How unsustainable the fashion industry is
Source: https://www.weforum.org/
Zara, the biggest international fashion company puts out 24 collections per year, while H&M offers between 12 and 16. A lot of this clothing ends up in the dump. The equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second. In total, up to 85% of textiles go into landfills each year. That’s enough to fill the Sydney harbor annually. Washing clothes, meanwhile, releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year - the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. Many of those fibers are polyester, a plastic found in an estimated 60% of garments. Producing polyester releases two to three times more carbon emissions than cotton, and polyester does not break down in the ocean. A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics - very small pieces of plastic that never biodegrade - in the ocean came from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester.