Even in factories that are located in core and developed countries such as the United

Kingdom, labor exploitation is a very common practice that delivers very little positives to

factory workers. A study by the University of Leicester found that a majority of factory workers

in the United Kingdom were illegally paid below the minimum wage, do not have employment

contracts, and are subjected to intense and arbitrary work practices (Hammer et al., 2015). This

means that workers in these factories were also subjected to issues such as long and intense

working hours, night shift subcontracting, and poor health and safety conditions (Hammer et al.,

2015).

One of the most shocking issues that factory workers have to deal with, in the United

Kingdom, is the lack of a liveable wage and enforcement of a minimum wage. In 2019, the

minimum wage for workers in the United Kingdom was eight pounds and twenty-one cents but

an investigation on clothing factories found that the average salary for factory workers is

between three fifty and four pounds an hour with the highest earners earning five pounds an hour

(House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 2019).

What is even worse is that the governmental organization that’s tasked with enforcing the

minimum wage, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), knows what is taking place but

has chosen not to enforce the minimum wage and ignore the situation. A report published by the

HMRC indicated that 232,000 people were paid below the minimum wage yet only eighty-three

of those people were indicated as textile workers (House of Commons Environmental Audit

Committee, 2019). Per the investigation, which comes from a source who has no ties to both the

companies and workers involved, we can undoubtedly say that the percent of factory workers

making less than minimum wage is more than 0.0003% and the 83 person figure provided may

only reflect those who make a wage above the minimum wage.
 Another aspect of overconsumption within the textile industry is water consumption

which has become a crucial element to the industry because the raw material used for production

requires a lot of water to be produced correctly for clothing. In the United Kingdom alone, it was

estimated that the water footprint of the clothing industry was 8 billion cubic meters and,

globally, the fashion industry is estimated to utilize 79 billion cubic meters of water annually.

Not only does the growing and production of textiles themselves use a great deal of water, the

dyeing, finishing, and washing of clothes throughout the production process also consumers a lot

of water.

The discarding and recycling of material within the textile industry is another sector of

the industry that has proved to be problematic for the environment (Brewer, 2019). Due to

overconsumption, people in countries such as the United Kingdom are buying more clothes in

the current day than they ever have in previous times which presents more and more textile-

based waste that must be disposed of somehow. In the United Kingdom, statistics show that their

citizens not only buy more clothes per person than any other country in the European Union but

they are also buying five times the amount of clothes than they ever have in history. Data has

also shown that citizens of the United Kingdom discard approximately one million tonnes per

year of textiles and three hundred thousand tonnes come from household bins with twenty

percent being disposed of through landfills and eighty percent of it through incineration.

Overconsumption and waste within the textile industry first starts during the design

process and the production process before the clothing can even reach customers and the global

market. During clothing production and design, clothes are cut out as patterns which leaves as

much as fifteen percent of the fabric on the cutting room floor which does not get used. The

current waste of the entire supply chain for clothing in the United Kingdom was estimated to be
at around 800,000 tonnes in 2016 which is an increase of over 100,000 tonnes from the 700,000

tonnes figure the statistic was at in 2012. When the fibers are prepared to make yarn and clothing

gets produced in the factory, around 440,000 tonnes of the supply chain waste occurs.

Another issue concerning overconsumption is the fact that some corporations in the

higher-end segment of the fashion world are now participating in stock burning for stock that

goes unsold. In 2018, Burberry admitted to burning unsold goods that were valued in total at

around twenty-nine million dollars with ten million dollars worth of destroyed goods being

beauty products such as perfumes. This was one of the few instances in which a company in the

fashion and clothing industry openly admitted to burning unsold products but this is an issue that

many companies in the industry participate in.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that the total value of unsold goods

burned by Burberry in the last five years was more than ninety million dollars. The trend of stock

burning within the fashion industry because of overconsumption is extremely troubling because

it releases harmful gases and pollutants while also increasing emissions that harm the

environment and worsen the climate change situation. The burning of beauty products such as

perfume that Burberry reported specifically is extremely concerning because those types of

products tend to use harmful chemicals that, when put into the environment, do nothing but raise

the global temperature and release greenhouse gases. The burning of clothes, especially those

that were made with synthetic fibers, releases microfibers into the air which is harmful to both

humans and various marine ecosystems. The effects of overconsumption have oftentimes been

thought of to only effect periphery countries such as Bangladesh and China because the elites in

western countries have a tendency to exploit periphery countries for materials but through the

research done in this paper we see that this is not the case. In reality, capitalism not only affects
periphery countries but corporations are even willing to go as far as exploiting the lower class

within the western world in order to make a profit.