Why The Fashion Industry Is The Second Largest Environmental Polluter In The World: Fashion labels seem increasingly responsible for producing their clothing, partly under pressure from an increasingly critical consumer and corporate social responsibility from the industry itself.

H & M has the sustainable and organic line Conscious Exclusive, and Zara recently presented their responsible Join Life collection. It is striking, however, that in the recently signed Paris Climate Agreement, where universal measures are in place to limit CO2 emissions, nothing said about this.

Reason for two authors for the website Fast Coexist to write a critical piece about the impact on the environment of the fashion industry, now this month world leaders in Morocco come together to discuss the implementation of the Climate Agreement with each other.

Fast Fashion
An essential cause according to Maxime Bédat, CEO, and founder of sustainable clothing brand Zady.com, and Michael Shank, teacher of sustainable development. The Center for Global Affairs at the New York University in the article for Fast Coexist, is that an organisation is lacking that consumers made aware of the link between climate change and the production of clothing before they buy the dress.

Every year, 150 billion new garments designed, but nowadays consumers do not keep the clothes that purchased for a long time. They wear it and very soon after it is thrown away again. This phenomenon is also called fast fashion and is as bad for the environment as the plastic bottles or bags that consumers throw away.

Contribution to environmental pollution
Fast fashion is possible because there is an increasingly cheaper production of clothing available in countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, the authors then argue. Because there is no strict environmental legislation in these countries,

 the cheapest and most harmful form of energy often used: coal. Usually refers to the poorer nations for polluting the environment, but we as (Western) consumers buy the clothes. There is also a lot of water used in the production of clothing and the massive amount of goats used for the cashmere yarn provide overgrazing, creating a significant desert in Asia.

The unprocessed chemicals then end up in the worldwide water systems, so that for example there is no right drinking water available in large parts of China or water that you can shower. Also, consumers nowadays consider it to be preferable to use synthetic materials made from oil instead of natural substances, and the clothes are increasingly shipping,

 which also increases CO2 emissions. None of those mentioned above issues is specified in the Paris Climate Agreement, When there is a massive impact on the environment, according to the authors. It is, therefore, time for the fashion industry and policymakers to paint a complete picture of the entire CO2 footprint of the fashion industry to the environment.