Local First Arizona launches green certification to encourage sustainability in local businesses

When buying clothes, most people don’t think about the impact it has on the environment. With more and more people buying from fast-fashion empires like Zara, H&M, and Forever 21, should this be a subject of concern for the public?   Fast-fashion is a new subject for most people, emerging within the last decade. Fast-fashion focuses itself on being cheap, trendy, and reliable.  Mass production always has negative impacts;, factories almost always have high pollution levels and poor work conditions.  According to a Princeton study on the impact of fast-fashion, approximately 20% of the wastewater worldwide is produced by the process of mass producing cotton for these brands. The same study shows that 35% of all microplastics entering our oceans are from producers turning to plastics for cheaper production. 

In our ‘throw away’ society, the linear model of make, use and discard is depleting the resources of our planet – and our pockets. The solution is a circular economy, where nothing is wasted, rather it gets reused or transformed. While standards and initiatives abound for components of this, such as recycling, there is no current agreed global vision on how an organization can complete the circle. A new ISO technical committee for the circular economy has just been formed to do just that. It’s a well-known fact that the rise in consumerism and disposable products is choking our planet and exhausting it at the same time. Before we reach the day where there is more plastic in the sea than fish

We can all do our bit for the environment. No matter where you shop, you can recycle your soft plastics at Co-op….