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Textile + Material Waste
Textile Waste Facts
Wed March 13 2024
Why are material reuse and slow fashion important?
Contemporary Consumption
Everyone has a pair of jeans, right? We’ll start there.
The average American consumer owns ~7 pairs of jeans any given year, and throws away 81.5lbs of clothes every year, going, for the most part, straight to landfill. The rise of discarding clothing is mostly due to Fast Fashion industry.
The number of times a garment is worn has declined by around 36% in 15 years. The average fast fashion garment is worn 7 times before being discarded.
The rise of Fast Fashion in the 1970s-80s saw the introduction of elastic material to previously monofiber textiles. Stretch Denim took the industry by storm in the ‘80s with Spandex replacing 3% of the cotton, making denim jeans 15% elastic. Poly-blend materials are harder to recycle into renewed textiles and thus tend to end up and sit, not degrading, in landfills.
Textile Waste
Textile waste is the second-biggest consumer of water and responsible for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions (GCE), more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, compared to the largest contributing industry, construction, at 39% GCE.
87% of the materials and fibers used to make clothing will end up in either incinerators or landfills.
In the US alone, an estimated 11.3 million tons of textile waste end up in landfills on a yearly basis, around 2,150 pieces per second countrywide. This includes 2.6 million tons of returned clothing ending up in landfills in 2020.
Textile Landfills
Of the 100 billion garments produced each year, 92 million tons end up in landfills (the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes ends up in landfill sites every second), in predominantly thrid world countries that are paid to take on the world’s waste.
If the trend continues, the number of fast fashion waste is expected to soar up to 134 million tons a year by the end of the 2020s decade.
This is environmentally disasterous.
Nearly 10% of microplastics dispersed in the ocean each year come from textiles, the equivalent to the plastic pollution of more than 50 billion bottles, as well as chemical pollution in the ground (and, eventually, our water-tables) from the dyes and chemicals used in industrial textile production that seep into the groud in landfill sites.