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Fast Fashion brands are hazardous to environment: Study

Fast fashion brands may be out to kill the planet, an investigation has revealed. Clothes which are processed and got to the market as fast as possible (a model favoured by H&M, Zara's, and Forever 21) come at a very high environmental cost, with millions of tons of clothes ending up in trash bins, incinerators and landfills.

Going by the practice of popular clothing chains trying to cover up the environmental impacts, H&M had announced in April that it was accepting used clothes as donations from customers that they would recycle to create a new fiber and thus new clothes. However, only 0.1 per cent of all clothing received by charities and programmes that recycle clothes is actually recycled, H&M's Development Sustainability Manager Henrik Lampa admitted. 

Fast-fashion outlets are worsening the problem because very few secondhand stores or websites selling used clothes such as thredUP accept items purchased from Forever 21 and other stores due to their poor quality. This means more unwanted clothing is adding to the national trash pile.
Fast fashion is the second dirtiest global industry after oil. Since 2011, Greenpeace has been running its Detox campaign to urge global fashion production houses to eliminate hazardous chemicals from clothes. The problem is further worsened by the increased speed of trend turnover. The fast-fashion outlets are changing trends very quickly to stimulate more sales due to their quick and voluminous output. This means that recent purchases will go out of style sooner than ever before. This indicates that there would be more clothes in the trash bin.

Natural fibers including silk, linen, cotton and semi-synthetic fibers (modal, rayon and Tencel) have a similar decomposition process to food which yields methane. But it's impossible to compost these clothes. Other materials are acrylic, nylon and polyester. Since these have a petroleum base, it could take many hundreds of years to fully decompose.

 
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