Our garments are not only sawn, but they are made out of fabric. Majority of the fast fashion garments use fabrics such as acrylic, polyester, polyamide, nylon which are essentially plastic. Many of these items are only worn few times before ending up in landfill where it will take in between 20-200 years. Meanwhile, while we wash these fabrics they keep releasing micro plastic into the water, which eventually end up in the ocean. In a study at Plymouth University, “they found that acrylic was the worst offender, releasing nearly 730,000 tiny synthetic particles per wash, five times more than polyester-cotton blend fabric, and nearly 1.5 times as many as polyester.”
The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world just after the oil industry. And the environmental damage is increasing as the industry grows. The fast fashion industry consume enormous amounts of water, pollutes the waters as in countries where garments are produced untreated toxic wastewaters from textiles factories are dumped directly into the rivers. Along side there is the problem of greenhouse gases emissions of the fashion industry, soil degradation and rainforest destructions among others.