Gradually, Then Suddenly: Fashion's Mounting Waste Problem

“Gradually, then suddenly” is Ernest Hemingway’s description of a character’s personal descent in ‘The Sun Also Rises’. The phrase relates to a universal phenomenon of a million cuts, in the form of bad decisions, in what one day appears as a gaping wound.?Like many of our current national problems, we’ve kicked the can down the road for so long in the fashion industry, gradually, then suddenly we are facing a national and global dilemma.

I start each day looking at a full inbox.??

“We have employee uniforms that need to be destroyed for brand protection but we don’t want to incinerate them like we used to. Can you help?”

“Our brand wants to start a national clothing collection program and campaign but we don’t have any budget. What’s a no-cost solution?”

“Our city wants to start a municipal clothing recycling program but we don’t have tax dollars to fund trucks, infrastructure, or jobs.”

“I thought you were a recycling professional. Why can’t you take my textile scraps or give me a free solution??

As a Circularity professional in the fashion industry, I wear the?“Circularity'' title with optimism but the term is aspirational. It is symbolic of an ideal where everything we produce returns to use, continuously.?The truth on the ground is each inquiry presents a lack of infrastructure, budget, and available solutions.?I’ve worked between fashion brands and US cities on the municipal textile waste problem for enough time to know there are no perfect answers. I feel like a therapist to brands and other stakeholders who want to do ‘the right thing’ but their current toolbox is inadequate and their antiquated business models incentivize over-production and reward a false sense of scarcity for their product. What this means is that they often have warehouses full of overstock and returns that they don’t want on the market competing with their full-price offerings. Furthermore, until they have solutions for this category of product, their businesses don’t have any real incentive to help pay for the textile waste they cause in our communities (your used clothes).?

The word “donation” has done us a disservice. We were told there would always be someone who wanted and needed our used clothing, and brands themselves aren’t exempt from this magical thinking. With the advent of fast fashion, this is no longer true. Textile waste makes up 6% of municipal landfills and is growing faster than any other waste stream. Meanwhile,?true fiber recycling, where a t-shirt can be turned back to a t-shirt, is available for <1% of clothing.

Textile waste management is complicated but the root of these problems is simple. The fashion industry overproduces disposable fashion, we haven’t invested in the systems to handle it, and we have not enacted any policy or regulation to solve any of this. Now is the time to hold fashion companies accountable for both curbing their waste, and for owning the cost. Fast fashion is cheap, at face value, but it’s expensive in every other way. It costs you, the taxpayers, millions of dollars each year to haul fast fashion to your town dumps and incinerators and the companies who produced it aren’t paying a dime to reimburse you. Not to mention the cost of the environmental damage. Finally, our clothing collection/recycling system is actually linear (rather than circular). At the end of the used clothing supply chain is a pile of trash that’s always someone’s problem and, like most global dilemmas, the poorest countries suffer most.?

The good news is, in the last few years, many finally woke up to the fact that up to?85% of clothes?go to landfills and incineration. But awareness doesn’t mean the solutions suddenly exist.?Nuanced media?stories about the problem don’t get clicks. I used to have a hard time getting reporters to cover sustainable fashion, now they are reporting on a host of sustainability issues, but the full textile waste picture isn’t told because it’s not as digestible or captivating. The flood of media and citizen concern can often present a binary moral argument that we rarely have for our plastic yogurt containers, which we also mostly ship overseas. Here are the two arguments about domestic clothing collection. The first is that collecting clothes is ‘good’ because fashion is our fastest growing waste stream and we only collect a sliver of what’s out there. The argument goes that we should collect more and make the collection more accessible, as we do for paper, bottles, and cans. The other narrative is that collecting clothes is ‘bad’ because exporting our increasingly disposable fashion hurts other nations’ economies and creates a host of waste management and labor problems these countries aren’t equipped to deal with. All points are true. However, whatever we are doing now is like putting your finger in an open fire hydrant.

Until you’ve stood in a US warehouse, with one million pounds of baled used clothing, bumping up against the light fixtures, with no one to purchase these clothes because an international supply chain just fell apart, for reasons that are complicated, it’s very hard to grasp the enormity of the scale of the problem domestically. The bottom line is, when you work in the business of apparel waste, think pieces and sudden ESG and analyst interest, splashed all over the media, often feels like a person sitting in the corner pointing fingers telling you where to move a 600-pound couch on your own.?

Over the last few years, my working days have been devoted in part to emploring the fashion industry to sponsor collecting their waste (used clothing) on a city level. What this has led me to understand is that brands feel the waste is a municipal problem, while municipalities feel it’s a clothing collection company problem. All the solutions require expensive logistics for a low-value item: used clothes. So, who pays??

Much of this sounds like doom and gloom. However, to give up is un-American, and to turn a blind eye is inhumane. The automotive and electronics industries have already successfully created legislation around the right to repair. It’s illegal to sell a car that immediately falls apart. The same should apply to a jacket whose lining rips out after just a few wears. Not only outlawing fashion overproduction but enforcing extended producer responsibility is key, meaning the brand would that makes the *thing* should also pay for it to be responsibly disposed of or recycled.?

Biden’s??Made in America?and?Environmental Justice?plans are ambitious and are well aligned to a better fashion industry. It is time for those of us who’ve been taping together this broken plane for years to ask for a higher level of support and to demand we’re part of making these decisions. Some have asked for a Fashion Czar, a term laden with imperialistic undertones. Let’s just call it an advisor. Our industry needs one at the highest level of government for the sake of the planet.