Trends are everywhere: on social media, peoples clothing, in the way they talk, the way buildings look, and what everyone is starting to eat. Trends can affect almost anything in a person's life. But how does it affect our environment? Unfortunately, majorly. All of the new trends such as new clothes, skin care, makeup, devices, apps, stores, and business have taken a big role on the earth's landfills. An example of a trend that caused major landfills is the pink barbie. This was a trend that happened just a few months ago and already a desert in Africa is literally doused in pink. Everyone was running to get the hot pink shirt, and now a landfill is filled with tons of clothing. That’s one trend of the thousands that go through social media every year.
A big fashion store that is popular because of social media is Shein. It’s practically the hot spot for fast fashion. Shein is an app that provides the latest trends every other day, with cheap prices that gets people instantly buying many products. Every girl in our grade has most likely bought something off of there or knows someone who has. This is usually the cycle that happens with people: you buy clothes that are in trend, and then by next year it's WAY out of trend and you just have a weird cutout shirt laying in the back of your closet now. But at some point it's just a waste of space so you end up throwing it out. Now imagine if that one shirt was thrown out by a million other people. Over 50,000 tons of Shien's false synthetic clothing ends up in landfills, but some people may take a greener step and donate their unworn clothes. Unfortunately only 10-30% of clothing truly gets donated while the rest either gets sold off or just ends up in the waste. So the next climate friendly action is to just not buy everything you see that is cheap and trendy. Shein has made 100 billion dollars these past few years after blowing up all over tik tok for the true price of our environment.
Another trend that hurts our environment is the new skin care products that everyone “needs” to get. In reality, all a person is doing is spending an extra thirty dollars on a piece of plastic packaging for a few handfuls of some magical product. It will probably do nothing new for your skin. In fact, 36% of our waste is all packaging. A big portion of that is all of the packaging that is put into all of our makeup, skincare, soap, and clothing packaging. The real enemy here is the influence that social media can have on people. There was a study put out to show that at least 66% of people who have tik tok noticed an increase in their shopping. There are 4.7 billion tik tok downloads and if 66% of those people have been known to buy more items because of it it makes it a much bigger deal.
Now, it's time to deinfluence people. No, you don't “need” that skincare item. Sure your favorite TikToker might call it the “holy grail”, but do you really want a thirty dollar serum that really doesn't do anything for you? Probably not. Everyone on social media is scrolling through countless ads, some of which are hidden in plain sites as a “shopping haul” , or an influencer “go to” item. At the end of the day, in the next five years it will most likely end up in the trash along with the trend that made it so “buy worthy”. All of these trends may come and go, but our environment will always stay. The only thing that might change is how we affect it. So now it's time to start influencing climate friendly actions, and whenever you're about to hit that add to cart button make sure to truly think, do I want this or does my Instagram want me to have it? If it’s your instagram, then you most likely will not be “needing” it. Trends come and go, but our environment will stay how we take care of it is up to us, not our instagram.
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