Dr. Pat McCormick presents on April 14th. Today’s fast fashion, pressuring young women to buy ever more clothing, produces 150 billion garments a year (up 800% since 2000), usually worn 10 times. With 85% of these mostly polyester garments going to incinerators or landfills, fashion is the 2nd largest polluting industry, 2nd largest consumer of water (producing 20% of the world’s wastewater with textile dyes) and produces more CO2 than aviation & shipping combined. And most of fast fashion’s female global workforce are underpaid, mistreated, or poisoned, while poor nations live with the bulk of our textile waste.
How should Christians judge and address the causes of this exploding, exploitive and polluting industry? What does our faith have to say about fast fashion’s exploitation of female consumers and workers and of the injuries to poor nations & our planet by the profligate production, burning and burying of mountains of our textile trash?