“There is no such thing as ‘away’. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere”
We need to “re-imagine the way the way we design, wear and reuse our clothes – so that our fashion waste no longer becomes another country’s burden.”
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We are throwing away tonnes of stuff: can we do something about it?
Maybe we can locally:
Enter the Champions Awards 2023 – Sustainable Sidmouth Champion Awards
We are throwing away so much clothing: it’s called ‘fast fashion’ and it’s going to get faster:
“In a world where the average consumer throws away 60 percent of new clothes the year they are bought, Shein seeks to raise that number to 70-80 percent.”
What do you know about the biggest fast-fashion company? – Vision Group for Sidmouth
The fashion industry is promising to get responsible:
Up in smoke? How green is the fashion industry? – Vision Group for Sidmouth
But this amounts to tonnes of greenwash.
Today’s Mail takes us to the “mountains of garments promised to be reused by brands like H&M and Zara, which are instead flooding waterways of Ghana”:
Parts of Africa are drowning in millions of used garments the fast fashion industry ships over each year – even though big names like H&M and Zara have made pledges to recycle the used clothing. H&M, a major offender in the industry, produces three billion garments a year alone and only recycles about 10 percent of them – the rest is shipped to places like Accra, the capital of Ghana, where there are heaps of used clothing flooding waterways. The fast fashion industry, which includes Zara that is less than 50 percent environmentally sustainable, churns out a total of 100 billion a year and recycles just one percent, Bloomberg reports.
H&M, Zara Fast Fashion Waste Leaves Environmental Impact – Bloomberg (register)
Fast fashion waste is choking developing countries with mountains of trash / Twitter
With more from Bloomberg yesterday:
What Actually Happens to Your Donated Clothes – YouTube
And more from ABC last year:
And from two years ago – the Textile Mountain Film:
“There is no such thing as ‘away’. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere”— Annie Leonard
Europeans throw away 2 million tonnes of textiles each year. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. Many of us donate our unwanted clothes to charity shops & clothing collection banks – but do we really know what happens to them then? Globally, 70% of our donated clothing is baled and sold to textile merchants who ship them overseas for resale in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Textile Mountain exposes the social and environmental cost of the second hand clothing trade, tracing the path of our unwanted garments from recycling bins in Europe to landfills and waterways in the Global South.Shot in Kenya, Ireland and Belgium, this film calls on us to re-imagine the way the way we design, wear and reuse our clothes – so that our fashion waste no longer becomes another country’s burden.
TEXTILE MOUNTAIN – THE HIDDEN BURDEN OF OUR FASHION WASTE – YouTube
TEXTILE MOUNTAIN – The Hidden Burden of our Fashion Waste
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