Adhering to the latest fashion trends may be an unwritten social expectation in many educational and business contexts. However, Dr Dorottya Sallai argues that the detrimental impact fast fashion causes to the environment goes far beyond the benefits it offers.
When people update their wardrobes every season, they may not realise that the manufacturing of just one simple cotton T-shirt requires approximately 2,700 litres of water. However, hyper-consumption of fast fashion continues. Would behaviours change if people knew, for example, that discarded clothing results in the release of half a million tonnes of microfibres into the ocean every year – the equivalent of more than 50 billion plastic bottles?
Fast fashion is considered the primary cause of the rise of mass consumption and environmental pollution. According to studies, by 2030, 69 per cent of global textile production will be based on polyester, nylon and other synthetic fibres, and only 25 per cent will have a natural origin.
While the industry may be bringing sustainability more into focus, as long as consumers buy cheap clothes, balancing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives with commercial objectives will be challenging.
What is fast fashion?
Fast fashion refers to mass produced cheap clothes that are distributed quickly to consumers to enable rapidly changing fashion trends. Fast fashion’s affordability, convenience, and trend-based nature has seen the exponential growth of the industry despite its negative impacts on the environment and garment workers.
This is not a surprise since fashion is also a highly profitable business, being valued at $1.7 trillion in 2023 and employing more than 300 million people across the different global value chains. As a result of fast fashion, clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, while the number of items of clothing people buy per capita increased by about 60 percent.
What’s more, in 2024, fast fashion was outpaced by ‘ultrafast fashion’, which allows wardrobes to be updated at an unprecedented pace. The rise of trend-based social media and extremely cheap price tags has led to a culture of over-consumption and an even more accelerated disposal of fashion items that are often ‘barely worn before being dumped’.
For example, in 2023, Shein, a Chinese fashion brand, produced around 7200 new product models every day, pricing them significantly cheaper than established fast-fashion retailers. Fast-fashion retailers like Shein and Temu have enjoyed staggering sales as they become popular due to their ability to quickly produce and sell trendy, affordable clothing. This method is proving popular—in 2024, 40 percent of US and 26 percent per cent of UK consumers shopped at these retailers.
The impact of fast fashion on the environment
Fast fashion contributes to substantial waste, pollution, and subsequent environmental damage, contributing more to climate change than international flights and maritime shipping combined. Given that the textile industry accounts for 20 percent of all industrial water pollution, and fast fashion is responsible for 10 percent of global carbon emissions due to energy consumption in production and distribution, this is not surprising. According to the European Environment Agency, clothing purchases in the EU generated around 270kg of carbon dioxide emissions per person in the year 2020 alone.
This is without mentioning the physical waste fast fashion generates. Out of the total annual production of 100 billion garments, around 92 million tonnes are disposed of in landfills. Or, in other words, one bin-lorry worth of clothes is added to landfills every second. In the United States alone, an estimated 85 percent of all textiles end up in landfills each year, equal to 37kg per person.
Sustainability versus profit
In respond to climate change concerns and regulatory pressure, we are starting to see progress within the industry on addressing these issues. Many fashion companies are integrating sustainability into their business models. Shein has called for the fashion industry’s ‘urgent transformation’ on sustainability, while H&M offers customers discounts on purchases in exchange for used clothes for recycling. Companies are moving away from the old linear model of extraction and disposal and towards circular business models that emphasise recycling.
Regulators around the world are also evaluating possible interventions in the industry to protect the environment. EU states, for instance, have considered introducing restrictions on textile waste exports, as much of the disposed fashion-related waste is transported to countries such as Ghana and Kenya, causing environmental damage locally. The French parliament is debating a bill that would impose serious new restrictions on fast-fashion brands, including fines if they fail to address environmental damage.
Nevertheless, companies have little reason to change as long as the average European consumer uses approximately 26kg of clothes a year and disposes of approximately 11kg of them. In Europe, British shoppers buy more clothes than any other nation.
Despite all the environmental concerns and regulatory efforts, investment in fast fashion is still growing, and people are still spending their money on low-quality clothing that goes out of fashion in weeks. The question that the industry should be really worried about is when fast fashion will go out of fashion.
- This blog post is based on Navigating the 21st Century Business World—Case Studies in Management, edited by Dorottya Sallai and Alexander Pepper, chapter, “Environmental impact: why fast fashion is bad for the environment”, LSE Press (2025).
- The post represents the views of its author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Image credit: Halfpoint, Shutterstock.
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