The fashion industry is one of the world’s largest industrial polluters, and yet it continues to grow, in part due to the rise of fast fashion. British people buy more clothes per person than any other European nation, with only a limited amount of used clothing being reused or recycled; less than one per cent of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing.
The environmental impact of the fashion industry – particularly the fast fashion industry, which is based on a rapid cycle of cheap, mass-manufactured, disposable garments often made from artificial fibres – has been brought to mainstream attention in recent years. However, the fast fashion industry continues to grow and accelerate, largely driven by the popularity of budget online fashion retailers such as Asos, Boohoo and Missguided.
A paper published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment has examined the environmental impacts throughout the textile and fashion chain from production...