Chapter 1
Introduction: Over-production and consumption in textiles
The efficient collection of used clothing and their reuse is vital to ensuring that the global apparel sector becomes more sustainable. The second-hand clothing sector enables clothing items to be sorted, processed, sold on and reused by consumers worldwide, minimizing energy consumption and environmental impact compared to new clothing production. Reusing clothing will help our economies and societies to achieve the highest environmental protection and sustainability standards.
At present, textiles are the fastest growing source of waste globally and the textile and apparel sector is estimated to be the fourth most environmentally damaging industry in the global economy, after food, housing and transportation.3 Textile production requires significant water and raw material inputs, generating substantial carbon emissions. Fast fashion's rapid global expansion exacerbates this problem.
Based on our survey data4 Americans buy 7.7 billion fast fashion items each year or 148 million items a week. Many of these items, 1.8 billion, remain unworn in US closets. Young people are buying more fast fashion than any other generation, with nearly a third (32%) of Gen Z buying items at least once a week and 6% admitting to buying something every day.
Only a small proportion of clothing is actually reused or recycled in most industrialized economies. Circularity in the textile and clothing sector is far from where it needs to be. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only 15% of clothing and textiles are reused or recycled in America. An astonishing 11.3 million tons (equivalent to 81.5 pounds per person) of clothing ends up in landfills annually. Our survey data suggests that 5.5 million tons of reusable items are thrown in the trash by consumers annually.5 The equivalent of 10.4 billion items of clothing per year, or 4,000 truckloads of reusable clothing thrown away each week. This excessive textile waste significantly increases the industry's negative environmental impact.
Policymakers must leverage all available regulatory and financial tools to incentivize business models that dramatically increase clothing and footwear reuse throughout the textile value chain. As Rachel Kibbe, CEO of Circular Services Group recently argued, the circular supply chain has to become more efficient to bring down costs and build markets at scale. The circular textile industry urgently needs political support to boost its potential.
Our survey found strong support among Americans for the growing second-hand market. The vast majority of those surveyed (78%) purchase second-hand clothing and 35% do so at least monthly. 39% of respondents expect to continue to buy as many or more second-hand clothes in the future. This presents an opportunity to build scalable markets around the industry, however, it is in danger of being squandered.
Policy focus must ensure that the business model for used clothing and footwear collection and reuse can be significantly expanded in the foreseeable future. In industrialized countries, wage costs are relatively high and reuse is an employment intensive industry. Historically consumers have been less willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable garments.6 While collection for resale through thrift stores and donation bins is encouraged in the US, the majority of textile products are still discarded in landfills or burnt in incinerators.7 This amounts to significant loss of material and economic value, with hugely negative social and environmental repercussions.
The green transformation and the search for sustainability
The world urgently needs a textiles ecosystem capable of driving an ecological transformation to achieve ambitious climate change and net-zero targets. A window of opportunity exists to dramatically scale up textile reuse models, but it will not remain open indefinitely.
Although clothing reuse rates are rising significantly in many countries around the world, the apparel market remains a high consumption sector. The number of times a US consumer wears a garment has plummeted by 36% in the last 15 years, while each American discarded an average of 47 kg (104 lbs) of textiles in 2018; in comparison, the annual per capita discard rates in Finland and Sweden are 17 kg per capita and 24 kg per capita respectively.8
Our survey reveals that wasteful habits when it comes to clothing could be a generational issue with 65% of Gen Z throwing away at least one item of reusable clothing each month, falling to 55% of Millennials, 36% of Gen X and 25% of Baby Boomers. Wasteful consumption which leads to high levels of discarded clothes contributes to dire environmental statistics in the US. Textiles comprised 5.8% of the total municipal solid waste (MSW) stream generated in the US in 2018 (roughly 15.5 million metric tons)9. Fast fashion brands are producing twice as much clothing today than in 200010, and our consumer survey highlights an ongoing latent demand for fast fashion with 16% of Americans planning to buy only new clothes in the future, and a further 35% intending to purchase as many new garments as well as used garments.
If business-as-usual continues in the textiles ecosystem, the industry’s global emissions will double by the end of the decade, wreaking environmental havoc. As the draft Americas Trade and Investment Act (2024) observes, large-scale textile manufacturing in Asia has, ‘paved the way for unprecedented natural resource exploitation, escalated emissions, forced labor, and wasteful over-production practices’.
Optimistically, there is vast potential for a green transformation in the fashion industry. The major drivers are the growing importance of environmentally conscious consumers; and the economic impact of cost of living pressures which has led many households to seek alternative clothing options given squeezed discretionary incomes.
In addition, circularity is reshaping how we understand our economies in light of the imperative to achieve greater sustainability. The environmental economist Kate Raworth argues in Doughnut Economics that the guiding principle of circularity is reuse: reuse should always take precedence over recycling, since it reduces waste and has the least damaging environmental impact. Recycling textiles is a seemingly attractive but economically and environmentally complex option when it comes to circularity.
Increasing collection and optimizing reuse is the best way to promote the shift from linear to circular value chains. It is particularly important to avoid policies that inadvertently undermine reuse such as by diverting items into fiber-to-fiber recycling processes that could first be reused.
It is also important to recognize that the textile value chain is inherently global, from the raw materials required for production, to the process of post-consumer reuse.
Achieving circularity throughout the textile ecosystem necessitates much greater collaboration across the value chain among retailers, garment makers, yarn and fabric suppliers, collectors, and sorting centers. Ultimately, a strategy for circularity needs to operate across the world economy.
As regulators experiment with new solutions such as banning the disposal of textiles as waste and introducing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, they must ensure that new regulations support the global market for textile reuse wherever possible.
Finally, it is important to recognize the highly experienced and professional global SHC and reuse sector and its longstanding role in the global circular economy. As the journalist Adam Minter writes:
The circular economy wasn't invented recently. It wasn't devised during brainstorming sessions for the Green New Deal. It wasn't engineered by the authors of EPR regulations. Instead, circular economy businesses have been operating since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, seeking new ways to recycle, re-use, and repurpose what others view as waste. There's no reason to reinvent that wheel.11