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Fast Fashion Is Creating an Environmental Crisis

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Fast Fashion Is Creating an Environmental Crisis

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Discusses the growing problem of textile waste and the challenges of clothing recycling. The article also explores potential solutions, such as closed-loop recycling technology.

"In less than 20 years, the volume of clothing Americans toss each year has doubled from 7 million to 14 million tons, or an astounding 80 pounds per person. The EPA estimates that diverting all of those often-toxic trashed textiles into a recycling program would be the environmental equivalent of taking 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the road."

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Updated | Visitors who stepped into fashion retailer H&M's showroom in New York City on April 4, 2016, were confronted by a pile of cast-off clothing reaching to the ceiling. A T.S. Eliot quote stenciled on the wall ("In my end is my beginning") gave the showroom the air of an art gallery or museum. In the next room, reporters and fashion bloggers sipped wine while studying the half-dozen mannequins wearing bespoke creations pieced together from old jeans, patches of jackets and cut-up blouses.

This cocktail party was to celebrate the launch of H&M's most recent Conscious Collection. The actress Olivia Wilde, spokeswoman and model for H&M's forays into sustainable fashion, was there wearing a new dress from the line. But the fast-fashion giant, which has almost 4,000 stores worldwide and earned over $25 billion in sales in 2015, wanted participants to also take notice of its latest initiative: getting customers to recycle their clothes. Or, rather, convincing them to bring in their old clothes (from any brand) and put them in bins in H&M's stores worldwide. "H&M will recycle them and create new textile fibre, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M. Everybody wins!" H&M said on its blog.

It's a nice sentiment, but it's a gross oversimplification. Only 0.1 percent of all clothing collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fiber, according to H&M's development sustainability manager, Henrik Lampa, who was at the cocktail party answering questions from the press. And despite the impressive amount of marketing dollars the company pumped into World Recycle Week to promote the idea of recycling clothes-including the funding of a music video by M.I.A.-what H&M is doing is nothing special. Its salvaged clothing goes through almost the exact same process as garments donated to, say, Goodwill, or really anywhere else.

Picture yourself with a trash bag of old clothes you've just cleaned out of your closet. You think you could get some money out of them, so you take them to a consignment or thrift store, or sell them via one of the new online equivalents, like ThredUp. But they'll probably reject most of your old clothes, even the ones you paid dearly for, because of small flaws or no longer being in season. With fast fashion speeding up trends and shortening seasons, your clothing is quite likely dated if it's more than a year old. Many secondhand stores will reject items from fast-fashion chains like Forever 21, H&M, Zara and Topshop. The inexpensive clothing is poor quality, with low resale value, and there's just too much of it.

If you're an American, your next step is likely to throw those old clothes in the trash. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 84 percent of unwanted clothes in the United States in 2012 went into either a landfill or an incinerator.

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. But unlike banana peels, you can't compost old clothes, even if they're made of natural materials. "Natural fibers go through a lot of unnatural processes on their way to becoming clothing," says Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. "They've been bleached, dyed, printed on, scoured in chemical baths." Those chemicals can leach from the textiles and-in improperly sealed landfills-into groundwater. Burning the items in incinerators can release those toxins into the air.

Meanwhile, synthetic fibers, like polyester, nylon and acrylic, have the same environmental drawbacks, and because they are essentially a type of plastic made from petroleum, they will take hundreds of years, if not a thousand, to biodegrade.

Despite these ugly statistics, Americans are blithely trashing more clothes than ever. In less than 20 years, the volume of clothing Americans toss each year has doubled from 7 million to 14 million tons, or an astounding 80 pounds per person. The EPA estimates that diverting all of those often-toxic trashed textiles into a recycling program would be the environmental equivalent of taking 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the road.

Trashing the clothes is also a huge waste of money. Nationwide, a municipality pays $45 per ton of waste sent to a landfill. It costs New York City $20.6 million annually to ship textiles to landfills and incinerators-a major reason it has become especially interested in diverting unwanted clothing out of the waste stream. The Department of Sanitation's Re-FashioNYC program, for example, provides large collection bins to buildings with 10 or more units. Housing Works (a New York-based nonprofit that operates used-clothing stores to fund AIDS and homelessness programs) receives the goods, paying Re-FashioNYC for each ton collected, which in turn puts the money toward more bins. Since it launched in 2011, the program has diverted 6.4 million pounds of textiles from landfills, and Housing Works has opened up several new secondhand clothing sales locations.

But that's only 0.3 percent of the 200,000 tons of textiles going to the dump every year from the city. Just 690 out of the estimated 35,000 or so qualified buildings in the city participate.

Smaller municipalities have tried curbside collection programs, but most go underpublicized and unused. The best bet in most places is to take your old clothing to a charity. Haul your bag to the back door of Goodwill, the Salvation Army or a smaller local shop, get a tax receipt and congratulate yourself on your largess. The clothes are out of your life and off your mind. But their long, international journey may be just beginning.

Made to Not Last

According to the Council for Textile Recycling, charities overall sell only 20 percent of the clothing donated to them at their retail outlets. All the big charities I contacted asserted that they sell more than that-30 percent at Goodwill, 45 to 75 percent at the Salvation Army and 40 percent at Housing Works, to give a few examples. This disparity is probably because, unlike small charity shops, these larger organizations have well-developed systems for processing clothing. If items don't sell in the main retail store, they can send them to their outlets, where customers can walk out with a bag full of clothing for just a few dollars. But even at that laughably cheap price, they can't sell everything.

"When it doesn't sell in the store, or online, or outlets, we have to do something with it," says Michael Meyer, vice president of donated goods retail and marketing for Goodwill Industries International. So Goodwill-and others-"bale up" the remaining unwanted clothing into shrink-wrapped cubes taller than a person and sell them to textile recyclers.

This outrages people who believe the role of thrift shop charities is to transfer clothes to the needy. "What Really Happens to Your Clothing Donations?" read a Fashionista headline earlier this year. The story hinted, "Let's just say they're not all going towards a good cause."

"People like to feel like they are doing something good, and the problem they run into in a country such as the U.S. is that we don't have people who need [clothes] on the scale at which we are producing," says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. The nonprofit N Street Village in Washington, D.C., which provides services to homeless and low-income women, says in its wish list that "due to overwhelming support," it can't accept any clothing, with the exception of a few particularly useful and hard-to-come-by items like bras and rain ponchos.

