Reducing Textile Waste: Where Small Steps Create Huge Progress (Speech at AP Environmental Science presentation week)

What are you wearing today? How would you describe what you wear? Basis uniform?

[Go around class]

How will you describe it from an APES standpoint?

[Go around class]

Producing a single shirt, like the one you’re wearing, uses 3,000 liters of water and emits 11 kilograms of CO2. The clothing industry is responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions, 79 trillion tons of water waste, and 1.7 million work-related injuries. The great Pacific garbage patch we learned in class – fibers in our clothing accounts for 35% of that. The municipal landfills we learned in class – textile from our clothing fill up 92 million tons of that. From Persistent Organic Pollutants to habitat destruction, from irrigation problems to noise pollution, the pieces of garments covering our body also cover over half of APES curriculum.

We own more clothes than ever before. Since the start of this millennium, total global clothing sales have doubled, rising to 200 billion units per year. Population growth is not an excuse. From the year 2000 to 2020, the per capita consumption of textile fibers has grown from 9.4 kilograms to 14 kilograms per person.

The clothing industry made more money than ever before. In 2020, 62 million tonnes of textile products were sold, and by 2030, this number is expected to rise to 102 million tonnes. The entire industry is projected to jump to $133.43 billion by 2026 from $99.23 billion in 2022. 

Clothing has become cheaper than ever before. In the EU and the UK, the per capita expenditure on clothing and footwear has decreased from approximately 12% to 5% of total annual expenditure between 2009 and 2020, despite an increase in garment products owned.

But the environmental cost of our cheap clothes are now higher than ever before. This time, there must be a change.

I reviewed literature online, interviewed at schools, communities, clothing shops, and distributed online surveys across China, ending with a paper and a report.

Three key strategies for transitioning towards sustainable clothing became apparent: go clothless, go nude, go naked. Nah I was joking, that was just one of the three strategies. The others are human population eradication and total chlorination of textile factories.

Ah, I love how some of us didn’t laugh at that terrible joke. Honestly, I don’t know if I should be sad that you’re not listening, or anxious and afraid that you were listening but took human population eradication seriously.

Seriously though, aside from going naked or killing humans, does anyone want to guess the three paths to sustainability?

[go around class]

Degrowth, extended producer responsibility, and a circular economy. All hinge on consumer awareness of the environmental and humanitarian costs behind cheap clothing. They also require accessible and affordable circular infrastructure – basic facilities and systems supporting a circular economy. These involve renting and peer-to-peer sharing platforms, repair and second-hand shops, and material recycling methods. After all, most of the textile industry’s problem boils down to the fact that less than 1% of garment products are recycled, wasting a huge amount of resources.

My interviews and surveys indicated a medium level of awareness on the repercussions of fast fashion, but surprisingly few are familiar with rentals, sharing, swapping, or consignment stores. Used clothing donation boxes stood out as popular destinations of old textile, but few considered the final destiny of donated clothing, most of which, according to BBC, are shipped to Africa for profit, further increasing their ecological footprint – as a side note, economically this might be profitable, but transportation and textile are two industries with significant negative externality, so the overall social efficiency is reduced by this process. To verify the BBC report, I bought small GPS trackers, hid them in pockets of old clothes, and placed them at these donation boxes. I also bought small cameras and installed them around some boxes to figure out the who and when and how about the transportation of donated clothing. But sadly none of the GPS trackers got out of Guangdong, and none of the cameras survived – some were taken away by mysterious people, others died under sunlight.

In China, numerous NGOs and recycling platforms promote sustainable clothing and a circular economy. Despite their mature logistics, their impact is limited, as each organization addresses only specific issues, while public enthusiasm remains inadequate. The result is a fragmented landscape of specialized platforms existing in isolation. This makes it challenging for consumers to recognize the need and methods to change their clothing behavior.

The issue is not a lack of circular infrastructure capacity, but rather an imbalance with excessive infrastructure and insufficient linkage to the public – like an intricate national highway system that has no entrance point for cars. There’s a missing link between consumers and these organizations, making sustainable clothing choices less accessible or appealing than the convenient practice of “donating” to old garment boxes.

So with peers from over 20 high schools, we made a website, streamlining information – from where to purchase recycled school uniforms to how to reuse old clothing – to provide accessible, actionable, and comprehensive guidance towards sustainable clothing choices to over 1000 users. Within our school, Johnny and I set up clothing donation stations, hosted an exhibition of textile mountain at the music festival, and are now working to transform our lost and found so that unclaimed school uniforms that pile up there – many of them still in perfect shape – won’t end up somewhere at the bottom of a trash can. Maybe you have to become a vegan to stop the slaughtering of animals, but to reduce textile waste, no you don’t have to go nude. We can collectively create huge progress by each taking small steps. Yes, we can.