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Online shopping and social media apps have made it so you can get whatever shiny thing catches your eye sent to you with a click of a button. With this level of ease in the shopping experience, it can be easy to forget what it takes to get the product to you.
When activist Livia Firth was visiting Bangladesh with the charity she co-founded, The Circle, she got a rude awakening.
“We got smuggled into a factory that was producing garments for a French supermarket brand, and what I saw completely shocked me,” she said to the Independent. “It was rooms packed with women who were afraid, they were sewing 100 items per hour and earning nothing.
“The windows had bars like a prison and the entrance had a guard with a gun. I saw the women that we exploit to make clothes for us. And from that moment, once you see that, you can never turn away.”
Livia Firth is the founder of the Green Carpet Challenge, a sustainable and ethical red carpet event, as well as the co-founder of Eco-Age, a sustainable fashion company. She is also a member of the UN Women’s Europe and Central Asia Regional Civil Society Advisory Group. While Firth was already working in sustainability, this trip drove her further to increase awareness of the damages of fast fashion.
Firth produced a documentary called “The True Cost” following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh that resulted in 1,138 deaths. Regardless of the film’s success, Firth is aware that the industry has barely changed in the 12 years since the disaster and that the fashion industry needs to own up to its use of dirty energy and slave labor.
“The first issue that we should solve is paying a wage to all the garment workers,” Firth shared with the Independent. “[But if] we put in place legislation to do that, then the fast fashion industry will be in trouble.”
Secondly, the industry needs to raise its self-awareness and understand that the circular economy doesn’t always apply to fashion: “We have been told that it’s going to be fine, and we can recycle our way out of this mess. It’s not true because when you think about the fact that the majority of clothes today are produced using synthetic fibers, which are fossil fuel fibers, recycling is basically impossible.”
The clothing that gets tossed and donated ends up in landfills, often in places like Ghana, and is then incinerated or dumped.
Regardless of the bleak reality of the fashion industry, Firth is hopeful for change and regulation. Firth is hoping that with the combination of taxes on production volumes, regulations on fast fashion, and a change in consumer behavior, we can all make a difference in reducing the impact of fast fashion.
“We don’t want to consume like that anymore,” Firth said to the Independent. “We have enough clothes to feed two planets like we don’t need this anymore, and we can start that change.”
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