Fast Fashion’s Environmental Toll Under the Microscope: What 117 Studies Reveal

Fast fashion has quietly become one of the most consequential environmental stories of the modern consumer economy, and a new systematic review published in Discover Sustainability has now mapped the scientific landscape surrounding it with unusual precision. Researchers from Mahidol University in Thailand analysed 117 Scopus-indexed publications spanning 2007 to 2025, combining bibliometric analysis with a systematic appraisal of how the field measures, reports, and mitigates the environmental damage caused by rapid-cycle clothing production. Their conclusion is sobering: the evidence base is growing explosively, yet it remains fragmented, methodologically inconsistent, and surprisingly thin on hard numbers.

The growth pattern documented in the review is striking when placed in historical context. The 117 publications analysed cover an eighteen-year window, but the distribution of that output is heavily skewed toward recent years, with 2024 alone accounting for 32 articles. The authors fitted an exponential Poisson model to the complete years from 2007 through 2024 and estimated an annual growth rate of 42.6 percent, a figure that was statistically significant at p < 0.001. The incomplete 2025 count was deliberately excluded from the model to avoid distorting the trend estimate. This kind of exponential trajectory is common in emerging research fields, but the magnitude here suggests that fast fashion has moved from a peripheral concern to a central topic in sustainability scholarship within roughly a decade. It also reflects broader institutional momentum: sustainability journals have expanded, funding bodies have prioritised circular economy research, and consumer awareness campaigns have generated demand for evidence that can support policy and corporate action.

Yet the review’s most consequential finding may be the narrowness of the quantitative evidence base. Of the 117 studies examined, only 17, or 14.5 percent, reported numerical environmental outcomes that met the authors’ eligibility criteria. This means that the vast majority of the literature describes environmental impacts in qualitative or indirect terms, which limits the ability of policymakers and practitioners to compare interventions, set targets, or verify claims. The problem is compounded by the heterogeneity of the studies that do report numbers. Life-cycle assessment emerged as the principal quantitative framework, but the review found substantial variation in functional units, system boundaries, allocation procedures, and data sources across studies. A functional unit defines what is being measured, such as the impact per garment, per wear, or per kilogram of textile, and differences in this single choice can change conclusions dramatically. System boundaries determine whether a study includes only fibre production or extends through use and disposal, and allocation procedures govern how impacts are divided when processes yield multiple products. Without harmonisation on these methodological choices, two rigorous studies of the same garment can produce figures that differ by orders of magnitude.

The methodological appraisal conducted by the authors adds another layer of nuance. They classified 56 studies, or 47.9 percent, as high reliability, 57 studies, or 48.7 percent, as moderate reliability, and only four studies, or 3.4 percent, as low reliability. On the surface this appears encouraging, since fewer than one in twenty studies fell into the lowest tier. However, the near-even split between high and moderate reliability indicates that even the growing body of work in this field frequently suffers from limitations such as reliance on secondary data, incomplete transparency about assumptions, or absence of independent verification. For a field that increasingly informs regulation and corporate sustainability claims, the distinction between moderately and highly reliable evidence matters considerably, because decisions worth billions of dollars and affecting millions of workers may rest on figures that have never been independently audited.

The review’s analysis of where environmental pressure concentrates along the fashion value chain provides useful orientation for mitigation efforts. Fibre production, wet processing, and garment manufacturing emerged as the major upstream pressure points. Wet processing, which encompasses dyeing, printing, and finishing, is particularly significant because it is water-intensive and can release chemical effluents if treatment is inadequate. Fibre production carries impacts that differ sharply by material type: conventional cotton is associated with high water and pesticide use, while synthetic fibres such as polyester are derived from fossil feedstocks and shed microfibres during laundering. Garment manufacturing involves cutting waste, energy use, and in many production regions, reliance on grids dominated by fossil fuels. Upstream stages tend to be geographically concentrated in a small number of producing countries, which means that the environmental burden of clothing consumed in Europe or North America is largely exported to manufacturing regions, a pattern that complicates both accountability and measurement.

