The fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence.
Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry.
My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.
So the effects are much less impactful on the environment.
Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption)
We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry.
The damages have already been done and some are irreversible.
- Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people.
- Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment.
- Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill.
- The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030.
- If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years.
- Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
Microplastics are a horrific nightmare, you got me there.
But I will point out that Games rely on electricity, that is coal/nukes/ect in some countries. Not to mention whatever materials go into building the internet for multiplayer games.
The cost of water is usually the cost of pumping it and the filters for desal, or aeration or whatever cleaning method is used. If people have adequate access to water, using it on fashion is not so morally terrible.
Land-filling fibers, producing excess waste water and microplastics is "not so great" (to understate it), I agree.
Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry.
My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.