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This year again, we have seen a new edition of Black Friday in our stores. This commercial event, which begins the holiday shopping season, offers attractive promotions and multiple discount signs everywhere at the end of November.
But what is the environmental impact of this event?
Black Friday pushes us toward overconsumption and sometimes makes us question our own behaviors. This event illustrates how the capitalist model creates superficial needs for us, as we can see in videos people arriving at dawn in front of stores and running to get the latest fashionable T-shirt on sale.
However, beyond the inflated promotions and the lack of transparency for consumers, the ecological impact of Black Friday, which sometimes extends over more than a week, is considerable.
Black Friday also affects online shopping, and the different platforms encourage impulsive purchases by facilitating deliveries and returns, sometimes generating more pollution than the production itself. Indeed according to ADEME, ‘a T-shirt produced in Bangladesh and transported by plane emits 14 times more greenhouse gases than if it were transported by boat, even exceeding the emissions generated during its manufacture’. Moreover, in Europe ‘1.2 million tons of CO2 discharge into the atmosphere by the tents that transport packages to warehouses and stores’, an increase of 94% during Black Friday compared with an ordinary week, according to a 2022 study.
The manufacturing of clothing also has a carbon footprint and requires considerable amounts of water. For example, it takes 7,500 liters of water to make cotton jeans. In addition, washing these clothes releases microplastics and toxic substances that pollute both water and soil. It is therefore important to consider all these consequences before consuming.
To counter Black Friday, several initiatives have been developed to encourage more responsible behavior during this period such as the Buy Nothing Day initiative or Green Friday. To consume more responsibly, a few simple steps can help avoid regretting a purchase:
- Asking ourselves whether our clothes, shoes or electronic devices are repairable before throwing them away and/or buying new ones is essential, especially because today, a ‘truck of clothes is thrown every second in the world’. As for electronic devices, millions of tons of electronic waste are generated each year, so it is important to ensure that a device is fully beyond repair before replacing it.
- Making sure that we really need to buy something, and that we will use it several times and not just because it is trendy, is also crucial. Indeed, our clothing consumption has increased by 60% compared to the early 2000s, while ‘their duration of use has been divided by 2 in 15 years’.
- Checking whether a brand respects ethical standards regarding production conditions, transportation, and the materials used can also help avoid products from fast fashion in particular.
It is therefore possible to take action on our own scale by asking ourselves a few simple questions to avoid overconsumption and preserve our resources – and our money!
Edited by Ruby Fry
Image: Glowing ´Black Friday’ text, by OpenClipart, 2016 // CC0 1.0 Universal
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