Fast fashion is forcing charities to process larger amounts of garments in less time to get the same amount of revenue-like an even more down-market fast-fashion retailer. "We need to go through more and more donations to find those great pieces, which can make it more costly to find those pieces and get them to customers," says David Raper, senior vice president of business enterprises at Housing Works. Goodwill's strategy is much the same, says Meyer: "If I can get more fresh product more quickly on the floor, I can extract more value."

This strategy-advertising new product on a weekly basis-is remarkably similar to that of Spanish fast-fashion retailer Zara, which upended the entire fashion game by restocking new designs twice a week instead of once or twice a season. And so clothing moves through the system faster and faster, seeking somebody, anybody, who will pay a few cents for it.

Secondhand Africa

If you donate your clothing anywhere in the New York City area and the items aren't sold at a secondhand store, they're likely to end up at Trans-Americas Trading Co. Workers at this large warehouse in Clifton, New Jersey, receive and process about 80,000 pounds of clothing a day.

When Eric Stubin, owner of Trans-Americas, president of the Council for Textile Recycling and president of the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, takes me on a tour of the warehouse, he pauses while a forklift scurries around the corner with a bale of garments and neatly stacks it in a tall, dense wall of clothing, before shooting back around the corner to grab another from a semi that's backed up to the loading bay. Workers stand in front of conveyor belts making split-second assessments as they mine the castoffs for valuable pieces. Sometimes, they find a gem-a pair of vintage Levi's, an ugly Christmas sweater, an army jacket-and toss it into a small bin full of other covetable items, which Trans-Americas can sell at a markup to vintage stores in Brooklyn. But that's just about 2 percent of what they get. The rest is sorted into broad categories, like T-shirts, pants or cold-weather items, then divided again by quality and material.

Forty percent of the clothing will be baled and shipped all over the globe to be resold as is. Japan gets the second nicest vintage items after the U.S. stores, South American countries get the mid-grade stuff, Eastern European countries get the cold-weather clothes, and African countries get the low-grade stuff no one else will take. In the 1980s, secondhand clothing began flowing into African countries that had dropped their protectionist economic policies. And because it was cheaper and seen as higher quality than domestically produced clothing, it dominated the market. By 2004, 81 percent of clothing purchased in Uganda was secondhand. In 2005, according to an Oxfam report, secondhand clothing made up half of the volume of clothing imports in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, starting in the 1990s, textile industries in those African countries cratered.

Early last year, at a summit of East African heads of state, some of the regional leaders proposed a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing; English-speaking news sites such as Voices of Africa and CNN followed up by positing that old clothing from the U.K. and U.S. was creating a post-colonial economic mess. "Exporting low-quality clothing that has no value in our own society forges a relationship of dependency," says Andrew Brooks at Kings College London. "You can call me idealistic, but I don't really want to live in a world where people who are in the global south, the only clothes they can afford to buy are clothes you and I don't want."

Not everyone agrees. Georgetown University's Rivoli, for example, says the secondhand clothing trade creates jobs in not only selling but also cleaning, repairing and tailoring. Karen Tranberg Hansen, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, has argued that secondhand clothing in countries like Kenya, Zambia, Lesotho and Uganda fills a different niche than the textile industry. "There are different segments of the population that have different desires," she says. "It is not a direct competition." Secondhand clothing, traditional clothing that is made locally, Asian imports-different people buy different things, she asserts.

But what everyone agrees on is that Africans buy cast-off clothing from the U.S. because they see it as high quality and good value. This might not be true much longer. The 2005 Oxfam report found that in Kenya up to a quarter of clothing in imported secondhand bales was unsalable due to poor quality. Since then, fast fashion's market share has expanded, even as it has become synonymous with "falls apart after two wears" for Western consumers. It's possible that Africans might eventually recognize that the secondhand fashion is just cheap, old imported clothing from Asia that made a quick pit stop in the U.K. and U.S. And like Americans, they might decide to just buy it new.

On the Brink of Collapse

Thirty percent of the clothing that comes into Trans-Americas is T-shirts and polos that will be cut into wiping rags for auto shops and other industrial uses. Another 20 percent of the clothing-the ripped and stained items-will be shipped out to processors that will chop it up into "shoddy," to be used in building insulation or carpet padding or floor mats for the auto industry. These are the least profitable types of clothing recycling for Trans-Americas.

The surge of fast-fashion garments poses a problem for Trans-Americas too. "More garments are made with polyester [or] poly-cotton blend," Stubin says. "If you have clothing that is lower quality, you're going to end up with more wiping rags and more material for the fiber market. The market for fiber is pennies these days. Half of the clothing we sell for less than the acquisition value."

Though it's better to downcycle clothes-turn them into less valuable consumer goods like auto-shop rags-than to send them straight to the landfill, it's not a complete solution. Those rags will still find their way to the landfill after a few uses; insulation will be thrown in the dumpster when it's torn out of a wall or old car. Everything is broken down further and further until it eventually reaches the landfill.

The cost to the planet isn't just what the stuff does when it's put in the ground, though that's bad enough. The wasted resources it took to create a textile are devastating for the planet. "When it ends up in the landfill, it's a wasted material," says Annie Gullingsrud of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. "There's been an expense to the planet. There's been an expense to the company [and] sometimes to the people creating the materials. And it creates a need to use virgin materials."

International companies like Adidas, Levi's, Nike and H&M don't want you to stop buying their products, but they also don't want to give up on their fast-fashion business models. "The holy grail for sustainability in fashion is closed-loop sourcing," Marie-Claire Daveu of the global luxury holding company Kering told Vogue. (Kering owns companies like Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Saint Laurent and Stella McCartney, among many others.) "Reuse old materials. Make new materials out of old materials. Recapture the fibers."

Closed-loop technology, where a product is recycled back into almost the same product, is a tantalizing prospect for sustainability advocates, because it essentially mimics the natural process of life. A plant grows out of dirt, dies, is incorporated back into dirt, and then another plant grows from that dirt. Rain falls, moves through the forest and into a river, flows to the sea, evaporates into the sky and falls again. There's no waste. If closed-loop technology could be achieved for fashion, nothing would ever go the landfill-it would just be endlessly looped through textile factories, garment factories, stores, your closet, secondhand retailers, textile recyclers and back to textile factories again. Polyester thread would be created, woven into a textile, made into a garment, broken down into pure polyester and woven into a textile again. Same for natural fibers.

