Circular economy shortcuts to make your fashion habits more sustainable

In everyday life, we are bombarded with shiny ads for the “fashion trend of the year” and the “latest seasonal collections.” Nowadays that happens not just via TV commercials and shop windows, but also when using the internet and social media. It’s an overwhelming message that subconsciously pushes us to seek new clothes that we often don’t really need. In the just the few years from 2000 to 2014, and the number of garments purchased per capita increased by about 60%, while apparel manufacturing doubled. The glossy advertising images obscure our view of the environmental costs we are paying in exchange for the latest looks.

The inconvenient truth about the fashion industry

The fashion industry generates 2.5 trillion dollars and is a source of income for many, but it also uses a lot of materials and water. Here are some interesting facts:

• Water use in the fashion industry accounts for 20% of global wastewater
• 2,700 liters of water are need to produce one cotton shirt
• On a much larger scale, 93 billion cubic meters of water is consumed by the fashion industry annually
• The industry creates 8%-10% of global carbon emissions, which is more than all international flights and marine shipping combined

Despite the huge environmental footprint of fast fashion that these figures attest to, even more shocking is that 85% of textiles are disposed of each year, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

Just imagine that you buy 20 new pieces of clothing at the beginning of the year and throw away 17 of them by the end of it. Then imagine doing the same thing again the next year, and the next, and so on.

What our clothes are made of

More than 60% of all clothing materials are made from plastic. And the washing of some clothes made from plastic causes 500,000 tons of plastic microfibers to flow into the ocean each year. That’s equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles!

One of those materials is polyester. Annually, 70 million barrels of oil is used in polyester fibers for clothes. The production of a polyester shirt, for instance, emits 5.5 kg of carbon dioxide, while a cotton shirt’s carbon footprint is 4.3 kg.

Stretch jeans are also made from polyester, and are therefore often less recyclable and pollute lakes, rivers, and oceans with microfiber from washing. Moreover, the manufacture of a pair of jeans requires about 10 years’ worth of drinking water per person.

How often do we wear the clothes in our closets, anyway?

According to researcher Sandra Roos, in Sweden, one T-shirt is worn about 22 times a year on average, while a normal dress is worn 10 times a year. In her research, a T-shirt was washed after two uses. Some sources suggest a T-shirt can tolerate 60 washings. So, a person who wears the same T-shirt 22 days a year should be able to keep hold of it for about 5.5 years. However, in reality, 85% of textiles (21 billion tons) are thrown into landfill annually!

Given the facts above, it’s clear that we need to make a big shift from mass-consuming fast fashion to alternative fashion choices. To do that, we need to establish a new economic model, such as a circular economy, instead of linear models that encourage consumers to buy fast fashion products.

How to make fashion more circular and ecofriendly

There are several areas where we can make changes to the fashion economy

• choice of materials (at production),
• choice of purchase and use (at consumption),
• recycling or composting

Below we share some approaches for reuse, or sharing, as everyday circular fashion initiatives.

Love your clothes for longer

As the statistics show, we buy more clothes than we need and send most of them to landfill. So, when buying clothes, select ones that you will keep long-term, by asking yourself these questions; Does the item really make me feel happy? Can I live with it for at least 5 years?

Reuse through second-hand retail

Second-hand clothes are popular all over the world. In Japan, the biggest second-hand retail chain is Book Off, which has almost 800 branches throughout the country. Although it started out by selling books, it now also sells clothes, jewelry and all sorts of things. The quality of the clothes is good and the prices are very reasonable.

In Japan, privately owned second-hand shops, or “vintage clothing” shops, tend to be a little fancy and not particularly affordable for many people. In many other countries, including Europe, private second-hand shops are very common and the prices are cheaper, though their quality is unpredictable. Germany has about 11,000 second-hand retail stores.

Second-hand stores are also common in the UK, where they are often known as charity shops because they are run by charitable organizations such as the British Heart Foundation, Barnardo’s (care for vulnerable children), Oxfam (alleviation of poverty), etc. The number of shops is similar to that in Germany.

Keep fashion fun with a clothing swap!

Swapping is a great idea to keep one’s excitement towards clothes by sharing them with people such as your friends or family. Are some clothes in your closet still in a good state but don’t make you feel happy anymore? Why not give them a chance to find a new home? The difference between this approach and buying second-hand clothes is that by knowing, or meeting, the person who was wearing the garments before you, you get to see the history of the items, which encourages you to keep the clothes longer term.

Though the approaches suggested above are better than sending clothes to landfill, following them just so that you can make space for new clothes is not ideal in a circular fashion system. The priority is always to make and consume only the necessary amounts. We all want to look good, and advertisements for trendy fashion make us want the products to achieve that, but is a never-ending desire to keep renewing our appearance really worth destroying the planet?