Yes.
You read the title right. That's enough to dress about half of the planet.
Because of an apparently slow beginning of the year (cold weather and all the like), H&M has been unable to sell millions of items of clothing. It now has $4.3 billion worth of unsold clothing, which can be good news for some (yeah, let's buy more and more and MORE clothes because of all the discounts!) or slightly less good news for others (yeah, let's burn unused clothing and label it green energy!).
The point, really, is not to demonise H&M. H&M is not worse than ASOS, Inditex (Zara owner), Primark ect, ect, ect... No, really, the point is: when are we going to stop this absurd concept and practice that is fast fashion?
Fast fashion = inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trend (Oxford Dictionary).
Let me decipher that for you.
Inexpensive = made not to last by polluting the planet and not giving the workers decent working conditions.
Environmental costs: water pollution, use of heavy toxic chemicals and textile waste (as H&M kindly illustrated just now).
Textile dying is the second largest polluter after agriculture. To give you an idea, 70% of Asia's river (you know, Asia, this far-away big land that makes all the clothes we wear!), are contaminated by the 2.5 billion gallons of wastewater produced by the textile industry.
Furthermore, about 70% of our clothes are made out of polyester (= plastic), which means that every time you wash your garment (and god knows how people wash their clothes way too often) you (or your washing machine) release millions of microplastics into the water.
And to give you even more of an idea, you can roughly remember that 1 kilogram of cotton = 20,000 litres of water. 1 kilogram of cotton = 1 t-shirt and 1 pair of jeans. (memo: only about 2% of the water on the planet is available for human consumption. This is this very water we're polluting to produce cheap clothes).
Social costs: treated workers who make the clothes (mostly women) as if they were not worthy of decent wages, holidays or maternity leaves.
You've heard about the accident of the Rana Plaza in 2013, where 1,135 people died because the building collapsed on them, where clothes for Western consumption were made. Well, the Rana Plaza is a drop in the ocean. Fast fashion retailers pay other companies (subcontracts) not to bear the responsibility of millions of workers in Asia (China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka...) who work in insane conditions for wages that we wouldn't accept for a minute.
I'm keeping it simple here, because the goal of the WOW moment is to be short and straight to the point. However, if you want to know more about the topic, I strongly advise that you watch the documentary The True Cost, which was a true eye opener for me: https://truecostmovie.com/
Finally, ALWAYS REMEMBER:
- Buy less: a study by Weight Watchers found out that people in the UK own 10 BILLION WORTH of pounds of clothes THEY DO NOT WEAR. So yeah, buy less, and buy better. There is now more and more companies which offer clothes made ethically and that will last you more than a season...
- Wash less: yes, your jeans can go a month (or more) without being washed. It doesn't mean you're dirty, it's normal.
- Wash better, i.e with natural laundry stuff: don't add up to all the companies polluting rivers and oceans. Washing with natural laundry actually makes a difference.