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Waste – is it ‘really’ in Fashion?

Over the last few months, you would be forgiven for believing that the entire global fashion industry has united shoulder-to-shoulder to fight fashion’s waste. From the glossy Vogue and ELLE pages to the buzzy and busy digital coverage, reducing waste, upcycling, recycling and circular business models seem to be firmly ‘in fashion’.This is all great news – for sure – but it’s not enough cause for widespread celebration.Over the last 12 years since I, together with the formidable teams at NGO Redress and upcycled fashion brand The R Collective teams, have worked neck-deep in textile waste issues to achieve our mission – to reduce waste in the fashion industry – one thing has become clear.We are not winning the battle.  The sobering reality is that we have a long way to go until waste really is both ‘in and out’ of fashion.Let’s take a look at what is going on around us. The number of garments produced annually has doubled since 2000 and exceeded 100 billion for the first time in 2014 and an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste is created annually from the fashion industry. Shockingly, every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned globally.