FASHION & WASTE: TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

 This article is for the ones who care about our planet’s future or at least care about their next generation’s life. So if you are not that person I’d suggest don’t waste your precious few minutes reading this article. Now if you are the first person the following facts are definitely going to blow your mind away. Did you know where your old fashioned or so-called donated clothes go? Through this article, I shall take you through a journey of a cloth. Everyone loves dressing up and go shopping for clothes once in a while. We just need an occasion to go shopping whether it be Diwali, Dussehra, Christmas or your birthday for that matter. The point is, clothing is our basic necessity and we’ve just made it our luxury. People have more clothes than they actually need, closets filled with useless clothes. And when these useless clothes come out of the closet to get dumped away, 57% of these end up in a landfill. You would be surprised to know that 35% of the materials right in the supply chain end up as waste before the garment even reaches the customer. Even surprising are the reasons, they can be unusable stock due to last-minute design changes, cutting waste, also excess stock which does not get sold in the market and more often gets incinerated by brands. Research has shown that if these industries work on better waste management policies they can save up to 4 Billion Euros per year. 

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Well if you’re already feeling a bit guilty and surprised there’s more. We all wash our clothes on a daily basis, don’t we? Well, each time a garment is washed it releases thousands of tiny fibers that find their way into our oceans and that’s just from a single household and only includes only a single day of wash. Imagine this on a large scale, billions of people doing their laundry each day and 365 days a year. These microplastics are accumulating in marine habitats and affecting our marine life as a whole. It is inevitable that these microplastics/microfibres end up in your or my system because we consume these marine species. Researchers have found out that one of the chief culprits of microplastic pollution is clothes made up of man-made synthetics like polyester, polyethylene, acrylic, elastane, etc. These plastic particles are less than 1mm in diameter hence they easily clear every possible obstacle created by us and eventually end up in our oceans. According to an estimation, out of the total microplastic pollution, 35% is contributed by civilian households by washing their synthetics. Also Synthetics, like polyester, uses fossil fuels as the basis of their fiber.

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Here are some crazy facts, that seem too bad to be true. We all have learned about the importance of water harvesting and saving freshwater as it only constitutes 1% of the total water present on the planet, the rest all is saltwater. You will be surprised to know that the water used in fashion industries today can easily quench the thirst of 110 million people for an entire year. Each and every one of us blames cars and the vehicle industry for pollution and the emission of harmful gases. But did you know the fashion industry creates the same amount of emissions as 372 million cars driving for one year? There are somewhere around 7.8 billion people on this planet and what if I tell you that the fashion industry creates 13kg of fashion waste for every person on the planet each year. Scarcity of land is faced all around the world, which is the reason millions of trees are chopped every day around the world, for new land. Shockingly the fashion industry accumulates land roughly 1.3 times the size of France. 

 Image Source: Flickr

You see? Your clothes don’t like the way you treat them. Now I’ll tell you how to reduce your fashion waste and contribute to your future generations' wellbeing. I’m not telling you to take huge actions against it or suing the government. Well most of us never get out of our comfort zones, we see what’s going on, we want to change. But we don’t want to be the ones to start the change. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”- Leo Tolstoy’s. We don’t want problems in our lives, humans are like I won’t cause the problem to anyone and in return, I don’t want any problem in my life. But the least you can do is change yourself not expecting the world to change with you. Often we are like “What’s going to change by only one person changing(Mere Akele ke karne se kya farak padega)?”. But as the saying goes “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” -Barak Obama.

Now let’s talk about the SOLUTION, for starters make your clothes last longer by washing in lower temperatures and repair when possible. Swap clothes with friends and family, it is a fun and cheap way of getting a new wardrobe and at the same time getting rid of clothes you never wear. Explore the charity shops in your local area, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, right? Join Beach Clean-up drives happening in your surroundings, who knows you might find your old friend or your future partner over there. When buying new clothes, stick to garments of high quality and avoid clothes that contain plastic materials. If something is beyond repair, or not suitable to be passed on to someone else, put it in a bag and recycle the bag when it is full. The clothes will then be made into new items, such as padding for chairs, cleaning clothes, or industrial blankets. Think before and try not to scrap your clothes, the point is to be creative. There are hundreds of DIY items you can find online and how to make them step by step. For example, an outdated skirt might make a good ‘Apron’ right? The biggest and the most important change is to spread awareness and share the knowledge you have about these issues. If you see something wrong happening, speak up, take the first step towards change. Well, I hope you have got what I’m trying to say here and now you have to decide what changes are you willing to make? Thank You!

“Re-Fashion, Recycle, Donate”

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