Trash or Treasure: CLOTHES

Clothes. We all wear them. That's billions of items being worn every day. That's billions of items being made each year. And it's also billions of items being thrown out.

The environmental impact is huge – in the UK alone, 300,000 tonnes of textile waste ends up being sent to landfill each year. And that is a small fraction of the worldwide figure. Less than one percent of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing at the end of its life, according to a recent UK lawmakers' report. 

The social and environmental impact of the industry is clear to see.

"People don't say 'You shouldn't be buying so much clothing'," says Alan Wheeler, the director of the UK Textile Recycling Association. "And yet it has more of an impact on the climate change issues than flying does."

"We just can't carry on extracting these dwindling resources from our stressed natural world and dumping our waste on the lands and oceans and countries that we have already culturally depleted," says Carry Somers, founder of Fashion Revolution, the world's largest activist movement seeking reform of the fashion industry.

It's a growing problem – at a recent OECD event, she says, it was projected that garment production would increase by 81 percent by 2030.

"And we know that cutting down forests is already leading to habitat loss, and this makes the risk of disease transmission from wildlife to humans so much more likely, increasing the risk of future pandemics," added Somers.

It's not just current generations to blame, she says: There is a long history behind what we see in the world around us.

"A lot of this environmental degradation that we see around us is the product of centuries of colonialism and globalized exploitation and also that Western-focused worldview which sees human and environmental prosperity as being very isolated and disconnected," she says.

"We can see that when we look at clothing waste, at some of the organizations who are dumping our leftovers on countries in sub-Saharan Africa."

But there is good news – clothes are in the front line of efforts to get consumers to make better environmental and ethical choices.

Innovators around the world are coming up with ideas which are helping to change people's attitudes to what might previously have been considered trash.

Somers says the key goal is "to empower people, to make them realize that they have the power and the ability to create change… be curious.

"This is about what we do with our clothing. How can we share it and keep it in circulation and reuse it? How do we change our relationships within fashion supply chains and our relationship with the natural world as well, so that the rights of people and the rights of nature are holding more sway?"

Somers says that social media can be a good way of getting people to think about the issues, but is also a platform that can fail to get across complex points, such as about the merits of different textiles.

But one area where it has helped is with the growth of the resale market in the UK – with some predicting that it may even be bigger than fast fashion within a decade.

FAST FASHION has grown since the 1980s as, thanks to globalization – and the availability of cheaper manufacturing – cheap versions of the latest fashion trends can quickly be on sale in high street stores, making fashionable affordable for everyone. The downsides are not just the exploitation of the workers producing the clothes, but the environmental impact of encouraging people to buy cheap clothes on the understanding that they will not have a long lifespan – adding to what's called the 'throwaway society.'

"We can actually keep the clothes within the UK, keep them within Europe, so we don't have to be shifting our second-hand clothing around the world," says Somers. "We have to change the conversations, we have to change the narrative, and we have to change the culture on which it thrives.

"Fashion brands, retailers, all companies have to take responsibility for what's happening in their supply chain wherever it's happening in the world, rather than the story we hear so often saying, 'Oh well, these aren't my employees, we don't own these, so we can't do anything about it' and just pushing that responsibility onto another country and another factory."

There also needs to be government action and there are some examples of initiatives in Europe, which she hopes others will follow. France has new stricter requirements for microfilters on new washing machines, while Sweden is proposing a tax on substances of concern in textiles.

The Swedish proposal may cover some of the chemical coatings that help make things like school uniforms 'easy-care' or 'non-iron.' They may make life easier - but they can also have an impact on the environment.

Somers' advice to people is to "use your voice and your power to create change," and she suggests that rather than signing a petition, a picture of you with one of their items makes brands "listen, because they know that you are a customer who does buy from that brand."

But she also says that governments must play a more active role in regulating the industry, protecting workers and the environment because "a lot of these brands are not going to act unless they are forced to do so by law."

What if your clothes could grow with you? And what if they were made out of recycled plastic bottles, but they were still comfortable and fashionable?

Too good to believe? Well, the fast-growing award-winning UK start-up company Petit Pli has created just such a range, which the team hopes will cut down on waste at source.

Ryan Mario Yasin became an uncle just at the time he was tackling waste within the fashion industry and had realized that "extending the life and use of garments is the best way we can reach our carbon-neutral emission targets."

