You don't have to be made of money to dress like a supermodel. Thanks to the rise of fast fashion, consumers can get their hands on the latest catwalk styles almost instantly and at high-street prices.
But the throwaway culture fostered by the fashion business has a huge environmental cost.
From the production of cotton or silk to manufacturing and end-of-life disposal, fashion is an exceptionally resource-intensive business. Take jeans. Through its entire lifecycle, a pair of 501 Levi’s jeans uses 3,781 litres of water – three days worth of an average US household’s total water needs – and generates 33.4 kg of CO2 emissions – equal to 69 miles driven by an average US car.1
Globally, the fashion industry produced 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2015, more emissions than the aviation and and container shipping industries combined.2
Here, mega takes a closer look at fashion's environmental footprint using two groundbreaking analytical tools - the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
[2] House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee/Institution of Mechanical Engineers
