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How Instagram Culture Is Contributing To The Climate Crisis

Isabella Carapella/HuffPost; Photos: Getty (Isabella Carapella/HuffPost; Photos: Getty)
Isabella Carapella/HuffPost; Photos: Getty (Isabella Carapella/HuffPost; Photos: Getty)

What Will Be Lost is a series of reported stories and essays exploring the ways climate change is affecting our relationship to one another, to our sense of place, and to ourselves.

In 2018, popular beauty vlogger Samantha Ravndahlannounced to her legion of subscribers that she would no longer accept boxes of promotional samples because she was concerned about the waste in beauty packaging.

“I was feeling like this walking billboard because all I was doing was constantly pumping out videos of new products,” Ravndahl said. It wasn’t just her own waste she was trying to combat. It was the glamorization that “new” means better ― a trend that social media has certainly amplified in recent years.

It happens with clothes, too. One of the biggest “rules” in fashion is not duplicating an outfit. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture’s subconscious that people can still vividly recall a scene from ’00s Disney show “Lizzie McGuire” in which mean girl Kate Sanders accuses Lizzie of being an outfit repeater. Fast forward almost two decades and the insult still carries weight.

Now social media gives users unlimited potential to broadcast their lives — and increasing pressure to dress for it as well. Forty-one percent of 19- to 25-year-olds said they won’t rewear an outfit to go out in a survey from the environmental charity Hubbub. For 17%, rewearing it all was a nonstarter if they’d posted a picture of themselves in it on Instagram.

The consequences of an entire generation rapidly cycling through products and clothes — the majority of them completely non-degradable — is apocalyptic. As it stands, the fashion industry is responsible for 8% of all global carbon emissions in the world.

Consumers play a major role — consumers who are deeply influenced by social media and who copycat the behavior of others. But in these times of impending environmental doom, it’s worth reexamining the patterns that make them complicit in the...

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