As we prepare to start in-person school, you must be wondering what outfit to wear on the first day, and what jeans look best with that new top you bought at Forever 21. But what if I were to tell you that your decision on what outfit to wear has a negative impact on the environment?

According to Yixiu Wu, organizer of “Detox my Fashion”, the average pair of jeans require “1850 gallons of water to process”. What do you think happens to the water?

Adam Matthews goes into depth in the Newsweek article “The Environmental Crisis in Your Closet”, explaining that most of the water being used to process clothes is being dumped untreated in water sources. An example would be the textile factories of Tirupur “Knit city”, India; them being one of the largest producers of cheap clothing, their clothing factories in order to compete with the demands of the market, are left to dump their untreated contaminated water into their main water source, the Noyyal River. For reasons like these, the fashion industry is considered the second largest polluter of water, after agriculture.

All that is left to do is to be conscientious of where the clothes you wear came from. Quality over quantity will help reduce pollution and give more life to your outfits instead of a shirt from H&M that you’ll probably only wear 3 times. Let’s make saving the Earth our next trend.