By Julien Garcia
I love spending money. It’s my favorite pastime. My favorite “game” on my phone is Depop, which is a game where you click on used clothes and add them to a cart. After a week or so they appear at your house. I love clothes—buying them, wearing them, even dreaming about them. I am a firm believer that if you want clothes, check second hand first, then retail. Thrifting or shopping second hand is far more sustainable, cheaper, and even helps the environment compared to retail shopping. Shopping retail is not a bad thing, but when it comes to brands such as H&M, Zara, and the absolute horrid, abomination of a cretin called Shein, it’s certainly not an amazing pastime.
“Why are these brands and fast fashion companies no bueno?” you may ask. Let me break it down for you.
Fast fashion is utterly terrible for the environment. Fast fashion dries up water sources quickly because it takes 20,000 liters of water to produce a single shirt and pants. And companies are doing that on a massive scale on a production line, resulting in the fashion industry using 79 trillion liters of water each year. \
Fast Fashion companies and their use of cheap, toxic dyes make the fashion industry one of the largest polluters of clean waters, and you can’t forget the 500,000 tons of microplastics they leave in the ocean each year. With all of these downsides, you would think the clothes’ quality is good, at least, but you would be wrong because the quality is dog-water, abhorrent, even. So shop at Depop, Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc.—anything other than stores like Forever 21 (even though nobody even shops there anymore, anyways). I like some of the H&M pieces, but what the heck do they know about environmentally friendly business practices and good quality clothes? So don’t be a bum and buy clothes of higher quality at better retail stores or from thrift stores.
beniciapaw.com 