As he saw the speed at which babies grow out of clothes, he decided to use his background in origami and came up with a design for children's clothes that would expand and "grow" with the child. His first collection was designed to last from the age of nine months to four years, with the clothing able to change into seven separate sizes. 

But it wasn't just a case of maximizing use and minimizing waste from the garments. He also used recycled bottles to manufacture the textile used to make the clothes.

"The garment has an almost architectural form with a grid-like structure," he explains. "It expands in two directions so as you pull the leg out it actually becomes wider as it becomes longer – whereas typically a material, as you pull it out, becomes thinner: think of Lycra or a rubber band."

But what about the young people who are seeing their clothes grow with them? What do they think?

"They do believe it's magic, seeing this growing garment that they've never seen anything like before. And I think that also helps inspire them to be the sort of little astronauts that they can be."

There are some long-established recycling systems in place across Europe. Municipal governments have established centers where people can drop off their old clothes and there are numerous charity shops and collection organizations aiming to give unwanted clothes and shoes a new home and save them from ending up in rubbish dumps.

But what happens to your clothes? Every year, Kenya imports more than 100,000 tonnes of second-hand clothes or mitumba from all around the world. Some of the good quality clothes get sold and reused, but an estimated 35,000 tonnes are thrown away and end up in overflowing landfill sites like Dandora, Africa's biggest, in eastern Nairobi.

With around 50 percent of Nairobi's population living below the poverty line and surviving on around $1 a day, buying second-hand clothing can be the only affordable option, with many people dependent on selling second-hand clothes. But there has been a growing problem of rejected garments ending up in the river, leading to calls for a ban on the import of second-hand clothes, as Rwanda has implemented.

"The river is really, really suffering and the fishes are no more," says Gisore Nyabuti, chairman of the campaign group Slums Going Green and Clean. "When we were kids, we used to swim in it. But at the moment you can't even dare tell your kid to swim."

Nyabuti and other members of the group run river clean-ups and education campaigns, encouraging locals to think about the environmental consequences of old clothes being discarded in the river. But many people are too worried about where the next meal is coming from to be able to make environmental issues a priority.

At the Toi market, traders say that second-hand clothes can often be better quality, as well as being cheaper than new clothes – but as one said: "When they stop them from being imported, people won't be having job opportunities."

The problem is that along with good quality items, other countries are sending clothing trash here as well – clothing that is too damaged to be worn.

Wagura Kamwana, creative director of a Nairobi fabric shop called The Textile Loft, said her mother was a mitumba seller in the 1990s, but she believes the only way forward for the local economy and for the planet is to invest in the local manufacturing industry and build more textile mills.

"A lot of the second-hand clothes coming here are cast-offs – you might find a nice pair of jeans and a shirt, but half of the other stuff, it's clothes that we can't even wear," she says. "What happens? It ends up in the landfill. We don't have recycling capacity, so it ends up getting tossed all over the place."

But there are some signs of hope. An increasing number of organizations and businesses are trying to come up with innovative sustainable clothing solutions. 

One of them is Africa Collect Textiles, which reuses and recycles clothing and footwear. The aim of this circularity-seeking social enterprise is to recycle more than 50 percent of all textile waste in Africa.

"People are becoming more aware in the fashion industry," says co-founder Alex Musembi. "People are now excited, people are now becoming empowered and we need to do a lot of social media education so that the community can be able to understand when we mean by recycling and the importance of reusing."

Musembi says donation containers allow people to give clothes anonymously; there is cultural stigma about giving clothes to family and friends, with some believing that if the recipient loses their job or gets sick, it's because of the textiles passed to them.

"So people decide to not give their textiles to other people," he says. "And that also explains the reason why people have a lot of textile in the wardrobe and they need to declutter."

Could Kenya follow Rwanda's lead and ban the import of second-hand clothes? Job Wanjohi from the Kenya Association of Manufacturers says such a move would be impractical: "A ban is not likely to work – it's even likely to cause some economic and security crisis in the country because of the numbers that are employed there."

Musembi agrees that a ban is not the solution. Instead, he says, awareness is key so that people become more conscious of the impact on the planet.

As the environmental crusader and singer Larry Dwayne says: "We are all together on this earth, we are one big family. And what we have in common is mother earth. I would just love to encourage each and every youth around the world to play their part in terms of conservation. I will just urge them to not tire and just encourage each and everyone to be at the forefront to fight for ecological justice."