85 percent of clothes are thrown away within less than a year of purchase. This means that we buy a lot more clothes - and they are cheaper than before, but they have a negative impact on the environment
The proposal recently made headlines Abolish the exemption from VAT on online shopping from international websites, an issue that is at the heart of the dispute between the Ministry of Finance and the textile union and small and medium-sized fashion manufacturers in Israel for many years. The full exemption from tax on personal imports (at a cost of up to $75), which allows Israeli residents to order a variety of products from abroad - especially clothes, may sound like a marginal issue, relevant to textile manufacturers and nothing else. But the truth is that the matter is linked to one of the biggest environmental and social problems in Israel and the world.
From the beginning of the 90s, Israel began a policy of reducing customs rates in the textile and clothing industry - up to full exemption, and this at the same time as the price of consumer goods decreased, the number of workers in the industry decreased, and consumer spending on clothing decreased. In fact, although from the 80s to today the amount of clothing produced in the world increased by 400 percent, the household expenditure on each item of clothing decreased by dozens of percent - and so did the average use of each garment. in fact, 85 percent of the clothes Thrown away in less than a year from the moment of purchase. This means that we buy a lot more clothes - and they are cheaper than before. On the face of it, this is a positive phenomenon, which indicates an increase in purchasing power, but in practice, the increased consumption of fast fashion has many negative consequences for the environment and society.
the fashion industry is currently considered one of the industries the most polluting in the world. It is responsible for a quarter of the use of polluting chemicals in the world, for emissions 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year and for production 35-20 percent of the total The microplastic Bring back billions of tons of textile waste that is currently impossible to recycle. This industry is the consumer of water The second largest in the world, and it produces about 20 percent of the world's wastewater. While most of the clothes will be purchased in the West, the carbon emissions, water pollution and land destruction in the production process, as well as the landfilling and incineration of the clothes at the end of use, will mostly occur in poor countries in Southeast Asia and Africa.
In Israel, as well as in Europe, despite the general increase in the consumer price index, the consumer clothing price index decreased - and the decrease in Israel is tens of percent greater than in Europe. However, while fashion prices fell between 2017-1997 by about 34 percent, the monthly expenditure of a household on fashion remained constant - meaning, households buy more cheap items, but at the same level of expenditure.
If so, the full exemption from tax on personal imports, established in 2018 and intended to lower the cost of living (under the auspices of the reform of Moshe Kahlon, the Minister of Finance at the time), not only does not lower the cost of living but also incentivizes the Israeli consumer to purchase more and more fast fashion, at the expense of the local market, and produces one of the most significant environmental problems in the current era. Moreover, while we buy countless cheap clothes, which according to statistics will soon end their lives in landfills in Africa, the cost of living remained the same and even increased: While the expenditure on clothes has hardly changed, the expenditure of an Israeli household on housing, education and food has increased. Cheap clothes are a dangerous smoke screen, which creates a momentary illusion that we are getting richer - when in fact, our purchasing power is decreasing.
It doesn't have to be that way. In contrast to fast fashion, there is the alternative of slow fashion, which includes a variety of options, including second-hand clothes, upcycling (creating new clothes from clothes that are no longer used and textile scraps), eco-collections (collections produced in more environmental processes) and purchasing local design. A smart public policy in the field of fashion and the environment is one that will incentivize manufacturers to produce sustainable fashion instead of incentivizing consumers to purchase fast fashion. Countries around the world, such as Germany, England and California, have already adopted such a policy, which is short of describing its components. But what is clear above all is that, in the first step, the VAT exemption for online shopping must be abolished.
And as for us, the consumers, one of the most important activism is choosing where to put our money. By choosing to buy local produce, we support the local economy and independent designers, manufacturing practices in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and reducing the environmental footprint of the fashion industry, by preventing the environmental damage of shipping and encouraging slow fashion. There is no need to wait for the cancellation of the VAT exemption in order to reduce consumption and divert our shopping to local design. True, it will cost more, but we must remember that there are no really cheap clothes - there are only clothes that someone else paid the price for.
Mittal Pelag Mizrahi is a doctoral student in public policy, a researcher and lecturer on sustainable fashion and environmental justice, a graduate of an internship at the Ministry of Finance in the field of green economy, and the founder of "Dressing for November" - the movement to promote fair fashion in Israel.