But commercially scalable, closed-loop textile recycling technology is still five to 10 years away, at best. According to a 2014 report commissioned by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, there is closed-loop technology for pure cotton that could take a garment, break it down and reweave-but once cotton is dyed, treated or blended with other materials, the process no longer works. Treated cotton, linen, silk and wool can be mechanically chopped up for recycling, but they yield a low-quality, short fiber that must be mixed with virgin fiber for clothing. At 20 percent reused cotton, H&M's recycled denim line released last summer pushed the limits of what's possible today-a higher percentage of recycled cotton results in a lower-quality textile that tears too easily to be wearable.

A hopeful note appeared in May when Levi's debuted a prototype of jeans in partnership with the textile technology startup Evrnu, made with a mix of virgin and chemically recycled cotton from old T-shirts. Evrnu says its technology isn't sensitive to certain dyes, and it hopes to eventually make jeans from 100 percent post-consumer cotton waste. But they never tested the jeans, so don't know what percent of the denim was the recycled cotton. Plus, there's no timeline available yet for when these jeans will become available.

Closed-loop recycling of synthetic textiles like elastane-nylon blends is even further away from commercial feasibility. The technology exists to chemically process polyester into its core components and spin it back into polyester thread, and Patagonia is already using it to recycle its clothing. But Patagonia is doing it out of principle, not for profit; the process is prohibitively expensive and finicky, requiring high-quality polyester textile (Patagonia's own fleeces) as an input, instead of the cheap polyester textiles typically used by fast-fashion retailers.

Then there are popular blended fabrics with both polyester and natural fibers that, currently, can't be closed-loop recycled at all. Because the manufacture of polyester textiles is soaring -from 5.8 million tons in 1980 to 34 million in 1997 and an estimated 100 million in 2015- we won't be able to handle our output of old clothing until that problem is solved.

H&M knows this, which is why in February it handed out $1.1 million through its charity, Conscious Foundation, to five "innovation teams" working on textile recycling technologies. One team will be working on a process to dissolve old cotton clothing into a cotton-like material that can be spun into new fibers. Another is developing a microbe that can digest polyester, even if it's blended with a natural fiber, and break it down into its basic components for resale back to polyester manufacturers.

These processes need to be developed in tandem with a sorting technology that can easily tell apart pure cotton, synthetic fabric and blended fiber, or recognize that a jacket has cotton on the outside and polyester on the inside. "If we're going to try to get 24 billion pounds out of the landfill, we can't be hand sorting," says Jennifer Gilbert of the international secondhand clothing collection company I:CO.

There's a special sense of urgency to these brands' efforts to close the loop, which would create a new and-hopefully-profitable market for old textiles. In the past year, the market for secondhand textiles has tanked, pushing this entire system to the brink of collapse.

At the moment your old clothing is baled for sale to a textile recycler, it ceases to be discrete items whose value is determined by the label, quality or trendiness. Instead, it becomes a commodity with a per-pound price governed by global supply and demand. In the past 18 months, that price has dropped to a few cents per pound, shoved down by the strength of the dollar, weak demand due to unrest in the Middle East (where much of the secondhand clothing is processed), upward economic mobility in Eastern European countries and a fire in the largest secondhand market in East Africa.

Some percentage of that price drop could be attributed to a steady increase in the supply of lower-quality secondhand clothing, as charities race to process more clothes faster. "The used-clothing industry is going through an extremely difficult period both here in the U.K. and globally," Alan Wheeler, director of the Textile Recycling Association in the U.K., told Sourcing Journal in April. "Yet consumption of new clothing is continuing to rise, with clothing prices still generally much lower than they used to be. Continuing downward pressure on prices for used clothing is inevitable for some time to come." With little financial incentive for recyclers, collection rates have dropped by 4 percent in the past year, after rising steadily during the years after the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

If clothing quality continues to fall, demand from the international market drops even further and the closed-loop recycling technology doesn't come through, we might have a secondhand clothing crisis. And then there wouldn't be any place at all to take your cheap, old clothes.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Levi's and Evrnu had created a prototype of a pair of jeans with 52 percent recycled cotton. In fact, the jeans were not tested to verify the precise percentage of recycled cotton.

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Textile waste is piling up at catastrophic levels thanks to the fast-fashion industry.

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Fast Fashion

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Fast Fashion

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Industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

Clothes in your suitcase are screwing up the planet more than the flight you put them on

Circular Fibres Initiative - Collaborative effort to find solutions to textile waste and promote sustainable fashion practices

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Fashion shoppers spent about £3.5bn on Christmas party clothing this year - but 8 million of those sparkly items will be on their way to landfill after just one wear.

So-called fast fashion has ushered throwaway culture into the clothing business, with items so cheap they have become single-use purchases.

Last week, the young-fashion brand Boohoo had 486 dresses available online for less than £5. Many - like a black bandeau jersey bodycon number - were just £3.75, meaning the delivery charge cost more than the contents of the package. Rival Asos was offering 257 dresses and 2,141 different tops for less than £10.

Now, however, some fashion experts believe the party could be coming to an end for such disposable clothing and a backlash could be brewing, just as it has against takeaway coffee cups, plastic packaging and meat. Overall, the fashion industry as a whole is contributing more to climate change than the aeronautical and shipping industries combined. If trends continue, the industry could account for a quarter of the world's carbon budget by 2050.

In the past 15 years, global clothing production has doubled to meet demand. But it has left a trail of cast-offs, with more than half of fast fashion items thrown away in less than a year, according to the consultants McKinsey.

Disposing of clothing and household textiles costs the UK alone about £82m a year, according to a 2014 study by the government-backed recycling charity Wrap.

A little black dress from the young-fashion brand Boohoo is available for just £3.75.

In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production globally totalled 1.2 billion tonnes of CO ₂ equivalent, according to a report by the industry-led Circular Fibres Initiative. This is more than the emissions of all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

Less than 1% of the material used to produce clothing globally is recycled into new clothing, with 12% recycled into other products such as insulation or mattress stuffing.

