Fast Fashion: Sustainability Works Both Ways

Fast Fashion: Sustainability Works Both Ways

By: Ron Benjamin

As a GreenEarth dry cleaner, it is our goal to provide you, our customer, with the best quality dry cleaning at a fair price.  We work to do that every day and base the prices we charge you on what it costs us to deliver that service to you, including the wages for our people, the cost of our equipment and supplies, our rent, utilities, and all of our operating costs.

One of our goals is to provide our services to you in the most sustainable way. And so we operate using the GreenEarth process which allows us to minimize our operating costs while at the same time reduces the amount of landfill waste we generate and eliminates any environmental damages that might otherwise be caused.

We’re proud of the role we are playing in our community which helps our customers, our employees, and the planet.

At the same time, we recognize that you make similar choices when you make your clothing purchases. At one end of the spectrum, clothing can be purchased which is timeless in its fashion and which is made using high quality fabrics, trims, and construction . . . clothing which can last a lifetime if it is cared for properly.

And at the other end of the spectrum, fast fashion garments can be purchased which are made inexpensively and are not meant to last. These garments are designed to be worn just a few times and are not meant to be kept over long periods of time.

Of course, the challenge with this approach is that much of this fast fashion ends up in landfills rather than being used over a long useful life. In the U.S. alone, some $250 billion is spent on fashion each year. To the extent that some of it is not long lasting and not reused, both resources and money are wasted in the short term rather than being invested for the longer term.

As a dry cleaning company, we believe we are providing you with the opportunity to make an investment in that part of your wardrobe that is of high quality and that you want to keep for a longer period of time. We are committed to being a resource to you that can help preserve the investment you make today so that it pays you dividends over its useful life in the days ahead. And in this way, both you and we are furthering a more sustainable life style for those we care about in our lives today . . . and for our planet’s future generations that are to come tomorrow.