Module
Fashion is eating up our land!
Created by
Redress
Quick Access
Learn more fashion industry terminology from the Glossary.
Quick Access
Learn more fashion industry terminology from the Glossary.
Fashion is one of the most glamourous industries in the world — but you might be surprised to learn that it’s one of the world’s most polluting industries too. Making our clothes uses up large amounts of valuable natural resources, including water, oil, and even land!
Leading a sustainable lifestyle means that we are “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”; and this mentality and way of life is critically important when it comes to deciding how to use and allocate our land resources. As the amount of clothing we produce increases, so does our need for land. The fashion industry is projected to use 35% more land for fibre production by 2030 — an extra 115 million hectares.1 In total, that would be the equivalent of about 3.5 million Hong Kong Disneylands in size.2 Why does fashion require so much land? In this module, we’ll take a deep dive into fashion’s impact on our land, from how much we use to how much we pollute.
- Fashion needs a lot of space
Natural fibres and some man-made fibres rely a lot on farming, which uses up our land resources for growing raw materials.
What are the most common types of fibres that use our land?
Cotton
Cotton is super important because we use a lot of it! It is the second-most commonly used fibre in our clothes. But growing cotton takes up a lot of space on our planet: it is hard to imagine, but a basic cotton T-shirt will need about two square metres of cotton farming land.3 Also, cotton takes a long time to grow, about 5–6 months, which means that it occupies our land for a long time before we can harvest the fibres.4 Farmland for cotton is actually larger than any other crop that we grow (even food crops!). The average size of a cotton farm is 1,312 acres5, which is nearly four times the size of Hong Kong Disneyland.6
Credit: Agri Investor
Viscose
Credit: Textile Explainer
Viscose is known for its silk-like drape and softness. It is highly breathable and more affordable than silk. Viscose is a man-made fibre usually made from wood pulp. It is made by dissolving the wood pulp into a solution and then transforming it into fibers. To obtain this wood pulp, each year, more than 300 million trees are cut down, many from the most vital forest ecosystems. If placed end-to-end, those trees would circle the Earth seven times.7
Wool
Credit: Science ABC/Dalibor Sevaljevic/Shutterstock
Wool is the fibre obtained primarily from sheep, but also from goats, yaks, camels and alpacas. To harvest the wool, sheep are sheared once a year, usually in the spring. In that year-long period, sheep move across our farmland to eat grass. In order to avoid overgrazing or damaging the roots of grass that needs time to grow again, the space they occupy must be very large. For example, in Australia, producing wool requires 367 times more land than to produce cotton.8
Why is growing more fibres an issue for our land?
To meet the rise in fashion demand, we will need more and more fibres, which means we can either expand the land for agriculture, or grow more intensively.
Deforestation (cutting down trees) is a direct way to expand land for agriculture so that we can use the land to grow crops. Farmers cut down or burn trees that sometimes have existed for centuries to expand their farmland. However, trees are critical for keeping our air clean. Trees are what we call ‘carbon-sinks’: they trap and absorb accumulated carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere.
So when trees are cut down or burnt, we are losing those precious ‘carbon sinks’, eliminating the ability to absorb the pollution from the atmosphere. Also, when we cut down or burn trees, the accumulated carbon dioxide that was stored into the trees gets released into the atmosphere. This creates even more pollution.
Finally, cutting down trees can lead to a direct loss of wildlife (also called biodiversity loss). The removal of trees and other types of vegetation reduces the available food, shelter, and breeding habitat for animals. Forest loss does not simply mean all biodiversity is wiped out, but it often results in a significant change in the mix of species that live there.
Over the past decades, we have learnt how to grow crops faster on the same amount of land, so that we can produce more. This solution might sound ideal, but this intensive way of farming also has its issues. You will discover more in the next chapter.
- Fashion makes our soil sick
Not only does fashion require a lot of land, it also sucks up a lot of nutrients from the soil it uses for agriculture, making it unhealthy and unsuitable for other crops. To make the matter worse, modern, intensive agriculture involves many chemicals like fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides, etc. All these help enhance crop production and protect crops from pests, but unfortunately, they also slowly pollute our land and soil.