With a parliamentary committee set to produce a report on the issue in February and concerns about plastic pollution spurred by the BBC's Blue Planet documentary now turning to microfibres from clothing, industry insiders believe a backlash against fast fashion is on the way.

Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: "The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.

"There is not an obvious consumer backlash against fast fashion today, but it would be a very brave business leader who didn't look into the next 12 to 18 months and say we are not heading there. Every business leader in the fashion industry knows that clothing will have the same level of questioning and challenging that food has had for years.

"It is going from being a business-to-business and risk-management issue behind the scenes to a consumer issue, in the same way as plastics and deforestation linked to palm oil have been in the last 12 months."

His hunch is backed up by research that suggests shoppers have already begun buying clothing less frequently.

In 2018, a third of consumers bought clothing once a month, down from 37% in 2016, while those buying every two or three months or less rose from 64% to 67%, according to the market research firm Mintel.

Samantha Dover, senior retail analyst at Mintel, says nearly half of consumers say they prefer to buy clothing from companies trying to reduce their impact on the environment, and that rises to 60% among under-24s.

"People are far more interested than before in knowing exactly where products are coming from and how they are being made," Dover says. She says consumers are still more interested in the price and style of the clothing than where and how it has been made, but that change is coming.

With that in mind, switched-on clothing companies are no longer just setting up a few racks of eco clothing in the corner of a store but considering how to make their entire range more sustainable.

The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.

The government also wants to introduce extended producer-responsibility schemes for household and commercial textiles and clothing, similar to those currently in place for batteries and electronics, which would force companies to pay for the recovery of waste. But it is a slow process, with consultation promised only by 2025.

Mary Creagh MP, chair of the parliamentary environmental audit committee, which has been investigating fashion industry sustainability, says the timetable is too slow.

"We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change," she says. "We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world's richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it."

Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost - with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. "We are not saying to people on a low income you can't buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don't think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment."

The Swedish fast-fashion specialist H&M is bringing its free mending service to the UK. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters

Testifying to Creagh in parliament, Boohoo said that its £5 dresses were intended as loss leaders on which the company made no profit. It has also previously said that it takes sustainability seriously: 'The youthful demographic of our customer means that education is key and we use our huge reach across social channels globally to help share ideas of how a garment can be utilised in their wardrobe again and again. We are also working with reGAIN, a company that allows users to recycle unwanted clothing to prevent them from going to landfill."

Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.

In many ways, younger people are ahead of the game, using trading sites such as Depop and Thredup to resell and upcycle clothing.

Even cleaning and mending services appear to be in vogue. Earlier this month, H&M brought its free mending service to the UK, making it a key part of a store revamp in Hammersmith. The brand is jumping on a bandwagon kickstarted by ethical brands such as Patagonia, which makes 40,000 repairs a year at its service centre in Reno, Nevada.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles-based sports shoe cleaning specialist Jason Markk opened its first London store in March on Carnaby Street. It claims its "sneaker care technicians" have professionally cleaned more than 50,000 pairs of shoes since opening in the US in 2014.

Recycling is also becoming mainstream, with Primark set to launch a clothing take-back scheme in 2019, joining similar efforts by M&S and H&M that have been in operation for several years. Barry at M&S, which collects about 3 million items a year via its "shwopping" scheme, says it is only part of the answer. "The challenge is not getting clothing back: it's what to do with it," he says.

About 1.2 million tonnes of fibre from clothing is sold in the UK every year, about half of which is cotton, a third synthetic and the rest viscose or animal products such as leather. Reprocessing these fibres is tricky, according to Mark Sumner, a lecturer in sustainable fashion at the University of Leeds.

Most fabrics are a mix of different kinds of thread - such as cotton and Tencel for a T-shirt - and there are currently no commercial-scale facilities that can separate and reprocess such fabrics. Strong modern dyes are also extremely difficult to remove so, meaning that recycled threads cannot be recoloured.

Sumner says: "The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. "Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality."

Sumner and Barry say the government and businesses need to fund research into how good-quality fibres can be reprocessed on a large scale to build a closed-loop industry. "If we can find a way of recycling, we can think about the UK being an exporter of those fabrics or rescuing our textile industry. There is an economic story there," Sumner says.

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Is fast fashion giving way to the sustainable wardrobe?

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Fashion shoppers spent about £3.5bn on Christmas party clothing this year - but 8 million of those sparkly items will be on their way to landfill after just one wear. So-called fast fashion has ushered throwaway culture into the clothing business, with items so cheap they have become single-use purchases.

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Amount of water it takes to grow cotton for the clothes we wear (in YEARS)

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Amount of water it takes to grow cotton for the clothes we wear (in YEARS)

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The number of years the amount of water that is used to make ONE piece of clothing for a single human being is shocking and not many people even know about it

“do you really need that jacket as much as

someone needs 10,000 liters of water”

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Confronting High Street Shoppers with A Shocking Truth: Stacey Dooley Investigates

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these two posts talk to each other by emphasizing the true amount of resources it takes to produce the clothes we wear in the first place, and exemplify whether its even worth it at the end of day

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A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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Ellen Macarthur Foundation - sets out ambitions and actions – based on the principles of a circular economy – to design out negative impacts and capture a USD 500 billion economic opportunity by truly transforming the way clothes are designed, sold, and used.

Synthetic fibers are even worse. Polyester, nylon, spandex use almost 342 million barrels of oil a year. → Lululemon yoga pants as an example.

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A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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Fashion is a vibrant industry that employs hundreds of millions, generates significant revenues, and touches almost everyone, everywhere.

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Deforestation for fashion: getting unsustainable fabrics out of the closet

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Deforestation for fashion: getting unsustainable fabrics out of the closet

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The rayon and viscose that forests “donate” to fashion industries takes a huge toll on the environment around them

33% of viscose from clothes are made from ancient or threatened forests

Process involves a huge amount of waste

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Both sources talk about rayon and viscose's role in fashion production and what is happening to it without our knowledge

bottom source acknowledges the "waste" statement made on top

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Ecosystem Alert: Protecting Lands in Peril | earthrise

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Ecosystem Alert: Protecting Lands in Peril | earthrise

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Raises awareness of the human-caused factors contributing to environmental degradation and the urgent need for collective action to safeguard these precious landscapes.

