Environment – Fast fashion, big problem

The Uber Red Cross clothing drive encourages people to declutter their wardrobes and to get unworn gear out of storage and into the arms, or onto the bodies, of needy New Zealanders. Red Cross research shows that New Zealanders only wear a third of their clothes regularly, and that they have high-quality clothing valued at $1.45 billion sitting around unworn.

Another charity, Common, which collected and redistributed over 65,000 items of clothing from the public and retailers to 30 charities including Rainbow Youth and Victim Support over the last seven years, has just closed its doors for good, after funding applications to support their work were unsuccessful.

Like most things in modern life, clothing poverty and hardship isn’t so much a problem of not having enough in the world, it’s a problem of its distribution. Some people have too much, and others have too little.

While it’s been claimed that we already have enough clothing on the planet to dress the next six generations, that’s not been substantiated and might not be true. It’s also estimated that around 80 to 100 billion or more items of clothes are produced every year.

Unwanted clothes are certainly a global problem. Many fast-fashion, short-life span, trend-driven garments for consumers in the western world/global north are made in global south sweatshops, using poorly paid women and child labour in dismal working conditions with low environmental standards.

The fashion industry is the world’s second biggest user of water and produces 2-8% of greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN. The average consumer buys 60% more pieces of clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for half as long.

Surplus, unwanted or discarded items then get shipped back to ‘global sacrifice zones’ in the south. Just like other types of waste such as plastic recycling, it becomes a problem for the poorest, but it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for the people who drove its production.

A total of 50,000 tonnes of unwanted clothes have been dumped in the Atacama desert in Chile, in a pile that can be seen from space. Among them are big name brands like Levi’s, Calvin Klein and Wrangler. Often, they’re made of polyester and synthetics that might take hundreds of years to decay.

In Ghana, the country’s capital, Accra, and the globally important Densu delta, are overwhelmed with wealthier countries’ unwanted clothing. That leads to both macro and micro plastic waste from synthetic materials. in both their intact and deteriorated states. This is causing wildlife displacement and entanglement, pollution, water contamination and problems for generations to come.

We see environmental colonialism and racism in the distribution of wastes that result from overproduction and overconsumption in the western world, and externalities are foisted on those who least benefit from them.

New Zealand produces at least 180,000 tonnes of textile waste annually. The Uber Red Cross clothing drive is just a drop in the bucket while the tap is still turned on.