It’s no secret that fast fashion is (quite literally) trashing the planet. In Australia alone, 15 tonnes of unwanted clothes and textile waste is dumped every 10 minutes. That’s 800,000 tonnes every year. And only seven per cent of this waste gets recycled — the rest goes to landfill where, depending on the fabric, it can take hundreds of years to decompose. The fashion industry in its current state is one of the highest polluting industries globally, responsible for 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.
Fast fashion has seen the prices and quality of clothing plummet, while more textiles than ever are being made to keep up with current trends. Today’s consumers are buying 60 per cent more clothing and keeping them for half as long as we did 15 years ago.
The average person wears only 40 per cent of their clothes — just think about how many pieces in your wardrobe go unworn. And of the clothes we donate to charities and thrift stores, only 15 per cent are resold for wear — the rest are sold as rags, sent to landfill or shipped overseas.
There has been a lot of debate around the ethics and
