Week Two - Zero Purchases
- Reflection on the 2nd week
- Describe (IN DETAIL) how your 2nd week went with your behavior to reduce your environmental impact?
- What did you do? How did you do it? How often did you do it? - Calculate the impact of your behavior change. How many resources (water, trees, carbon, greenhouse gases, food, plastic, etc.) do you save by doing this behavior daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? How many resources will you save after 30 days?
- What if everyone at school did my behavior? In Seattle? In the World? How much of these resources would be saved?
- What is your perspective on the amount of resources your action has saved and will save. Did the amount surprise you? Why or why not?
- Considers where this data/information came from. Is it reliable? What are the gaps or limitations to this data? *Cog Skill: Interpreting Data/Info
Include citations in one of two ways:
1) In-text
2) Footnotes
During the second week of this project - I did not make any new clothing purchases. I did shop around, but nothing appealed to me where I felt inclined to buy anything. That, and I've been focused on saving money, especially for the Christmas/holiday season.
In addition to in-store shopping, I tend to online shop. When ordering from online clothes, you have no confirmation of the delivery source. I suppose by not ordering, I wouldn't be another stop contributing to the carbon emissions released by delivery trucks. Despite my lack of buying from biodegradable, more environmentally sensitive clothing, I still am avoiding fast fashion brands as a whole, and not supporting businesses and companies that produce high volumes of textile waste.
For example, brands and labels such as Forever 21, H&M, and ZARA are prominent fast fashion brands. In 2017, Forever 21 generated $3.4 billion in revenue and had 723 worldwide stores, indicating its high success. Due to high popularity and high demand, they are constantly producing millions of garments each year, which builds up the amount of textile waste they need to dispose of, which is commonly discarded in landfills, releasing methane.
If larger demographics of people in the world were to follow the same method of avoiding these brands, they wouldn't be in such high production rates to produce fabric, clothing, and textiles that would be disposed of to contribute to the emission rates of greenhouse gases, thus increasing climate rates in the atmosphere. This would limit the ecological footprint of fast fashion.
Forever 21 - 2017 Revenue / Store Count
I love how you are incorporating something that you enjoy (fashion) into your project. Maybe you could go into how you are getting to these stores? Are you Driving or walking? Taking the bus or even possibly carpooling? How would any of these affect the environment as well?
ReplyDeleteI agree with your opinion on fast-fashion stores. I definitely think that they produce much more textile waste than other stores. You gave some numbers on how successful these stores were, but could you also add some facts or graphs on how much textile waste they produce per year? I found this website, which might be helpful: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/textiles-material-specific-data
ReplyDeleteI agree with you r idea on fast- fashion stores. This made me rethink my views on how often and how much i shop on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to analyze the carbon footprint of one article of clothing and maybe include some images. I found some interesting graphs here.https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environmental-impact-6-graphics
ReplyDeleteLike for example it takes 2,700 liters of water to produce ONE cotton shirt, that is more water than one person drinks in a year!!
Your blog kind of reminds me of McKaylas, she explained how one pair of jeans would need 2,000 gallons of water in order to be made. Imagine how much water would be used by these fast-fashion stores creating millions of these garments a year...
ReplyDeleteYou touch on the carbon pollution that comes with transporting clothing items. Do you have actual numbers on this? How much carbon pollution is caused from transporting goods?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that you're including the fact that fast fashion brands produce a lot of waste, it's helping me understand your project a little more. That being said, I would like to see some actual numbers. Exactly how much waste does Forever 21 produce? I'm sure they have some of this info on their corporate site. A comparison between waste produced by fast fashion vs high fashion would also be really interesting.
ReplyDeleteI love your determination on finding out the negative impact that fast fashion has on the world, I do wonder whether or not you can show the stats of how much pollution carbon produces.
ReplyDelete