Fashion industry's plastic waste is a major environmental threat

You know those little tags on your clothes? Sure, they can be annoying, especially when they itch against your skin. But they hold a world of information – more than you can imagine! They tell us a lot about the clothes we wear and their impact on our environment. Recent study discusses how fashion industry significantly contributes to environmental plastic waste.

The driving force behind this revelation is Professor Richard Venditti from North Carolina State University, an expert in paper science and engineering.

Backed by a capable team of researchers, Professor Venditti has unveiled some eye-opening statistics about the chilling contribution of the fashion industry to environmental pollution.

Plastic waste from fashion industry

The fashion industry hasn’t exactly been basking in the sunshine of positive news. Stories of subpar working conditions, underwhelming wages, and the rapid-fire “fast fashion” culture have rocked its boat time and again.

But Professor Venditti’s recent study draws our attention to an even more alarming issue – plastic leakage.

“We analyzed data on imports, exports and apparel production in countries all over the world,” said Venditti. “Then we compared that to existing global information on different stages of the apparel value chain to estimate how much plastic leaks into the environment at each of those points.”

Impact on the environment

“Much of the plastic waste that leaks into the environment comes from clothes that are thrown away, especially synthetic apparel,” Venditti said.

“There is also waste from manufacturing, packaging and even from tire abrasion during transport, as well as microplastics which get pulled into the water when we wash our clothes.”

In 2019, the fashion industry cranked out an unbelievable 20 million tons of plastic waste. Fashion’s dirty secret lies in synthetic clothing materials like polyester, nylon, and acrylic, not to mention the plastics used in packaging. About 40% of this number ends up sullying our environment.

Who’s the villain?

Synthetic apparel, it turns out, is fashion’s biggest polluter, churning out 18 million tons of waste in 2019 alone. In the same year, 89% of all plastic waste from the global fashion industry came from these synthetic dark horses. Close to 8.3 million tons ended up in the environment.

Cotton might seem like the safer bet, right? Wrong. Even our beloved cotton contributes to the plastic waste debacle.

Cotton clothing was responsible for 1.9 million tons of plastic waste. Throw in some other fibers and you have a grand total of 0.31 million tons. And the packaging? Don’t get me started!

Plastic waste migration in fashion

The plastic waste doesn’t necessarily rest where the clothes are sold. Countries like the US and Japan, known for their “fast fashion” craze, often offload their discarded clothes to lower-income countries. These nations, lacking proper waste management systems, bear the brunt of this environmental calamity.

This means our shopping habits in well-off countries impact the environment in less fortunate nations.

“What we’re seeing is that in countries like the United States, we have a ‘fast fashion’ culture where we buy a lot of clothes and don’t keep them for very long,” Venditti said.

“When we discard those clothes, they either go into landfills or, more often, they end up in thrift stores. Some of the clothes that go to these stores are sold in the U.S., but often they end up going to other countries that do not have waste management systems robust enough to handle that kind of volume. That is where you end up with a large amount of plastic leaking into the environment.”

Can we sew up this issue?

The study urges a major overhaul in the fashion industry. A shift towards a circular industry model, one that recycles materials instead of ditching them as waste, is the need of the hour. We also need to promote renewable, non-synthetic textiles.

So, next time you’re shopping, take a gander at those tags. They speak volumes about your clothes’ environmental footprint. Will your next purchase add to the plastic waste mountain or will it steer us towards a more sustainable future?

Remember, our fashion choices don’t just define our style, they shape the kind of world we live in. Our decisions matter, more than we realize.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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