How our clothing is killing our planet!
In one year Americans alone donate 14 million tons of clothing, or approximately 80 pounds per person, contributing to extremely overloaded second hand stores and a huge buildup of textile waste.
Reducing your carbon footprint and living a more environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle has been increasing in popularity as climate change and environmental crisis’ are becoming public knowledge worldwide.
Many people have opted for one of the easier strategies, donating and recycling their used and unwanted clothes. Often people will feel great about the giant garbage bag of clothing they’ve decided to donate instead of throw out, and assume they are helping the issues at hand, when in reality they are only feeding it.
“According to the Council for Textile Recycling, charities overall sell only 20% of the clothing donated to them at their retail outlets” (Wicker, 2016, para.10) the rest of the clothing gets thrown into landfills, or cut up and used for cleaning/mechanical rags (Wicker, 2016, para.20).
The Environmental Protection Agency puts it in perspective by estimating that if they diverted all the trashed textiles into an actual recycling program it would be the environmental equivalent to taking approximately 7.3 million cars, and their toxic emissions, off the road entirely (Wicker, 2016, para.7).
The only way to truly end this cycle is to stop it before it begins, and that brings us to the fast fashion companies themselves.
Recycling programs work!
An obvious solution to this problem has recently been tested out in France specifically, and that’s using a law known as an extended responsibility policy to keep fashion companies responsibile for collection of at least 50% of their manufactured textiles for proper recycling.
Companies like H&M, Mudd Jeans, and Patagonia have encouraged customers to send back their clothing, or drop it off at any of their locations to decrease the amount of clothing being thrown away. Patagonia specifically has had a collection program in place since 1993
Patagonia is also known for repairing their old outerwear, Currently Patagonia has 54 free repair centres worldwide, with 500 volunteers and employees, who repaired 70,337 items collected in just one year (“Patagonia”, 2017, pg.7). This is an extremely successful business platform and many smaller companies are beginning to catch on.
To learn more about Patagonia, visit; https://www.patagonia.com/static/on/demandware.static/-/Library-Sites-PatagoniaShared/default/dw824fac0f/PDF-US/2017-BCORP-pages_022218.pdf
Pollution and the environment
If a company has to be able to recycle their products, they will have to start making them out of recyclable materials. There are a few processes known for recycling clothing into totally new fabrics that mimic that of a natural lifecycle known as closed loop recycling, but unfortunately they are very far out of reach for companies currently.
More often than not fabrics are finished with bleaches and dyes, making it almost impossible for companies to filter everything out (Wicker, 2016, para, 26). Enforcing an EPR or similar type of law will cause fashion brands to rethink the types of materials used in creation, as they are not going to want to deal with being responsible for a massive amount of unusable fabric.
Additionally, chemicals used to print, dye and bleach fabrics can leak out into soil and water in landfills, and many synthetic fibres will take thousands of years to biodegrade, and when nearly three-fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being made, that is a lot of buildup (Wicker, 2016 para. 5). Natural fibres in landfills can be almost as harmful: “When natural fibers, like cotton, linen and silk, or semi-synthetic fibers created from plant-based cellulose, like rayon, Tencel and modal are buried in a landfill in one sense they act like food waste, producing the potent greenhouse gas methane as they degrade” (Wicker, 2016, para. 4)
More sustainable textiles will lead to less greenhouse gas emissions and ground water pollution as well as leading manufacturers to create products out of textiles that can be recycled or put into closed loop technology in order to decrease the amount to discard so drastically.
Implementing a law similar to an EPR against fashion companies and textiles waste is the blanket solution for many of the problems the environment is facing world wide, from a buildup of unwanted textiles, to pollution and toxic emissions due to degrading textile waste. Overall it is very evident that we are going to have to take a larger step in a drastic direction in order to end a cycle that has been the same way for years.