Downstream, the review highlights how accelerated consumption cycles and short garment lifetimes intensify waste. The fast fashion business model is built on rapid turnover of styles and low prices, which encourages frequent purchase and early disposal. Garments that might have remained in use for years under previous consumption patterns are now often discarded after a handful of wears. This shortening of use-phase duration multiplies the effective per-wear impact of every upstream stage, since the fibre cultivation, dyeing, and manufacturing embedded in a garment is amortised over fewer uses. The review’s framing suggests that extending garment life is therefore not merely a behavioural nicety but a quantitatively meaningful lever, because doubling the number of wears of a garment can roughly halve its per-wear impact across most categories.

Circular strategies receive substantial attention in the reviewed literature, and the authors’ Sankey analysis identified 48 confirmed pathways across 30 studies. Recycling, material recovery, reuse, and second-hand systems dominated the interventions studied. The dominance of these categories reflects both genuine scientific interest and the policy salience of circular economy frameworks, particularly in the European Union where textile-specific regulations are advancing. However, the review is careful to note that the benefits of circular strategies are conditional rather than automatic. Outcomes depend on whether circular activities actually displace the production of new garments, on the energy sources powering recycling and sorting infrastructure, on the logistics of collection and transport, and on recovery efficiency. If a second-hand garment sold in one market simply adds to total consumption rather than replacing a new purchase, the environmental benefit is substantially diminished. Similarly, mechanical and chemical recycling processes vary widely in their energy intensity and in the quality of the fibre they produce, and downcycling into lower-grade applications may delay rather than avoid eventual disposal.

The alignment of research with the Sustainable Development Goals offers a window into how the field positions itself within broader policy frameworks. The review found that SDG 12, which concerns responsible consumption and production, dominated primary alignment among the studies analysed. This is unsurprising given that fast fashion sits at the intersection of production practices and consumption patterns, but it also reveals a relative neglect of other goals that are plausibly connected to the industry, such as those concerning water, climate, and terrestrial ecosystems. The concentration on a single goal may reflect the framing of the literature rather than the true distribution of impacts, and it suggests an opportunity for future studies to make multi-goal linkages explicit.

Looking forward, the authors identify several priorities that would strengthen the evidence base. Harmonised assessment methods would allow findings from different studies and regions to be compared directly, which is a precondition for meta-analysis and for robust policy evaluation. Independently verified data would reduce reliance on industry-supplied figures whose assumptions are not always transparent. Consistent Scope 3 accounting, which concerns indirect emissions occurring throughout a company’s value chain, would enable meaningful comparison of corporate claims and help regulators distinguish substantive decarbonisation from accounting artefacts. Finally, industrial-scale evaluation of interventions would move the field beyond pilot studies and modelling exercises toward evidence about what happens when circular and cleaner-production strategies are deployed at the scale of real supply chains. The review’s overall message is that effective mitigation requires integrated action across cleaner production, longer garment use, circular infrastructure, supply-chain accountability, demand reduction, and evidence-based regulation, and that no single lever, however attractive, is sufficient on its own.

It is also worth noting the study design choices that shape these conclusions. The restriction to Scopus-indexed publications means that grey literature, industry reports, and non-English scholarship fall outside the analysis, which may understate both the volume of relevant work and the diversity of perspectives. The authors received no financial support for the work and declared no competing interests, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons licence, which facilitates the kind of scrutiny and reuse that the review itself calls for in the underlying literature. As a bibliometric and systematic review, the study synthesises rather than generates primary data, so its reliability ratings and pathway counts reflect the state of the published record as it stood at the time of analysis. Given the exponential growth rate the authors document, that record is changing quickly, and the gaps identified here may begin to close within a few publication cycles if the field responds to the methodological challenges the review lays out.

Subject of Research: Environmental impacts of fast fashion assessed through a bibliometric and systematic review of 2007–2025 literature

Article Title: Assessing the global environmental impacts of fast fashion through a bibliometric and systematic review from 2007 to 2025

Article References: Teangsompong, T., Rujakom, S., & Sawangproh, W. (2026). Assessing the global environmental impacts of fast fashion through a bibliometric and systematic review from 2007 to 2025. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04885-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04885-0

Keywords: fast fashion, bibliometric review, systematic review, life-cycle assessment, textile pollution, circular economy, sustainable development goals, waste management, overconsumption, supply chain, sustainability, Assessing