The fast fashion industry is characterised by both overproduction and overconsumption. The sector is harmful to the environment, requiring enormous quantities of natural resources and creating substantial waste. Policy-makers could promote a more circular economy to reduce the damage.
Fast fashion thrives on satisfying consumers’ every whim. Whatever new style is trending – often made popular via content posted on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram – fast fashion companies quickly produce similar products and deliver them to customers. These firms are able to do so by combining agile supply chains (the ability to manufacture small batches of clothes quickly) with design capabilities (the ability to introduce new styles at high speed).
For example, the Chinese online retailer Shein adds around 6,000 new styles to its website every single day (The Economist, 2021). Behind the scenes, the company is able to deliver at such speeds by working with myriad small factories that produce a few initial samples and then quickly make more units if and when a particular style is a hit.
This process differs from the traditional fashion industry, where companies typically place large orders months in advance of the selling season. Production planning often starts more than a year in advance, resulting in fewer, and less ‘trend-driven’, styles.
The promise of fast fashion is also its biggest environmental drawback. By catering to consumers’ ever-changing tastes, fast fashion encourages overconsumption. This business model first came into prominence in the 2000s, with the success of companies such as Zara and H&M. Over the following two decades, the rise of social media and e-commerce further boosted the popularity of businesses like Boohoo, Fashion Nova and, more recently, Shein and Temu.
Partly as a result, UK clothing purchases grew to 1.4 million tonnes in 2022 – a 50% increase from 2012. According to a report by the Ellen McArthur Foundation, global clothing production more than doubled between 2000 and 2015.
At the same time, the frequency of use of a typical piece of clothing has reduced. The average number of times a garment is worn before it is discarded has fallen by 36% over the past 15 years (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2017). So, as well as substantial increases in apparel production levels, clothes are increasingly being thrown away after only a few wears.
Such overconsumption hurts the environment in two ways. First, the more clothes we make, the more resources we use up. Apparel production draws on a large volume of natural resources, and it is a major source of carbon emissions and pollution.
It is estimated that the fashion industry accounts for 8-10% of global carbon production and is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution (BCG 2017; Kant 2012). The industry uses an estimated 79 trillion litres of water per year – equivalent to draining Lake Superior almost seven times (Niinimäki et al, 2020).
This is because making individual garments is thirsty work. In fact, producing a simple cotton t-shirt can require the same amount of water needed to satisfy one person’s drinking needs for two and a half years (European Parliament, 2021).
Other types of materials commonly used in fast fashion – such as polyester – rely on non-renewable and carbon-intensive resources such as petroleum (Niinimäki et al, 2020). Further energy consumption and pollution occur in the processing stages, for example, during spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing and finishing.
Figure 1. Water and energy consumption from making a t-shirt and a pair of jeans
Source: Niinimäki et al, 2020
The second way in which overconsumption hurts the environment is that the more we buy, the more we throw away. Total textile waste in the United States exceeded 17 million tonnes in 2018 – a tenfold increase from 1960 (Environmental Protection Agency, 2025). Global textile waste now exceeds 92 million tonnes per year (Quantis, 2018). Much of this increase is due to the rise of fast fashion.
Lifespans for these products are often limited due to their lower quality. The factories churning out new styles prioritise speed over quality, and consumers chasing every trend prefer to buy cheap. As a result, consumers keep products for a shorter duration, and second-hand shops tend to reject products from fast fashion brands (due to their flimsy quality). These clothes are then incinerated or get sent to landfill, where they can take hundreds of years to decompose.
The environmental impact of fast fashion is not distributed evenly around the world. The globalisation of fashion supply chains means that the bulk of fabric production and apparel manufacturing – and hence the resource consumption, pollution and pre-consumption industrial waste – occurs in developing countries, away from the Western countries where the end products are enjoyed.
The impact can often be dire. It is estimated that 20% of the water loss in the dried up Aral Sea (in Uzbekistan) was caused by cotton consumption in Europe (Chapagain, 2006).
Similarly, post-consumer apparel waste is often exported to developing countries, where fast fashion products have overwhelmed local second-hand markets. For example, every week, Ghana receives 15 million items of second-hand clothing – 40% of which are unsellable. This results in overflowing local landfills and polluted beaches (BOF, The Business of Fashion, 2023; The Times, 2021).
What can consumers and businesses do to respond?
So, what can be done to help to mitigate these problems? First, since overconsumption is the root cause of the environmental problems described above, reducing consumption could be an obvious answer. But this has proven very difficult to achieve so far, as shown by the enduring popularity of fast fashion giants like Zara and Primark, as well as the rapid rise of new companies like Shein.
