TEXTILES WASTE DISGUISED AS SECOND-HAND
IS DONATING YOUR UNWANTED CLOTHES THE BEST SUSTAINABLE SOLUTION?
It’s the time of the year, it's a new year, a new start.
A time when many of us have a good clear out of our wardrobe. Many of us might have collected piles of clothing that have never been worn, ready to be donated to a charity shop. Often the reality of that the £5 shirt was never a good buy to begin with. This is often a continuous cycle for many of us; fuelled by how easy, exacting and cheap it is to buy new clothes. The environmental effects and the poor working conditions of fast fashion are continuing to be highlighted on the news but this hasn’t stopped the increase in purchasing of new clothes for us consumers.
While donating clothes is definitely better than sending them to landfills, the volume of clothing donations has led to sustainability issues too. And they’re not easily solved.
10 years ago, the UK exported over £380 million worth of discarded clothing items overseas, mostly to Pakistan, Haiti and Uganda, a practice that still continues day! This process has knock-on effects on their environments and local economies, basically crashing any domestic textile manufacturing. This is an awkward truth for both local authorise for whom it is cheaper to ship this ‘waste’ than it is to pay the £86.20 a tonne to put it in landfill and for the fashion labels that can keep their abundance of waste out of site from their customers. Many fashion brands around the globe are promoting circularity, but the reality shows that this is a myth as fast fashion’s linear business model clearly shows this in the countries where many of these cheap clothes end up once their short lives are over: on huge dump sites, burnt on open fires and washed out into the sea.
As awareness of these issues arises, additional pressure is now being put on charity shops and other locations to find a way of dealing with the mountains of unwanted clothing we discard.
By reducing this amount of waste sent it landfills, charity shops saved local authorities around £28m in 2018. However, there is only so much this secondary market can take and it won’t be long before it bulks under the weight of waste we are producing. It’s worth remembering that Charity shops and secondhand clothes shops still rely on us all consuming and are at best a delay rather than a solution.
As an example of this, we recently purchased two Primark dresses for a local charity shop with the original labels still attached. Both had minor flaws but were still very much wearable. To see such new garments being sold secondhand without ever being worn is so disheartening and shows how far we have to go to achieve sustainability.
For now, however, these garments have been given a second life (or first ) as Assemble bags but this in itself is far from the ideal, they are at least in use and more practical and beautiful than when we found them.
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