What is soil erosion and degradation ?
Soil erosion is a slow procedure that happens over a long period of time, when the water or wind breaks and removes soil particles, causing the soil to weaken.
Soil degradation is when the nutrients of topsoil are no longer able to support the plants and animals in that area. The soil quality becomes very poor.
Both soil erosion and degradation are common results from excessive farming and deforestation. Degraded lands become much less fertile, and they are also often less able to hold onto water, which can worsen flooding. The erosion and degradation of land has led to increased pollution and dirt being washed into streams and rivers, clogging these waterways and causing declines in fish and other species.
How can we grow crops without soil degradation?
Sustainable land use can help to reduce the impacts of agriculture, preventing soil degradation and erosion and the loss of valuable land that could end up becoming deserts.
Regenerative agriculture is a method that helps with building a sustainable and resilient ecosystem in order to support future agricultural use. It focuses on directly restoring and improving soil health and biodiversity, reversing degradation over time. Regenerative agriculture techniques include:
- Increasing soil fertility through natural means (for example with composting)
- Boosting biodiversity by integrating diverse crops and native species
- Using the no-till farming method to protect soil structure, reduce erosion, and support microbial life
Other industry efforts include technology advancement and innovative ideas to reduce the reliance on our precious land. For example, it is now possible to grow cotton in labs, which means it requires very little land.
How is our land getting polluted?
Credit: The Petite Soldier London
Chemicals and pesticides are heavily used in agriculture. For example, growing cotton uses 10–16% of the world’s insecticides9. These chemicals can affect the health of biodiversity in and downstream from the fields when they are flushed into our rivers. Their use also raises concern for the health of farm workers and nearby populations.
Even at the end of their life, our clothes still pollute our land in the form of waste. Globally, one rubbish truck of textiles is either burned or sent to landfill every second.10 In Hong Kong, an average daily quantity of 402 tonnes of textiles were landfilled in 2023!11 This is the equivalent of 17,480 suitcases of textiles landfilled every day.12
Clothes can take a very long time to decompose in landfill, especially polyester clothing, which can only break down into microplastics and never decompose. During decomposition, clothing items in landfills release greenhouse gases and other harmful pollutants into the air and land.
So how did we end up with so much waste? This is a direct end result of overproduction and overconsumption habits from fast, disposable fashion.
When we produce fashion products, we always produce more than what we need or want to buy. These products often end up in landfills before anyone wears them.
As for the clothing that we wear, we eventually also get rid of them because we grow out of them or no longer like them. Unwanted clothes or single-purpose items in our wardrobes, like company and school uniforms, swag, and costumes are difficult to resell. They end up being dumped after a very short period of time and usage.
These mountains of clothes in landfill don’t just represent pollution and wasted clothes — they also represent all the wasted resources that went into producing them, including land.
Credit: Scholastic Science World, ‘Fast Fashion Graveyard’ (MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Quick Tips
- When you are bored with a piece of clothing, be creative! Consider restyling and accessorising it to create new looks to avoid throwing it out too soon.
- If you no longer want or have outgrown your clothes, consider passing it down to your siblings or friends.
Footnotes
1 Global Fashion Agenda and Boston Consulting Group (2017), Pulse of the Fashion Industry
2 Estimation by Redress, based on Hong Kong Disneyland land size of 126 hectares
3 UNCCD, ‘Fashion and Land’: Unravelling the Environmental Impact of Fibres (2024)
4 National Cotton Council of America, ‘Crop Production and Planting’
5 USDA, ‘Census of Agriculture Historical Archive’
6 Estimation by Redress, based on Hong Kong Disneyland land size of 126 hectares
7 Canopy, 2025
8 Circumfauna, 2025
9 International Cotton Advisory Committee, ICAC (2018–2022)
10 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (2017)
11 Environmental Protection Department, HKSAR. 2023. Monitoring of Solid Waste in Hong Kong: Waste Statistics for 2022
12 Estimation by Redress, based on a 23kg suitcase