What is the point of disposing of 70% of the shredded wood to obtain the rayon and viscose instead of putting it towards some other product that also uses it

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Ecosystem Alert: Protecting Lands in Peril | earthrise

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Indonesia’s Citarum: The World’s Most Polluted River

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Indonesia’s Citarum: The World’s Most Polluted River

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The Citarum River, Indonesia's longest, is choked by pollution, posing a grave threat to the environment and the health of millions who depend on it.

Dikanaya Tarahita, Program Director of the Bandung-based environmental organization Ecoton: "We found lead levels in the Citarum River to be 1,000 times higher than the U.S. drinking water standards."

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Advertisement
Suratmo, a fisherman living on the banks of the Citarum River, could only laugh softly when asked about his catch today. He replied that he could no longer be called a fisherman. For the last five years, his income has no longer come from catching fish, but fishing used items such as glass bottles from the mountains of garbage in what is often called the world's most polluted river. Yes, Suratmo can no longer be called a fisherman - he is now a garbage collector.

Every day, no less than 20,000 tons of waste and 340,000 tons of wastewater, mostly from 2,000 textile factories, are disposed directly into the once clear and pristine waterways of the Citarum River. No wonder the fish are largely gone in the third-biggest river in Java.
The Conditions
To illustrate how dirty the Citarum River is, at some places we cannot even see the water. Its surface is completely covered by the unimaginable amount of waste, trash, and dead animals floating on it. If we are lucky enough to glimpse the water, we will see it is colored due to the excessive amount of toxic chemicals being dumped into the river by industries. Not surprisingly, since 2008, nearly 60 percent of the river's fish species have been destroyed.

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Yet despite those very poor conditions, the Citarum River is vital for the 25 million people who daily depend on it for agriculture, water, and electricity.

As Indonesia's most strategic river, the Citarum is the source of water for the Jatiluhur Reservoir, which is Indonesia's largest reservoir at 3 billion cubic meters of storage capacity. The reservoir not only supplies clean water for Bandung but also provides 80 percent of the water supply for the capital. It also irrigates 400,000 hectares of rice fields and is a source of energy for three hydroelectric power stations serving three cities.

Yet a study conducted by the Blacksmith Institute in 2013 found that levels of lead in the Citarum River reached 1,000 times worse than the U.S. standards for drinking water. With severe pollution from lead, aluminum, manganese, and iron since 2002, the Citarum has never met the water quality standards of Government Regulation No. 82 of 2001 on Water Quality Management and Water Pollution Control.
Jokowi's Promises
Because people have been depending on this heavily polluted water, many now suffer from various skin diseases, ranging from scabies to infections, not to mention respiratory distress due to inhaling factory smoke. In addition, poor water quality due to waste and pollution also damages the crops of farmers.
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Over the years, successive governments have vowed to clean the Citarum, but they mainly failed because such efforts were only partially done. However, in February, after visiting the location, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo declared a seven-year Citarum cleansing program with a final goal of making Citarum water drinkable by 2025. The program will also be supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), which in 2009 had already committed to provide $500 million to fund the Citarum's rehabilitation.

From 1 February 1, 2018, a total of 7,100 joint personnel led by the Indonesian Army were divided into 22 sectors along this 300 km river to clear garbage from the river and to bring plant life back to the critical lands surrounding the Citarum. Citarum reforestation is critical - 2,500 hectares of sector 1 upstream land and 80,000 hectares of land adjacent to the river have been heavily affected by the rapid industrialization in the region since the 1980s.

The coordinator of the Citarum Sector 1 cleansing program, Colonel Yanto, said that it is estimated that reforestation will require 125 million trees - consisting of 25 million hardwood plants and 100 million shrubs - to be planted in the immediate vicinity of the river. The hope is that, in the next five years, Indonesia can end the floods partly caused by clogged garbage and overflowing rivers.
Future Benefits
However, efforts to clean up the river will be a waste if the government does not immediately take action against rogue businessmen who create dumping holes containing industrial wastewater that pollute the river. The authorities should go straight to the source to seal-off dumping holes and explicitly remove business permits for those who remain ignorant of the rules.
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With the Citarum clean of waste and integrated industrial wastewater treatment, the World Bank has estimated that Indonesia will get a massive range of benefits. Not only will the water ecosystem return to a healthy state, but the clean Citarum will bring economic benefits of up to $280 million annually.

Clean water will improve the quality of drinking water, improve crop yields, and in the long term revitalize the ecosystem and the volume of fish in the river. And when downstream canals are not clogged with garbage, aesthetically pleasing, crystal clear river water will make riverside property more attractive and resorts and water tourism can grow and prosper.
Dikanaya Tarahita and Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat are independent researchers focusing on social issues in Indonesia. Both are the founders of Sekolabilitas, an Indonesian-based NGO dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities access education.
But none of those dreams will come true if fishermen like Suratmo are only pulling garbage, rather than fish, out of the river.

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Indonesia's Citarum: The World's Most Polluted River

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Advertisement Suratmo, a fisherman living on the banks of the Citarum River, could only laugh softly when asked about his catch today. He replied that he could no longer be called a fisherman.

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both sources relate to the water pollution from chemical factories that produce what is used to make the clothes that are sold, effecting many civilians AND organisms together on this matter

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This report rips apart the glossy veneer of fast fashion, exposing a hidden world of perilous chemicals harming workers, consumers, and the environment.

"The impacts of chemicals banned in the final product but allowed in the manufacturing process, like dyes, polyfluorinated chemicals, and flame retardants, are striking. In China, 70 percent of the rivers and lakes are polluted, and in Bangladesh, the Buriganga River is so polluted with toxic chemicals and heavy metals prevalent in the leather tanning industry that it can no longer sustain aquatic life."

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If you go to a Forever 21 location two months in a row, odds are that practically nothing about the clothing selection will look the same. Forever 21 played a massive role in popularizing fast fashion, and as Green America's Toxic Textiles report recently found, workers and the Earth pay a massive price for these seasonal looks, exposing workers to hazardous conditions and polluting our water, soil, and air.

