engleski

Impact of Textile Industry on the Environment as a consequence of the Development of Social Networks

Living in the era of social media where influencers dictate fashion trends things change faster than ever. Mainly in the field of clothing, fashion trends are changing almost every week and textile industry needs to follow them. In fact, the amount of clothes bought in the EU per person has increased by 40% in just a few decades and on the contrary, more than 30% of clothes in European wardrobes have not been used for at least a year. Firstly, textile industry pollutes the environment by producing clothes and secondly by throwing them away. Lots of clothes are thrown away and burned in incinerators or end up in a landfill where they release methane. Increasing clothing demand is driven by a decrease in prices and a strong growth of the impact of social networks. This trend is also known as fast fashion. Fast fashion relies on mass production in countries of the Third world, low prices, large volumes of sales and use of lower quality materials. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of new trend of clothing habits on the environment. Without a doubt, increased clothing production has a large environmental footprint due to the water, energy and chemicals used in washing, tumble drying and ironing, as well as because of plastics shed into the environment. Consequently, governments and organizations need to advocate promoting the use of ecological and sustainable raw materials and the re-use and recycling of clothing through all communication channels especially social media. Most of all, social media need to promote slow fashion as opposed to fast fashion and improve collection of textile for re-use, repair and recycling. In order to make sustainable decisions in the field of textile industry, the EU has adopted circular economy package by which it is required from each Member state to ensure that textile which is thrown away by people is collected separately.

Social network, textile industry, fast fashion, environmental protection, sustainable fashion

This paper was fully funded by the Croatian Science Foundation Project 7031. Zbornik je indeksiran u sljedećim bazama: EconLit, Proquest, EBSCO.