Plastic Promises

A strict formula that has been sensed throughout society is that urbanisation will always be inversely proportional to the well-being of the environment. Basic amenities such as the transport and food industries would be slashed apart if major priority was given to the environment and vice-versa. In the end, the economically sound thing to do is to set a compromise so that both sects can maintain a balance with each other. However, often raw monetary profit is prioritised over the aforementioned balance. Crude oil that is extracted for multiple uses has been reported to contain nuclear substances in its residue. The population of the world at the start of the 21st century was 6.1 billion, currently, it’s at 8 billion. This major rise has contributed to increased pressure on consumerist industries. 

The favouritism given to consumerist industries is clearly seen through the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), a graph used to summarise how the environment in a certain country changes with the growth of its industry. It depicts how when a country moves past its industrial economies, its environment starts to improve once again. However, to move past this sort of economy, a state has to build it up in the first place. This phase is where the bulk of environmental degradation occurs and this is the phase where most states are, as they are largely developing countries that actually fall into the first sector of the EKC. Tech companies like Apple largely derive their materials from developing countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. It’s not the core purchase of a product that is inherently damaging the globe but the intense background labour and major waste of resources that is all conforming to build up the product that is the reason for a sustainability downfall. 

Although an increasingly visible problem, to say that its amendment is a priority is wishful thinking at best. A glaring example of this comes in the form of ‘fast fashion’. Fast fashion is the practice of incessantly producing new clothes at a much cheaper yet faster rate to not only keep up with the demands of consumers around the world, but also to accelerate it in order to undermine other fashion producers that spend more time and effort into their clothes. Fast fashion has adverse effects through both their input of raw materials and output through consumer patterns. The psychology behind fast fashion is to bring up the fear of missing out for consumers. As trends move at lightning speeds, shoppers are continuously incentivised to buy into these ‘state-of-the-art’ products. Given enough time, these trends will be seen as nothing more than relics of the past, and soon enough, most of these clothes will be cast into landfills as waste rendering all of the money dumped into advertising and making the clothes useless. This massively inhibits global sustainability efforts. 

The industrial stage of fast fashion is equally problematic as its consumerist counterpart. One of the biggest fast fashion retailers ‘Shein’ has been notorious for their large scale wastage. They have been reported to leave 6.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide as they continue to grow their massive empire. Their treatment of employees has also come under question multiple times, as they have been accused of violating labour laws, even having some of their employees work 75-hour shifts, all of these statistics did cause public outcry however it did little to actually damage Shein’s monetary empire. The biggest loser’s of this are developing countries. Countries with primarily lower-middle income where one can find cheap labour are feeding grounds for fast fashion companies. The willingness to work for a salary at these places coupled with the hive-like insecurities harboured within their consumers to get on the trend as soon as possible, have caused the fast fashion industry to be the juggernaut that it is today.

Throughout this thesis, the pseudo-utopia that can theoretically be achieved by striking a balance between sustainability and consumerism seems bleak for good reason, however an efficient way of measuring sustainability with profit comes in the form of ESG, the stat governing it. As said before, environmental worry has been pushed into the limelight as of late, companies have been extremely weary of how they make their products as they might be objected to public shame, and ESG’s are the perfect metric to balance their efforts of mass production and efforts towards sustainability. This stat is commonly brought up with investors and stakeholders in order to entice funding onto companies that can project they have the moral edge over their competitors. The steps taken towards sustainability can never be sudden, it has to have a strong foundation and in the end ESGs can play a major role, antagonising many fast fashion companies.