Every Picture Tells a Story: Fast Fashion

If, as the organizational guru Marie Kondo says, the object (in this case, clothing) no longer gives us joy, then it needs to move on. Absent a younger sibling, most clothing today gets tossed – into the trash or, if you are sustainably minded, into a bin to be repurposed by another. [1]

• 85% of clothing goes to landfills – 13 million tons, 70 pounds/per person annually.
• 1% is recycled into new clothing. For comparison, we recycle 9% of our plastic and 70% of our cardboard.
• Roughly 90% of the clothing we give “to charity” goes to bundlers who repackage the goods for export.

Obroni Wawu Or “Dead White Man’s Clothes”

Obroni Wawu is Twi, a language spoken in Ghana, the world’s largest importer of used clothing. Fast fashion has led to increasing volumes of clothing at increasingly lower quality. It is estimated that 40% or more of the imported used clothing is waste.

We are moving our first-world trash to a lower middle-income country that, like us, has no infrastructure to handle the waste and, unlike us, has no money to fix the problem. 

Here are just a few more facts about fashion:

• Clothing manufacturer uses 10% of all industrial water, resulting in 20% of wastewater.
• The higher cost to create fabrics lies with the natural fibers of “organic” cotton and silk.
• Synthetic fabrics are not without their impact; they are petroleum derivatives, and washing those clothing contributes to 35% of the ocean’s microplastics.

• According to the UN, “The average consumer buys 60 percent more pieces of clothing than 15 years ago. Each item is only kept for half as long.”
• It is estimated that “more than half of the fast fashion produced is disposed of in under a year.”

[1] While it is true that there are now many Internet vintage fashion consignment stores, fast fashion, by its very nature, is not a product they are consigning.

Source: ‘It’s like a death pit’: how Ghana became fast fashion’s dumping ground The Guardian

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