Tell Lawmakers: Regulate Fast Fashion

EARTHDAY.ORG has launched a fashion legislation report, Broken Threads & Twisted Yarns: Legislating the Reform of Fashion. It sadly shows that the United States lags far behind other countries in addressing the enormous impacts of the $2.5 trillion fashion industry.

Why legislation?  Because the fashion industry is, in a word ‘rapacious.’ Production has doubled over the past 15 years and will double again by 2030 while the amount of time clothing is worn has dropped 40%. Every year, fashion uses vast amounts of earthly resources, conservatively makes 100 billion garments and incinerates or landfills 87% which amounts globally to 92 millions of tons of waste. Only 1% is recycled.

We need to demand that fashion brands identify, prevent and mitigate their adverse human rights and environmental impacts, to provide a living wage to workers, to end slavery in their supply chain, and prohibit the degradation of soil, water and air.

We need to tell them to stop deforestation and excessive water consumption, pay for the amount of waste they create and to scientifically prove their sustainability claims.   

But brands won’t budge. Not without regulation. Urge your legislators to stand up to the rapacity of fast fashion and put an end to the greedy exploitation of the earth and those people, including children, who are forced to work backbreaking hours for little pay and barely enough to subsist on.