Shop at Forever 21? H&M? Zara? Do you know the work that goes into making it? Companies like this put out almost 10,000 pieces in one year when small boutiques might put out 50 pieces in one year. Fast fashion can take a piece seen on the runway and have it in stores in a matter of three weeks.

The quality of these pieces are so bad they end up in the garbage in an average of one to two years. Fast fashion traps young women between the age of 18-24 in poverty, where they earn less than $3 per day. They work in hazardous conditions, deal with sexual harassment, and work on average 14 hours a day.

Fast fashion is also terrible to our earth,12.8 million tons of clothing are dumped in landfills every year. Many countries face the choice between drinking water and cotton because it takes so much water to create these clothes. Even donating your clothing isn’t worth it because it usually doesn’t last long enough to donate and only 10% of clothes donated get resold, the rest get thrown into landfills in foreign countries.

The US sends 13 trillion tons of clothes to landfills where they sit for 200 years and give off toxic chemicals from the dye that ends up in the drinking water and soil. Leaving villages with dirty streets, toxic water, and contaminated soil.

Workers are starting to speak up in a way that have companies worried. Recently, Zara customers found notes in their clothing from the third-party manufactures of the item saying, “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it.” This is starting an uproar and causes a threat because no company wants this type of publicity.

A documentary was recently made on the cause and effect of fast fashion called The True Cost, you can stream it on Netflix now.

Something must be done and something must change. Your money makes the world go around if you stop buying fast fashion then they’ll get the signal and change the system. We are all guilty of buying something from Forever 21 or H&M but we all deserve to know how these products are being made and how they affect us.