Indonesia has dealt with rivers so polluted by factories that the Supreme Court had to intervene. Elsewhere, photo projects have shown fabric waste stacked high like man-made hills, slowly rotting in the open.
There is hope as more shoppers are looking for alternatives. One YouTube commenter wrote: “I’m saving up for a good secondhand sewing machine. There’s beautiful dead stock fabric heading for landfills, and some of it is free. We don’t need to add to our waste.”
Another added: “I hope this spreads to more countries. Loopholes will pop up, but at least it’s a start.”
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