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Whether you’re a classy fashionista or your type stopped evolving with grunge, you placed on garments daily. And these garments have an incredible environmental affect. To honor 52 years of motion impressed by Earth Day, Earth911 is presenting 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week via Earth Day 2023, we’ll share an motion you possibly can take to invest in the Earth and make your individual life extra sustainable. This week, you possibly can put money into the Earth by petitioning for laws that may make the garment {industry} extra sustainable.
An Unfashionable Impact
The style {industry} is infamous for its wastefulness and steep environmental affect. The style {industry} is chargeable for nearly 10% of worldwide greenhouse fuel emissions. It takes nearly 3,000 liters of water to make one cotton T-shirt and almost 3,800 liters of water to make a pair of denims. Washing artificial clothes (which contains 60% of what we put on) releases microplastics that account for 35% of all ocean microplastic air pollution. After expertise, no different {industry} contributes greater than style to modern slavery and youngster labor, whereas the chemicals (particularly pesticides and dyes) which are used to supply textiles for garment manufacturing pollute the communities the place they’re made, additional harming the employees who make our garments.
Fashion for the Earth
EarthDay.org’s new marketing campaign, Fashion for the Earth, goals to vary all that. They wish to make the style {industry} an instance of how one can make the shift to a inexperienced economic system. But to realign the style {industry} with sustainable practices, shoppers, companies, and governments should work collectively. Individual shoppers can do loads to make their very own wardrobes more sustainable and quit fast fashion. But it’s going to take regulatory modifications to attain industry-wide sustainability. Consumers may also help with that, too.
EarthDay.org is accumulating signatures on a petition to the Biden administration calling for laws that may require companies within the style {industry} to undertake greener practices. The petition requires laws that may:
- Hold the style {industry} chargeable for slicing carbon emissions to Paris Agreement ranges
- Require sustainable disposal of producing waste and used clothes
- Halt using virgin artificial supplies via carbon-taxation
- Require Fair Trade Commission’s Green Guidelines-compliant labeling for transparency and traceability
- Mandate plastic microfiber filters in new garments washers
- Restrict the manufacture, import, and export of clothes containing dangerous substances
- Eliminate unfair and unsafe labor practices for attire employees
- Ban importation of clothes made with indentured servitude or youngster labor
- Educate shoppers on efficient textile recycling
You can sign the petition on EarthDay.org’s web site, which additionally incorporates details about their Fashion for the Earth marketing campaign. You can be taught extra about sustainable fashion – from constructing a capsule wardrobe with sustainable brands to getting a greener clean within the laundry and disposing of your old clothes responsibly whenever you clean out your closet and extra – proper right here on Earth911.
