The fashion industry is huge. Around the world, people buy about 80 billion new clothing items per year. But it has way more problems than employing designers who don't know what they're doing.

For starters, of all American buyers’ total yearly clothing consumption, 85 percent ends up as waste in landfills.

And fast fashion is a big reason why—the term describes the quick production of inexpensive clothing to keep up with rapidly changing fashion trends.

Take Zara for example. The popular brand boasts a business model that produces over 20 different collections per year—meaning that on average, the business churns out new clothing pieces every five weeks or so.

Then there's Fashion Nova, a California-based fashion company that creates relatively inexpensive womenswear and releases more than 600 items per week on its platform.

This model of clothing production and sale presents ethical problems, primarily with environmental sustainability and labor exploitation.

Did you know the industry uses massive amounts of water? At present, fashion companies expend one-tenth of the total water used worldwide to operate their industrial factories.

However, brands also often outsource their manufacturing processes overseas in an attempt to lower the cost of production, in part by avoiding paying minimum wage to domestic workers.

Subcontracting this labor promotes hazardous, unhealthy, and below-standard working conditions in low- and middle-income countries.

Currently, fashion brands operating in the US face little regulatory intervention.

But activists, policymakers, and community members are calling for greater accountability for these companies to reform the quality and safety of their manufacturing methods.

And luckily there have been some changes. In response to sustainability concerns, for instance, the New York Senate introduced the New York Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, which would mandate that retailers and manufacturers publish their social and environmental policies online. The bill would require businesses to implement more sustainable processes on supply chains.

If passed it would be the first in the United States to require fashion companies to address their social and environmental shortcomings.

The Old Continent, however, seems to be more willing to tackle these issues. The European Commission aims to put an end to fast fashion by 2030 in an announcement introducing a mandatory minimum use of recycled fibers and banning companies from sending any unsold clothing and textile products to landfills.

Under the new expansion of the EU’s existing eco-design rules, which set down energy efficiency standards for consumer goods such as toasters and washing machines, companies operating in the region will have to include a certain amount of recycled content in their goods, or curb the use of materials that make them hard to recycle.

The EU also plans to force large fashion companies to disclose how much unsold stock they send to landfills as well as improve global labor conditions in the garment industry.

“The products we use every day need to last,” said Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission. “If products break we should be able to fix them.”

I don't know about you, but I think the world would be a better place without most of these clothing items we see on the list. Sure, it's nice to have a laugh at baseball caps with broken English all over them but do we really need to make a truckload of these absurdities every few weeks?