Our love affair with single-use plastics is over or is it?)

With every passing season, the global fashion industry propagates a frenzied pace of change in trends, feeding on consumers’ insecurities, deliberately making them feel off-trend and out of fashion. The fashion cycle has now shifted from the traditional spring/summer and autumn/winter collections to over 50 new micro seasons. Global clothing production doubled between 2000-2015, while the number of times an item was worn before being disposed of declined by 36 percent.  In India, customer spending on clothing rose by a whopping 181 percent between 2010-2018. The expansion of the middle-class population and growing purchasing power is likely to influence a shift from need-based purchasing to aspiration-based purchasing. This problem of overconsumption is further amplified by lucrative deals offered during shopping events such as the ‘Black Friday and Cyber Monday’ (BFCM) sales, leading to mindless consumerism.