The fashion industry is known to have many different ways in which it produces waste, but what we may not know is just how damaging this can be to us. One thing that we all look over is the waste of the materials being used in the first place. According to the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), 17 million tons of textiles ended up in landfills in 2018 alone! This number should not be acceptable by any standard because it puts us at risk.
There are also problems with the textiles that we are using to make clothing. How often do we really think of how our clothing and how its materials affect the environment? The cultivation of the most popular clothing fabric, cotton, can lead to many unintended consequences like the contamination of water from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers coming from cotton fields. According to TRVST, cotton growers used 48 million pounds of pesticides in the U.S. in 2017. Constant farming of cotton can also lead to soil degradation and the loss of habitats.