A Wardrobe of Waste

Lauren Frazier

Think about your closet. Are there things in there that you do not wear? Is it going to sit in there for years until you decide it is time to throw it out? Due to fast fashion, consumers consider the cheap clothing that has been made available to be disposable. However, there are more consequences to wasting clothing than just a few bucks.

The process to produce this fast fashion has a large footprint on the environment. Man made materials such as polyester require harmful substances like crude oil and hydrogen chloride to be used in factories and then released into the environment. According to the EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, many textile manufacturing facilities are hazardous waste generators. Yet man made textiles are not the only clothing materials leaving a footprint. Even cotton growing comes with large amounts of harmful pesticides: one fourth of all the pesticides used in the U.S. to be exact. A 2006 report by Oakdene Hollins reveals that once these textiles are bought, an estimated 21% of clothing purchases stay in the home. This number contributes to the “national wardrobe” which represents a large number of latent waste that will eventually enter the solid waste system. Americans throw away roughly 68 pounds of clothing per person each year, which contributes to 4% of solid waste.

Ways that clothing can be recycled include reselling clothing to other consumers at a lower price, sold in bulk to developing countries, or it can even be mechanically or chemically recycled for manufacturers. In order to support recycling in the clothing industry, the government even offers tax incentives to those who donate old clothes to organizations like Salvation Army and Goodwill. This not only benefits the environment, but the charities as well.

Clothing not given to domestic charities is often sold to other countries in bulk. Clothing is often sorted into high end clothing and other. The high end clothing often ends up in Japan, and the rest ends up in developing countries. Exports of used clothing from America has gone up to about 7 billion pounds per year and sold in more than 100 countries.

Although much is being done in order to reduce the amount of waste from the clothing and textile industry, it is still a growing problem. Fast fashion has created so much excess clothing in our closets that there needs to be more done in order to keep landfills from drowning in wasted textiles. Some manufactures are beginning to lean towards “eco-fashions” which the International Standard Organization defines as “identifying the general environmental performance of a product within a product group based on its whole life-cycle in order to contribute to improvements in key environmental measures and to support sustainable consumption patterns.” Steps are being taken to fix this growing problem. What do you do to combat this problem? Why do you think this is such a big problem? If this continues, what do you think the long term effects will be on the environment?