Between 2000 and 2015, clothing production almost doubled, from about 50 billion pieces a year to over 100 billion pieces a year. In addition, the amount of clothing Americans dispose of annually has almost tripled during that time. Green America recently investigated sustainability practices in the clothing industry, revealing how the push towards fast fashion has resulted in significant carbon emissions and environmental degradation. Green America's labor justice campaigns manager Charlotte Tate says it is crucial for individuals to know exactly what toxic chemicals could be in their clothing, especially given the lack of transparency in the industry.

"Currently, companies are deciding what chemicals are okay for consumers to be exposed to and at what levels, and companies are making those same decisions for workers," says Tate. "Information about what chemicals are being used at all tiers of the supply chains must be made public, so that the deciding power is not only with companies trying to maximize profits."

Textile producers and clothing companies not only largely fail to commit to environmental sustainability, their increased activity threatens the water supply and soil quality, while also using materials that present dangers for their labor force.

Further, less than one percent of the resources used to make clothing are captured and reused to create new clothing. Although many people donate their unwanted clothing, many of those clothes go unused after donation, eventually also becoming trash. This failure to create a cyclical system of clothing reuse means that most textile sales are of new products, accelerating the release of chemicals.

Water Use and Pollution

Water pollution is the most notable impact of clothing production, with around 20 percent of global industrial water pollution traceable directly back to the textiles industry. The pollution is multifaceted and affects all aspects of water ecosystems, from chemical contamination of drinking water to the spread
of microplastics into waterways around the world.

Target, VF (which owns The North Face and Jansport), Nike, and Gap have all introduced Manufacturing Restricted Substances Lists (MRSL) and Restricted Substances Lists (RSL) to eliminate the use of some chemicals that harm workers and consumers. These lists are an excellent first step, with a MRSL restraining what can be used in the manufacturing process and a RSL dictating what can be in the final product. The reality is that the vast majority of chemical exposure is to workers-some exposure occurs when consumers get the clothes, but much more to the worker.

"Companies need to work with their suppliers to ensure that the MRSL is being implemented appropriately," Tate notes. "Companies need to be paying enough for their products so that the supplier is able to implement the MRSL, and all apparel companies should come together and agree on one complete and holistic MRSL and RSL-raising industry standards across the board."

The impacts of chemicals banned in the final product but allowed in the manufacturing process, like dyes, polyfluorinated chemicals, and flame retardants, are striking. In China, 70 percent of the rivers and lakes are polluted, and in Bangladesh, the Buriganga River is so polluted with toxic chemicals and heavy metals prevalent in the leather tanning industry that it can no longer sustain aquatic life.

Even alternatives to conventional textile production cause environmental degradation. Organic cotton is grown without toxic chemicals, but unless the clothes are certified under GOTS, bluesign®, or Oeko-Tex certifications, toxic chemicals may be added in the textile production process.

Green America's Toxic Textiles report also found that the bamboo used in some shirts involves a more chemical-intensive process to make the material soft. Like bamboo, rayon fabric (and its variant, lyocell) is derived from raw materials in wood pulp, which go through energy- and chemical-intensive processes with to become a semi-synthetic material. The chemicals used generally aren't recaptured but instead are released into waterways.

Cotton is among the most water intensive crops and both organic and conventional clothing manufacturers consume enormous amounts in both farming and textile production. An astonishing 2,700 liters of water are required to grow the cotton needed to make a single t-shirt. These watering practices are especially harmful in the primary cotton-growing countries as they often face water scarcity but need to continue cotton production to maintain their economy. In Kyrgyzstan, where water is both contaminated and scarce, many civilians have no access to clean drinking water, even as cotton producers use thousands of liters.

Microplastics

Unfortunately, chemicals aren't the only harmful substances polluting water as a result of the textile industry. At every step of the manufacturing process, including after the product reaches the consumer, microplastics can be released into our waterways. When synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon, and acrylic break down, they release microfibers, another form of microplastic.

The global spread of microplastics was discovered relatively recently but is a cause for major concern, both for the uncertain health effects on humans and the deaths of aquatic animals that have consumed these microfibers.

When washing clothes using materials prone to shedding microfibers, each load releases as many as 700,000 microfibers into the water. These tiny plastics spread quickly, and when they accumulate in the digestive systems of oceanic animals, they can be fatal. With their health effects largely unknown but potentially hazardous, this spread is concerning.

"You and I and everybody else on earth is drinking and bleeding microfibers," says Dimitri Deheyn, a marine biology researcher at University of California in San Diego, who spoke about microfibers at the Unveiling Fashion conference in Washington, DC, in September 2019. "There are no studies whatsoever on the effect of microfibers made of plastic on public health, [...] we're just starting to look at this toxic aspect of microfibers."

But contamination is not the only negative effect on water that occurs during the textile manufacturing process.

Air, Soil and Agriculture

Many of the same chemicals that contaminate water end up in the soil as well, affecting agriculture as more land becomes less arable. Additionally, irresponsible sourcing practices for the raw materials also threatens endangered ecosystems, including rainforests and heavily deforested areas.

This impacts even supposedly sustainable materials, including rayon, a common silk substitute. Rayon is made with wood pulp, which is regularly sourced from endangered or protected forests. Worse, 60 to 70 percent of the wood pulp is lost in the process. As a result, rayon production fuels the deforestation crisis and requires vast amounts of wood for relatively little fabric.

Wood pulp harvesting, particularly when done in endangered forests, accelerates deforestation, which has wide-reaching effects on biodiversity. It is unfortunately part of the production process for rayon, viscose, and lyocell. Removed trees can no longer enrich the soil and air, negatively affecting the forest ecology. Degradation also occurs at the manufacturing stage; Rayon manufacturing factories in China contribute to severe air and water pollution, and residential areas near factories have reported dangerous levels of carbon disulfide, a chemical that can cause insanity, Parkinsonism, and birth defects.

Conventional cotton is very likely to be grown from genetically modified seeds, which often increase the use of pesticides on the crop. Cotton production has also increased over the past few years, as an increase in clothing demand drives farmers to extreme measures to keep up. The scale means farmers are prevented from planting a more diverse set of crops, which could help maintain the integrity of the soil and which also require less water. See our story on regenerative cotton to read more about regenerative and conventional cotton.

Exposing Workers to Toxic Chemicals

With sweatshop labor notably prominent in the textile industry, worker safety is rarely a priority in textile factories. However, increased textile production and the widespread use of chemicals in many developed countries also threatens these workers.

Polyester textiles, used in 55 percent of all clothing production, rely on the use of heavy metals, like antimony, a possible carcinogen, as well as known carcinogens, like cadmium and lead. Research from the National Institutes of Health shows that occupational exposure to antimony can cause respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal symptoms, and may even cause cancer. Too often, factory workers who may encounter such toxic materials are not notified about safety procedures or given proper equipment to reduce exposure.

It's not only polyester-nearly every textile material undergoes the wet processing phase of production, where dyeing and chemical processing takes place. Too often, workers lack proper protection. In countries with these wet processing factories, like China and Bangladesh, officials don't enforce the need to inform workers about the dangers of the chemicals or provide them adequate safety equipment. Wet processing plants are far down the supply chain from the companies and get less attention as a result.

Companies can help protect their workers by restricting the types of chemicals used in their clothing, but until that occurs, workers are threatened at every step of the process. This starts with the field workers, endangered by the cocktail of pesticides sprayed on conventional cotton crops.

"Chemicals used to produce clothing can disrupt hormone systems, harm liver health, or cause cancer," says Tate. "Brands have a responsibility to ensure that workers in their supply chain have a safe and healthy workplace and that their basic right to health is not violated by the chemicals used to make clothes."

Consumer Activism as a Solution

For three decades, Green America has been active in greening the apparel industry, by pushing companies like Nike, Hanes, and Gap, to address sweatshop labor in their supply chains.

Transparency is the first step in creating a safer textile industry. As consumers learn about key issues, they can begin to protect themselves, workers, and the environment from extreme pollution. The first and most important thing for people to do is reduce their consumption of new clothes. Even the alternatives to conventional textiles aren't without their own concerns. As Green America's report makes clear, there are no true leaders in this field, only relative successes.

"Brands are great at making big, vague commitments that don't deliver the implied impact," says Tate. "And on top of this, a majority of the commitments are voluntary, meaning there are no repercussions if the company does not meet its commitment."

Green America and our members have a large role to play. With workers often unable to advocate for themselves in factories, consumer pressure may be the best way to advocate for ethical and environmentally sustainable textile production.

Other organizations have also joined the push for more responsible textile production, as our ally Stand.earth pressures Levi's to put in place firm climate commitments for their overseas production facilities.

"Consumers have a lot of power with the textile industry. Millennial and Gen Z consumers especially are shifting their purchasing to companies that treat their workers well, use fewer toxic chemicals, and create durable clothes," says Todd Larsen, Green America's executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement. "This shift in purchasing has drastically reduced sales at fast fashion companies like Forever 21, which just declared bankruptcy."

Kids clothier Carter's (which also owns OshKosh B'gosh), is a major polluter, but their defensive response to questions about their process shows how these companies want to be seen as environmentally friendly and how they will fight to protect their image. Since the launch of Green America's campaign to pressure Carter's into improving their supply chain, almost 7,000 concerned people have signed on.

The systematic failure of textile producers and clothing companies to protect their workers and the environment outlined in the Green America report shows the necessity of this action. And as Larsen notes, customers can make their voices heard.

"This is the same approach we used to address toxins in the electronics sector, and it works."

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If you go to a Forever 21 location two months in a row, odds are that practically nothing about the clothing selection will look the same. Forever 21 played a massive role in popularizing fast fashion, and as Green America's Toxic Textiles report recently found, workers and the Earth pay a massive price for these seasonal looks, exposing workers to hazardous conditions and polluting our water, soil, and air.

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these two sources talk to each other because above source refers to how much we could actually benefit from recycling clothes, but the bottom source completely negates that because the amount of clothes getting donated is too much to recycle at once that most just end up intenerated or landfilled (very bottom source)

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This is an article about the afterlife of cheap clothes. It discusses where clothes go when you donate them and the challenges of textile waste. “We see people throwing away new stuff every day,” says Maui, an employee at the Salvation Army. “There are always enough clothes,” he says.

One salvation Army Center in NY creates 18 tons of unwanted clothes every 3 days

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Following is an excerpt from Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, out now from Viking.

It was early morning at the Quincy Street Salvation Army, an easy-to-miss location tucked away on a Brooklyn side street. The only donations that had come in so far were books, an entire truck full from one single apartment. Charitable clothing donations usually roll in with fits and starts, with the changing of the seasons and at the end of the year, when people are looking for tax write-offs. It was on a weekday morning in the middle of the fall, the off-hours for clothing donations. But I didn't have to witness someone pulling up their car and shoveling bags full of clothes from the trunk. I'd been that person innumerable times, lugging overloaded trash bags, pierced by the heels of cheap pumps, sleeves and pant legs hanging out, to a local charity. I had never known what happens after I drive away and leave my old clothing orphaned on the Salvation Army's doorstep.

Michael Noneza, otherwise known as "Maui," one of the donation center's assistant supervisors, bounced into the warehouse. "You ready?" the cheery Pacific Islander asked, and ushered me over to a massive freight elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator jolted upward and the doors opened on a scene that looked a bit like a threadbare Santa's workshop. Dozens of Hispanic women were standing behind a row of wooden slides, pulling clothes out of elephantine gray bins and separating them into broad categories like jackets, pants, and childrenswear. "We keep only the best," Maui told me. "Then it's ticketed and priced." The pricers, perched on what looked like adult high chairs, quickly and methodically moved through racks of 80 garments each, making snap judgments based on condition and brand.

The Quincy Street Salvation Army may be on a quiet out-of-the-way street, but it is the main distribution center serving eight Salvation Army locations in Brooklyn and Queens. It processes an average of five tons of outcast clothing every single day of the year, and much more during the holiday season when donations spike. From that astonishing mass, the sorters choose exactly 11,200 garments a day to be divided up equally between the eight thrift stores they serve. I asked Maui if they've ever hit a dry spell, where the donations dipped too low to fully restock each stores with their share of the 11,200 items. He laughed, "We never run out of clothes. There are always enough clothes."

What American doesn't have something hanging in his or her closet worn only once or twice, a pair of pants waiting for a diet, or even a brand-new dress or jacket with the tags still on? Common sense and everyday experience tell us that we have so many clothes that a majority go underused and neglected. According to a 2010 national survey in ShopSmart magazine, one in four American women own seven pairs of jeans, but we only wear four of them regularly. Not surprisingly, charities regularly see brand-new clothes come in with tags still affixed. "We see people throwing away new stuff every day," Maui says.

