New season, new styles, buy more, buy cheap, move, throw away: pollution, waste and emissions from fast fashion are fueling the triple planetary crisis.
The annual Black Friday sales on November 25 are a reminder of the need to rethink what you buy, what you throw away, and what it costs the planet.
Sustainable fashion and circularity in the textile value chain are possible, yet this century the world’s consumers are buying more clothes and wearing them for less time than ever before, discarding garments as fast as trends change.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) is leading an initiative towards a world with zero waste. As part of this ambitious vision, UNEP has partnered with Kenyan spoken word poet Beatrice Kariuki to shed light on high-impact sectors where consumers can make a real difference.
“We need circular industries where old looks are made new,” Kariuki says in the video. “Less packaging, more reuse. Threads that last”.
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, a UNEP partner, has estimated that every second a truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in a landfill or incinerated. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that people buy 60 percent more clothes and wear them half the time.
Plastic fibers are polluting the oceans, sewage, toxic dyes, and the exploitation of low-paid workers. Fast fashion is big business, and while the environmental costs are mounting, experts say there is another way: a circular economy for textiles.
At this month’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP27) in Egypt, UNEP and the non-profit organization Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) held an event on “Circular Systems for a Net Positive Fashion Industry” , which brought together industry leaders to discuss routes towards a circular economy. for the industry, with less waste, less pollution, more reuse and more recycling.
Source: news.google.com