Alternatively, businesses can try to support a more circular economy in fashion (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2017). With this approach, the focus is not on reducing consumer demand. Instead, the emphasis is on altering the operations of how companies satisfy that demand, shifting towards systems that (ideally) reduce both the amount of waste that goes to landfill and the amount of resources used to manufacture the products in the first place.
For example, companies could invest in recycling processes to salvage material from consumers’ discarded clothing, reducing waste. This would increase the amount of recycled material available to make new items. Companies could then use this recycled material for production, eliminating or at least reducing a major source of resource consumption and carbon (raw material production) from its environmental footprint.
But this approach is challenging. Recycling fibre is notoriously difficult and costly. Developing the technology requires upfront capital investments and order commitments from cost-conscious fashion brands. The recent bankruptcy of Renewcell (a Swedish company that developed a new technology for recycling cotton), despite it having received enthusiastic expressions of support from the fashion industry, demonstrates the scale of the challenge (Carey and Antoshak, 2024).
Upcycling, which involves making new clothing out of existing deadstock fabric without breaking that fabric down to fibre, is more feasible. But it is still expensive due to the lack of economies of scale: since each batch of deadstock varies in its quantity, print, texture and even shape, production cannot happen at scale. This makes upcycling much more costly than traditional manufacturing.
An easier approach is to try to elongate the time a piece of clothing stays in circulation. It is estimated that extending the average life of clothes by just three months of active use per item would lead to a 5-10% reduction in its environmental footprint (WRAP, 2012).
Companies could boost reuse by supporting and collaborating with existing second-hand platforms (or even launching their own). But this is where things get tricky for fast fashion companies. Due to their low quality, the second-hand value of fast fashion items is so low that it is difficult to sustain a functioning resale market. Often, the costs of logistics and sorting exceed the value of the product itself.
What are the policy implications?
Clearly, the right policy programme could make a difference. Policy-makers around the world are already taking action. For example, in 2024, legislators in California passed the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, imposing the burden of ‘extended producer responsibility’ (EPR) onto fashion companies. Specifically, firms are now required to join a ‘producer responsibility organisation’, which must have an approved plan for the proper collection, sorting and recycling of member companies’ textile waste.
Similar laws exist in countries such as France, and they are being introduced at the European Union (EU) level as part of the EU Green Deal. Other proposed legislation includes increasing supply chain transparency and imposing a ‘fast fashion tax’ on companies with rapidly renewing product assortments (New York Fashion Act, 2025; CNN, 2024).
A supply chain perspective can be useful for assessing the effectiveness of policy. For example, EPR-style regulations can be effective in reducing local waste but they do not prevent clothes from being dumped in developing countries. According to a report by Refashion (the organisation overseeing the EPR scheme in France), less than 10% of collected reusable textiles are actually sold in France, with the rest exported abroad (35% are sent to African countries and 24% to Asia).
Similarly, regulations targeting post-consumer waste do little to curb the pollution, resource consumption and waste that occurs in developing countries, where upstream supply chain activities such as raw material production and fabric processing occur (Long and Gui, 2024). So, waste-based regulation at the regional or national level may not be sufficient to combat the environmental impact of global fast fashion supply chains.
To make a true transition towards a greener economy, companies need to have incentives to reduce the resources they consume. This may involve taxing the carbon footprint of apparel supply chains to encourage the use of recycled material in production, or grants and subsidies that support companies developing recycling technology, upcycling start-ups and/or second-hand platforms with the goal of reducing the costs of circularity.
The hope is that with the careful use of both carrots and sticks, governments can help to facilitate the rise of a circular business eco-system by increasing both supply (for example, manufacturers offering recycled textiles or upcycling services) and demand (for example, fashion companies willing to purchase these textiles and services) in the system (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2017; Niinimäki et al, 2020).
Finally, education campaigns may be needed to build awareness and shift consumer preferences away from fast fashion towards more high-quality, durable products (WRAP, 2012).
Where can I find out more?
- A new textiles economy: redesigning fashion’s future: a 2017 report by the Ellen McArthur Foundation, which describes the environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry, and initiatives that can help to reduce those impacts.
- Valuing our clothes: the true cost of how we design, use and dispose of clothing in the UK: a 2012 report by the global environmental action NGO WRAP, which provides statistics on the carbon, water and waste footprints of clothing consumption in the UK, and suggestions for curbing those footprints.
- The environmental price of fast fashion: an article by Kirsi Niinimäki and colleagues, published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in 2020, which provides a comprehensive review of the environmental impacts of fast fashion by tracing the impacts at critical points in the textile and fashion value chain.
Who are experts on this question?
- Angela Druckman
- Hau Lee
- Kirsi Niinimäki
- Patsy Perry