There is an enormous disconnect between increasing clothing consumption and the resultant waste, partially because unworn clothes aren't immediately thrown out like other disposable products. Instead, they accumulate in our closets or wherever we can find space for them. Master closets now average about 6 feet by 8 feet, a size more typical of an extra bedroom 40 years ago.

Maui and I took the elevator back downstairs and walked into a dimly lit warehouse hidden away on the far side of the donation drop-off area. Garments that make it into the Salvation Army thrift stores have exactly one month to sell. Then, they're pulled from their hangers, tossed in bins, and end up back in a room such as this one.

In the rag-cut room, two men were silently pushing T-shirts, dresses, and every other manner of apparel into a compressor that works like the back of a garbage truck, squeezing out neat cubes of rejected clothing that weigh a half ton each. The cubes were then lifted and moved via forklift to the middle of the room, where a wall of wrapped and bound half-ton bales towered. I saw tags for Old Navy, Sean Jean, and Diesel peeking out of the bales, as well as slivers of denim, knits in bright maroons and bold stripes, and the smooth surfaces of Windbreakers. Smashed together like this, stripped of its symbolic meaning, stacked up like bulk dog food, I was reminded that clothing is ultimately fiber that comes from resources and results in horrifying volumes of waste. Clothing stores completely separate us from this reality, and a "rag-cut" room brings it home in an instant. The Quincy Street Salvation Army builds a completed wall made of 18 tons, or 36 bales, of unwanted clothing every three days. And this is just a small portion of the cast-offs of one single Salvation Army location in one city in the United States.

Most Americans are thoroughly convinced there is another person in their direct vicinity who truly needs and wants our unwanted clothes. This couldn't be further from the truth. Charities long ago passed the point of being able to sell all of our wearable unwanted clothes. According to John Paben, co-owner of used-clothing processer Mid- West Textile, "They never could."

There are thousands of secondhand textile processors in the United States today, mostly small family businesses, many of them several generations old. I visited Trans- Americas Trading Co., a third- generation textile recycler in Clifton, N.J., which employs 85 people and processes close to 17 million pounds of used clothing a year. Inside Trans-Americas, there is a wall of cubed-up clothing five bales tall and more than 20 bales long. "This is literally several hundred thousand pounds of textile waste, and we bring in two trailer loads of this much every day," Trans-Americas president Eric Stubin told me. The volume they process has gone up over the years alongside our consumption of clothing.

Without textile recyclers, charities would be totally beleaguered and forced to throw away everything that couldn't be sold. Charities might even have to turn us away. The only benefit to this doomsday scenario is that our clothes would pile up in our house or in landfills, finally forcing us to face down just how much clothing waste we create.

A majority of the clothing processed at Trans-Americas comes from overburdened charities within a thousand-mile radius of New York City. Used clothes come into the warehouse in mixed bales like those I saw at the Quincy Street Salvation Army. "I like to call it the good, the bad, and the ugly," Stubin said, as we sailed past women separating pants from shirts and sending them down long slides. "We get everything from torn sweaters to spoiled and stained towels to good useable clothing." Stubin's sorters separate the wearable stuff into two hundred broad categories like cotton blouses, baby clothes, jackets, sweaters, khaki pants, and denim. "From there, sorters begin to look for quality and start sorting the worn from the torn and making various grades," Stubin explains. The higher-skilled employees "develop an eye," he says, for coveted brands, cashmere, and the gold mine vintage finds. But a lot, at least half of what Trans-America processes, is "the bad and the ugly." This is the situation in general in the textile recycling industry today.

* * *

Most of our donated clothing does not end up in vintage shops, as car-seat stuffing, or as an industrial wiping rag. It is sold overseas. After the prized vintage is plucked out and the outcasts are sent to the fiber and wiping rag companies, the remaining clothing is sorted, shrink-wrapped, tied up, baled, and sold to used-clothing vendors around the world. The secondhand clothing industry has been export-oriented almost since the introduction of mass-produced garments. And by one estimate, used clothing is now the United States' number one export by volume, with the overwhelming majority sent to ports in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzanians and Kenyans call used clothing mitumba, which means "bales," as it comes off the cargo ships in the shrink-wrapped cubes like the ones I saw at Trans-Americas and Salvation Army. The bales are cut open in front of an eager clientele and buyers, who pick through it for higher-value finds.

Once again, while many Americans might like to imagine that there is some poor, underdressed African who wants our worn and tattered duds, the African used clothing market is very particular and is demanding higher quality and more fashion-forward styles. Paben told me that access to the Internet and cellphones has made the continent fiercely fashion-forward in recent years. "There's been a change in what you can sell there," he says, and the bales have to be much more carefully sorted based on style, brand, and condition. As incomes rise in Africa, tastes become more savvy, cheap Chinese imports of new clothes flood those countries, and our own high-quality clothing supply is depleted, it's foreseeable that the African solution to our overconsumption may come to an end. What then?

On a recent Saturday morning, I was back at the Quincy Street Salvation Army shopping for a vintage coat, hoping to find quality and craftsmanship I could actually afford. This particular Salvation Army is roughly the size of an airplane hangar, and deathly quiet in the mornings. I hoped to make a score while the rest of Brooklyn slept off their Friday night. As I flipped through the women's tops, I noticed a Salvation Army employee in a smock, methodically walking past me. At first I thought she was straightening the racks and hanging clothes back up that had been pulled to the floor, but then I realized she was carrying clothes away.She looked at the color of the price tags stapled onto each garment. Then, she plucked out the ones that had sat there too long unsold, like eggs gone bad, and chucked them into those huge gray dumpsters I saw in the sorting room upstairs. Soon enough, I thought, they would be shredded or on their way overseas.
Excerpted from Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Published by Portfolio/Penguin. Copyright Elizabeth L. Cline, 2012.

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The Salvation Army Probably Can't Use Your Clothes

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Following is an excerpt from Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, out now from Viking.

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A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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For all the fabric used in clothing, 87% just ends up landfilled or incinerated

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A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning fashion’s future

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Fashion is a vibrant industry that employs hundreds of millions, generates significant revenues, and touches almost everyone, everywhere.