Clothing for Christmas is a Terrible Idea
Family traditions vary and if you’re from one of those families where everybody dons a complete new outfit on Christmas Day, it could be time to rethink your behaviour.
It’s true that it’s never been cheaper to buy clothing – the growth in ‘value’ retailers has reduced clothing prices in the UK by a quarter – and as a result, the number of clothes we purchase has risen by 40% to two million tonnes of textiles per annum.
The dark side to the Emperor’s New Clothes is that the UK’s clothes hungry consumers then send 74% of those two million tonnes to landfill every year. And because a vast amount of what gets discarded is cheap clothing made with polyester, viscose and acrylic blends, it doesn’t even rot away.
New Year’s Clothing Resolutions
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is going to help Brits with their lack of sustainable fashion sense by creating a sustainable clothing roadmap which will be published in February. One thing we already know is that only 3.5% of that two million tonnes is recycled through charities, textile dealers and so on. What about the rest? Well a lot of the remaining 70% is sent to Africa and Eastern Europe, where there is a market for second-hand clothing, but it’s not the market that most of us imagine.
Fashion, thrift and landfill
If, in the back of your mind, your Goodwill bag of old T-shirts becomes a collection of happy Africans, receiving your once loved, but now baggy, sweats, think again. Our second-hand clothing is vacuum packed into container sized bricks that are sold, not by the garment but by the tonne. T-shirts are worth almost nothing – in fact they are usually burnt in incinerators or sent to landfill sites, but second-hand brassieres fetch an astonishing £2,500 a tonne because there isn’t an established indigenous lingerie industry to meet the needs of African women.
And actually, if you think somebody sits and goes through all the bags of cast-offs, sorting each item into ‘good’ ‘average’ ‘bad’ ‘classic’ ‘designer’ etc. You can think again on that fond idea too. If you send your old clothing in kerbside bags, it probably gets sorted for one or two specialist items (leather belts and bras are top of the list) but once they have been cherry-picked out, all the remainder is classed as rags.
Most bags handed in to shops are hand-sorted, but if you really want your clothing to be valued, you need to bag it separately, and hand it in to a charity or thrift shop, telling the assistant what each bag contains and what condition its in. And even then, it depends on the resources the charity has, and the amount of clothing being handed in, as to whether they can manage to sort your garments and put them on hangers. After the summer, for example, when many people dispose of clothing they bought for, or on, their holidays, charities are overwhelmed by cheap synthetic clothing that has no resale or recycling value. This clothing is simply containered up and sent from the UK to Eastern Europe, where a lot of it is, once again, used for landfill.
Buy less, love more
And as all this happens, more energy and more resources are used to make more clothes with synthetic fibre content that cannot be picked apart and re-used and will not break down in landfill. Our desire for new clothes is costing the planet dear. Each new ‘bargain’ garment we buy probably costs as much to produce as we pay for it, economically, and costs more to produce environmentally than almost any other consumer purchase.
Textile recycling is not big or sexy – no supermodel has shown up on the catwalk in last year’s fashion to demonstrate how gorgeous you can look even if you’re not entirely up to date. No government wants to tackle consumption at a time when we’re all being encouraged to buy our way out of a recession, and we’ve all got into the habit of thinking that a new white T-shirt is our birthright, and when our old one looks a bit grey and dingy, out we go and buy new. The solution though, is incredibly simple, doesn’t require legislation, and would cause us no pain at all. Buy less, buy better, and love your clothing more.
Thrift store image courtesy of empracht at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence
