Fashion must fight the

scourge of dumped clothing

clogging landfills
Lucy Siegle https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethical-living

Every year millions of garments are discarded as consumers

ditch fast-fashion styles for a new wardrobe. At last the
industry is acting but more has to be done

Facebook users will be familiar with the On This Day feature. From
time to time it greets you with a blast from your relatively recent
past. Some find it unnerving, especially if its a picture with an ex,
for example. But my eye is always drawn to the clothes. Whatever
happened to that handbag? Do you still wear those jeans?
If its an image from more than three years ago, then the answer is
probably no. According to a recent report from Wrap (the Waste
and Resources Action Programme), the average piece of clothing in
the UK lasts for 3.3 years before being discarded. Other research
puts the lifespan of UK garments at 2.2 years. For a younger
demographic, you can probably halve that. A UK-based fashion
company tells its buyers to remember that a dress will stay in the
owners wardrobe for only five weeks.

The way we get dressed now has virtually nothing in common with
the behaviour of previous generations, for whom one garment could
be worn for decades. Wrap estimates that we purchased 1.13m
tonnes of new clothing last year in the UK. While an estimated
30bn-worth hangs about gathering dust Tinie Tempahs refrain I
have so many clothes, I keep some at my aunts house was spot on
an unpalatable quantity goes in the bin. A survey commissioned by
Sainsburys last spring found that 235m items ended up on landfill
sites as people readied their wardrobes for summer. Surely we can
do better than this?
Vivienne Westwood never one to miss an opportunity to call her
legion of fans to action thinks we can. Its about quality, not
quantity not landfill, she said recently at one of her own shows.
Hot on her heels, Vetements, very much the it brand of our times,
made its own statement last week. The label filled the windows of
Saks Fifth Avenue in New York one of the commercial hotspots of
global fashion retail not with its latest collection, but with waste
garments en route to a recycling charity.
But it was Stella McCartney who really upped the ante, electing to
shoot her latest collection on a Scottish landfill site. Models lay
across the rusted husks of old cars and languished on top of
household waste. From a sustainability perspective, Stella
McCartney is the luxury Kering groups top-performing brand. Much
of this success is based on McCartneys own personal resolve. Its
clear that the landfill backdrop is not just an interesting aesthetic to
her.

Now theres an obvious contradiction between selling fashion and

instructing us to buy less, but what these designers are calling for is
some sanity in an industry now rated as the fifth-most polluting on
the planet.

The fashion industry has developed a pretty terrible reputation not

least for exploitation of human capital, outsourcing production to
the worlds lowest-wage economies. Four years ago, 1,133 garment
workers were killed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, while producing clothing
for high-street brands and their subsidiaries. After that, many
worried what was next.
For those in and around the industry, garment waste has long been
rumoured to be the next big scandal. Globally, levels of production
and consumption are forecast to increase as fashion waste
becomes an environmental crisis to rival plastic pollution in oceans.
This is a tale of over-production and supply, powered by the
relentless fast fashion system of production that over the past
three decades has revolutionised both the way we dress and the
way clothing is produced and not often for the better.
Much of the waste in the fashion industry is hidden along a chaotic
supply chain and doesnt make it into the environmental accounting
that underpins a Wrap report. Perhaps the worst of it comes in the
form of readymade garments, assembled and sewn but discarded
because of an order mistake or an issue with the colour. According
to industry insiders, this waste represents 3-5% of every factorys
inventory (and a large factory in Dhaka can produce 240m pieces a
year).
There is no verified figure for the amount of clothing produced
globally each year (predominantly in low-wage textile hotspots like
Dhaka without waste management systems) but my own research
puts it between 80bn and 100bn garments. That means a lot of
hidden fashion waste.

Where it becomes highly visible is on the outskirts of big production

areas, such as the garment districts of Dhaka. This is where the
production waste leaves the factories and is absorbed by the air and
earth in the local community. Waste from the cutting room (called
jhut) often ends up in so-called go-downs. These makeshift sorting
operations are the stuff of legend in Dhaka, with fires a regular
occurrence. But what happens to all the rest?
You dont even want to know, says Estonian designer and clothing
waste researcher Reet Aus, who spends a lot of time following
unwanted garments out of factory gates. You see it by the side of
the road being sold, or just dumped, but a lot is burned, she says. I
know a brick factory near the garment district where the main fuel
is garment waste. You cant really see anything around there, the
pollution is terrible. Remember that thanks to the chemicals and
finishing agents, used textile waste is basically toxic waste.
Meanwhile, the urge to buy grows stronger as clothes shopping
takes on a quasi-addictive quality. And lets be honest here, are the
fast-fashion corporations with their extraordinary profits likely to do
anything about consumption, the driver of waste and the driver of
the industrys impact? Their business model, after all, depends on it.

Increasingly these brands are signposting a way of allowing us to

have our cake and eat it. They are buying into recycling schemes
and investing in competitions to close the loop on textile fibres. The
idea is that if they can collect waste garments and regenerate fibres
to be used in new garments, the impact of fast fashion can be
negated.
The trouble is, its hard to buy into. I have been critical of brands
overclaiming in this area before, particularly when I looked at the
numbers around H&Ms recycling week in 2016. In truth, there are
quite a few technical barriers to closing the fashion loop that is,
regenerating fibre from an old, unloved outfit, spinning and making it
into something else, all within a timeframe and quality thats
interesting to the consumer.
Every fabric is different, says Aus, so one garment might contain
a blend of different fabrics. On top of that, you have to strip out the
zippers and buttons inherent in post-consumer fashion waste. So
while a consumer may believe that a loved jumper or sundress is
going to be magically regenerated into a new item, in practice your
old T-shirt is probably going into a well-worn recycling network.

She and her team have developed software to keep track of

potential garment waste data during production, which she is
trialling with a large manufacturer: Beximco in Bangladesh. By
getting information about the volume and material of leftover
textiles, she can design that material back into a product before it
becomes waste. Id rather not produce waste in the first place, she
reasons. Plus, this is a better system for large brands who find
recycling and regeneration difficult. That is easier for smaller, more
agile companies. This means some of fashions big lessons about
its waste may come from unlikely parts of the apparel world. For
once, the smaller companies have a chance to steal.
Tom Kay, the founder of Cornish outdoor brand Finisterre, is
addressing a waste problem highly relevant to his customer and
doesnt care that it might seem niche to the rest of us. The average
neoprene wetsuit only lasts two years, he says. Weve redesigned
with wider seam tape and better stitching but it still only lasts
probably for three. It would be disastrous for these things to be
dumped, but theres nowhere for them to go. Thats why you see
them piled up in peoples garages.
Last week, he launched an intriguing job advert in partnership with
Exeter University: a 26,000-a-year position, paid by Finisterre, to be
filled by a materials scientist who shares his dream of making
wetsuits from wetsuits. We dont know how it will go, but Im
excited, he said.
THE FIGURES
Last year 1,130,000 tonnes of new clothing was purchased in the
UK an increase of 200,000 tonnes since 2012.
Fashion in the UK lasts an average of 3.3 years before a garment
is discarded.
Extending the life of a garment by an extra nine months reduces
its environmental impact by 20-30%.
Providing one tonne of clothing for direct re-use by giving it to a
charity shop or selling it online can result in a net greenhouse gas
saving of 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Topics
Fashion industry
The Observer
Recycling
Ethical and green living
Landfill
Waste
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