There is a garment being thrown away right now. And another. And another. By the time you finish reading this sentence, an entire truckload of clothing has been dumped in a landfill or fed into an incinerator somewhere on Earth. This is not a metaphor. This is the operational rhythm of the fashion industry in 2025.
We have spent decades arguing about oil pipelines, coal plants, and diesel engines. Rightfully so. But the industry that dresses eight billion human beings has largely escaped the kind of sustained moral reckoning it deserves. Fashion is not a fringe polluter. It is one of the most destructive industrial forces on the planet — and the worst of it is happening not in the boardrooms of Paris or Milan, but in the sweatshops and river basins of Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, and India.
The numbers do not lie, and they are brutal
Fashion accounts for somewhere between two and eight percent of global carbon emissions. That range itself tells a story — we do not even measure this industry’s damage with precision, because doing so would be inconvenient. At the midpoint, fashion produces more greenhouse gases than aviation and international shipping combined. Let that sit.
Twenty percent of global industrial wastewater comes from textile processing. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of freshwater bodies on Earth, behind only agriculture. The chemicals used — azo dyes, heavy metals, bleaching agents, formaldehyde-based finishes — do not disappear when a garment is packaged and shipped. They seep into rivers, into soil, into the bodies of the people who live downstream from garment factories. In countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia, communities built around rivers that once sustained life now live beside water that is unusable. Children are born into environments saturated with carcinogens, not because their parents chose this, but because a consumer in London or Los Angeles needed a fifteen-dollar top by Tuesday.
Synthetic textiles — polyester, nylon, acrylic — shed microplastics with every wash. Approximately thirty-five percent of the microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans originates from these fibres. These particles, smaller than a grain of sand, are now found in Arctic ice cores, in deep-sea sediment, in human blood, in breast milk, in the lungs of infants. The garment industry did not create this problem by accident. It created it by choosing the cheapest possible material without ever being held accountable for what happens when that material enters the water cycle.
Fast fashion was a crisis. Ultra-fast fashion is a catastrophe.
The fast fashion model — pioneered by H&M, Zara, and Primark in the early 2000s — was built on a simple premise: make more, sell it cheap, move on. The average garment today is worn between seven and ten times before it is discarded. In some fast fashion categories, that number is closer to three. Ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein, Temu, and their imitators have taken this further still. They do not release seasonal collections. They release thousands of new styles every week, engineered for impulse, designed for disposal.
These are not fashion companies in any traditional sense. They are logistics machines with a creative veneer, optimised to convert raw material into waste with the minimum friction possible. The business model depends on two things: the willingness of consumers to participate, and the silence of governments. For two decades, governments have been largely silent.
But the silence is ending
The European Union has chosen to act, and what it is doing will rewrite the rules for every fashion brand that wants access to the world’s largest consumer market.
The EU’s Digital Product Passport — the DPP — is not a label or a certification. It is a mandatory data infrastructure that will attach to every garment sold in Europe, carrying verifiable information about its composition, its origin, its environmental footprint, and its end-of-life options. There will be nowhere to hide. A brand that claims sustainability will need to prove it at the fibre level, not at the press release level.
Alongside this, the EU has moved to ban the destruction of unsold textiles, classify microplastic shedding as a regulated environmental risk, and hold brands legally accountable for the conditions in their supply chains under Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks. The era of externalising every cost onto the environment and onto the bodies of low-wage workers in the Global South is being legislated out of existence — at least within European borders.
The consequences for fast fashion will be severe. Shein’s entire business model — offshore manufacturing, opaque supply chains, engineered disposability, no carbon accountability — is structurally incompatible with where European regulation is heading. Either the model changes, or the European market closes.
Slow fashion is not a trend. It is a correction.
There is a word being used more and more in design studios, in policy discussions, in the conversations of increasingly informed consumers: slow fashion. It is, at its core, a return to the logic that governed clothing for most of human history. Fewer garments, made better, designed to last, sourced with transparency, priced honestly.
India’s handloom tradition is one of the most complete embodiments of this logic in existence. Handloom fabric is produced on human-powered looms. It consumes no electricity in the weaving process. It uses natural fibres that biodegrade without releasing microplastics. It carries the knowledge of generations of weavers in its structure — each cluster producing textures, patterns, and drape that no machine can replicate. It is traceable by its very nature because it is made by identifiable human hands in specific geographic communities.
The EU’s DPP framework, ironically, describes what handloom already is. When the regulation demands proof of natural fibre composition, verifiable origin, and minimal environmental footprint, Indian handloom will answer every question before it is asked. The rest of the industry is scrambling to build systems to generate this data. Handloom weavers in Varanasi, Kanjivaram, Pochampally, and Sualkuchi have been living this data for centuries.
The human cost that never makes the headline
Environmental destruction is measurable. Human destruction is harder to quantify and easier to ignore.
The workers at the bottom of the fast fashion supply chain — primarily women, primarily in countries with weak labour protections — are exposed to toxic chemicals as a condition of employment. Dye workers develop respiratory disease. Finishing workers inhale formaldehyde. Sandblasting operators — the people who give jeans their worn, artisanal look — developed silicosis at such rates that the practice was eventually banned in some countries. But banning a practice in one country simply moves it to another where enforcement is weaker.
The Rana Plaza building collapse in Dhaka in 2013 killed 1,134 garment workers. It was not a natural disaster. It was a structural failure that had been flagged. Workers were ordered in anyway. The brands whose garments were being made in that building faced no criminal consequences. Many of them continue to operate today, with the same supply chain logic intact.
This is what the fashion industry has decided is an acceptable operating condition.
What comes next
The fast fashion era will not end with a single law or a single viral moment. It will end because the economic conditions that made it possible are being systematically dismantled. The EU DPP is the most significant of those dismantling forces. But consumer awareness is accelerating. Resale markets are growing faster than new clothing markets. Natural fibre products are commanding premium prices at scale for the first time. The vocabulary of slow fashion — provenance, durability, circularity, traceability — is entering mainstream commerce.
For India, this is not just a regulatory shift to manage. It is a structural opportunity. India’s handloom sector, if properly supported, funded, and connected to global markets, is positioned to supply what the world is now realising it should have been buying all along. The question is whether the institutions, the entrepreneurs, and the policymakers have the clarity to see that and the will to act on it.
The planet does not have another two decades to wait while the industry figures out whether slow fashion is profitable enough.
It is. And even if it were not, the alternative is not acceptable.
Nishani writes on geopolitics, economics, technology, and Indian culture at nishani.in. He is the founder of Save Handloom Foundation.