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Due to a greater demand for garments (particularly in fast fashion), there is a heavier effect on our environment; approximately 1.7 billion clothes bought in the UK each year go unworn and a scary 300,000 tonnes of clothing go to landfill sites or are incinerated.
This means a huge amount of perfectly wearable and/or recyclable garments being wasted and harmful gases being released into the atmosphere.
Organisations and charities such as Traid, vintage and second hand stores and brands which encourage garment restore/repair (such as Patagonia and Levis) are great examples of working towards a circular economy as opposed to a linear economy.
Now moving onto profit. Although it is a key and obvious aim for most retailers (in order to stay in the game and expand) in a lot of cases it is prioritised over making ethical decisions which affect our planet and the people involved in the process.
Greed is a huge factor in why profit is not used in all the ways it should be- cheap labour and the wastage of unrenewable resources are just two outcomes of this.
Profit should be used to invest in the proper treatment of everybody involved in the process of production, as well as investing in better, more ethical practices for a more sustainable industry.