At a casual glance, you might think her quote would accurately describe the fashion industry. But the dark truth about the fashion business is that too much of a good thing is creating environmental destruction and human misery on an unprecedented scale.
The merry-go-round of new apparel ranges the industry spews out at a dizzying rate is fueling an addiction to clothes and a perceived need to constantly be at the cutting edge of fashion.
As a result, people around the world collectively consume more than 80 billion items of clothing each year , and those items are increasingly seen as disposable. We need to slow things down and become more aware of the negative impacts of our actions. That does not mean taking the fun out of buying clothes. For the past two months we have focused on food waste, creating more than articles and more than 20 videos. We will now be putting our attention on fashion.
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To put this into context, the amount of money that consumers spend on clothes, footwear and jewellery each year is the equivalent to the combined gross domestic product GDP of the poorest countries in the world — or just slightly larger than the size of the Italian economy 2. This huge amount of money spent on fashion results in mountains of clothes and shoes. It is estimated that around the world, about billion units of apparel and That equates to every person on the planet buying roughly 13 garments and two pairs of shoes 3 , although buying patterns vary considerably between countries.
These figures are set to grow. Together, these markets account for three-quarters of the clothes and more than two-thirds of the shoes sold each year. China is particularly dominant — the quantity of garments sold there is more than the other nine countries in the list combined.
This makes them hard to separate so they can be effectively recycled. Sorting textiles into different fibres and material types by hand is labour intensive, slow and requires a skilled workforce. Growing use of modern fabric blends in clothing also makes it hard to do this mechanically too, although European researchers have been developing techniques that make use of hyperspectral cameras — which can see light beyond the limits of human vision — to better identify different fabric types.
Once sorted, the dyes that have been applied to the fabrics need to be removed in order for yarns to be reused. Old wool jumpers, for example, can be turned into carpets, cashmere can be recycled into suits. While of course there is a healthy market in second-hand clothes being sold online, perhaps the most popular way of disposing of old clothes is simply to give them away so they can be reused through charity shops.
Increasingly, however, clothes donations are being used as a way of simply passing on the textile waste problem to others. Over that time, however, she has seen a real decline in the quality of clothes that are reaching them, particularly when it comes to the materials used to make the clothes. These days, most of what reaches Wastesaver will end up never being worn again.
The majority is sent for recycling in some way, but about six tonnes of the garments are of such poor quality they are simply torn up so they can be used as industrial cleaning clothes and stuffing for mattresses or car seats. Fibre recycling technologies do exist, but they are only used on a small scale. Generally, the techniques can be separated into mechanical and chemical recycling.
Some researchers have found ways of creating noise insulation from old textile fibres. Chemical fibre recycling for fabrics with large quantities of one type of fibre, for example polyester and nylon are well established, says Prajapati.
Treating cotton-polyester blends with enzymes from fungi can recover the man-made fibres for reuse Credit: Getty Images. There has been success on a smaller scale to effectively separate natural and synthetic blends and capture both types of fibres, without losing either fibre in the process.
However, scaling up this technology to an industrial scale remains the challenge. One group of researchers led by Carol Lin, a chemical engineer at the City University of Hong Kong, has developed a technique for recycling fabrics made from cotton and polyester blends by feeding them to fungi. The fungi Aspergillus niger — which typically forms a black mould on grapes — produces an enzyme that can break down the cotton into glucose that can then be used turned into syrup.
The remaining pure polyester fibres can then be reused to make new clothing, they claim. People presumably felt the need to replenish their closets. But the numbers have flattened out again. The major reasons are large-scale changes in how Americans spend their money. Millennials, shaped by the Great Recession and more populous than the Baby Boomers, are coming into their prime spending years , and they use their money differently than previous generations.
Signs of this change pop up in subtle ways: Instead of buying SUVs for their looks, younger Americans are buying the oversized vehicles because they actually need the cargo space to lug their paddleboards and kayaks out to a lake or seashore.
Instead, high status is suggested in minimalism and the language of conscious consumerism, and brands are touting their sustainability and recycling efforts. When millennials are spending on material goods, clothing has tough new competition from pricey digital accessories. The annual US consumption for works out to every American on average buying more than five garments a month. The Council for Textile Recycling estimates that Americans discard about 70 pounds of textiles per person pdf , much of it clothing, in landfills each year.
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