Fast Fashion: Why Hemp is the Answer!
Fast Fashion is everywhere - on your Instagram feed, in your email, and on your favorite blogs, there is no escaping it. We are a culture of consumers, and boy do we love to consume fashion. You can find clothes at prices so low that you could literally replace your wardrobe each season if you wanted to...but you shouldn’t want to!
Have you ever wondered why, or how, clothes are able to be delivered at such a low cost to you? The answer is pretty simple, they go through an incredibly unethical life cycle in order to make it into your local Zara and H&M.
Fast clothing is created using a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) system, which creates a digital clothing pattern. The patterns are then sent to the manufacturer - which in this case is likely a sweatshop paying unfair wages in unfair and unsafe working conditions. The clothes are then sewn on an assembly line by a seamstress.
As clothes are being manufactured, the facility uses an open-loop cycle system for their products and their water waste, which contributes to an annual $500B loss of resources in the U.S. alone, due to the lack of recycling and underutilization.
Most of the fabric used throughout this process is conventionally grown cotton, which used to be the ideal crop for clothing, however, it is now responsible for the use of almost one-quarter of global pesticides. Cotton is also responsible for about 20% of global wastewater, and 10% of global carbon emissions!
Another portion of fast fashion fabrics are synthetic man-made materials. Crude oil is used in the production of fabrics like polyester, which is a plastic-based fabric. The result leaves the consumer exposed to microfibers of plastic, and they continue to leave a trail on every surface thereafter whether it is at a landfill or in a body of water.
This is where hemp comes in to create a new ecosystem that is sustainable and contributes to a better future.
Growing the hemp plant actually captures carbon. Hemp is considered carbon negative, meaning it removes more carbon than is emitted by the machinery used to harvest, process, and transfer it.
Hemp is also one of the fastest-growing plants in the world. This remarkable plant reaches maturity in a matter of months, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
During its growth period, there is no need for all of those incredibly harmful pesticides. Hemp is essentially a weed, so it grows plentifully, resisting insects naturally, and allowing for organic cultivation. Now more than ever, consumers appreciate affordably priced organic options.
This plant is so extraordinary that while it is growing, unlike cotton, it does not deplete the soil. Hemp actually helps increase the soil's health by enriching and regenerating it with CO2 and nitrogen. In the U.S alone, we have done a terrible job of keeping much of our farming soil healthy, due to older more traditional methods of farming.
Hemp can replace many fabrics on the market today. The lifetime of a hemp garment is much longer thanks to its incredible durability. It can also be blended with hemp polyester to give the fabric a softer feel. Purchasing a garment made with hemp will last you many, many seasons. When it is time to retire the garment, hemp fibers will break down and essentially go back to the earth. So let’s make hemp the new black!