The dirty truth about new clothes

Your t-shirt took roughly 27 bathtubs of water to make.

The clothing industry is one of the biggest contributors to waste. Clothing production burns through a significant amount of resources, the demand for more clothing is higher than ever, and most of it is eventually directed toward our already-overflowing landfills.

A basic pair of jeans can go through more than double what it takes for a t-shirt, 6700+ litres, to fabricate and dye. Additionally, textiles dyeing is thought to make up almost 20 per cent of the industry’s water pollution.

The clothing industry pumps out over 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. Unearthed, a Greenpeace journalism group, claims this amount exceeds the combined numbers of international commercial and shipping flights.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a charity that advocates for a circular economy. Driven in response to the "toss once worn" mentality of buyers, the circular economy model is becoming an answer to these concerns.

Clothes can’t be easily recycled or composted, and the pricing/production models of today’s stores encourage buying over repairing/repurposing.

The UN Alliance’s Sustainable Fashion press release from 2018 highlighted some relevant and worrying statistics: Clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014. Today, people purchase 60 per cent more clothing items than they did in 2003 - And clothes are kept half as long as they were in 2000.

Clothing production consumes valuable resources, many of them non-renewable.

The fast fashion industry encourages people to buy more rather than keep their still-useable clothing.

Apparel is thrown out too early and too regularly instead of being kept in use or donated.