An extensive enquiry and 2019 report by the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee(EAC) led to a series of impressive recommendations – all of which the UK Government rejected. Styles collected with no materials data were removed. Sampled datasets represent an average collection of women’s styles from each brand but may not represent other accessories, footwear or men’s clothing or other items and are a rough approximation of offerings by each brand. Plastic is made from oil and gas. Polyester is a thread made from plastic, woven into fabric. It’s thought over half of the clothes produced today use synthetic materials like polyester. The truth is, we live in a global economic system that sees the exploitation of people and the environment as a fantastic opportunity to make huge profits.

Finally, we can develop a deeper connection with our clothing, to slowly but surely change the way fashion works for us – either as individuals or together. We all need to wear clothes, so the massive reductions on fashion in the sales are certainly tempting. But how much will end up in the charity shop bag after January? On the consumer side, buying better quality clothing less often is one solution for shoppers – but it’s not always possible for everyone. Cheap options are far more accessible to the average shopper, and there’s a lot of it out there. We buy more clothes per person in the UK than any country in Europe. Around 300,000 tonnes of used clothes are burned or buried in landfill each year. Boohoo – whose parent company also owns PrettyLittleThing – set a target of using 100% recycled or more sustainable textiles in their manufacturing by 2025. The report’s authors warn that they have a ‘mountain to climb’ if they are to meet this, and must reduce their overall volume of clothing sold. A 2019 enquiry found that Boohoo and Missguided are among the least sustainable companies in the entire UK fashion industry.

The antidote is more conscious fashion production – and consumption

These moments of fashion disaster pierce the reader because they capture the cruelty of other people's judgments – whether real or imagined – and convey the acute anxiety of standing out in all the wrong ways. This is an anxiety that fashion thrives on, both as an industry (what else are trends but designations of "right" and "wrong"?) and a cultural system that frequently relies on dress codes, uniforms, and an unspoken understanding of what is considered appropriate and attractive. No wonder it sometimes all feels a bit crushing. Why is there so much clothing now? What’s it made of and who made it all? And where does it all end up when it’s no longer wanted? A project called Dead White Man’s Clothes, after the name given to clothing exports from the West to Ghana, shows grimly the problem of fashion waste exports.

We might just miss a whole season, and if we do, that’s okay. We have enough clothing out there that we don’t need to make any more clothes for decades and we’ll still have plenty to wear. Shein puts out an average of about 1,000 women’s new clothing styles a day based on our sample, 85% of which were made with polyester. Around 95% of styles we sampled from Shein were made with at least some plastics-based material, either from polyester, nylon, acrylic or elastane. A majority of these garments were made with blends of different fibers, like polyester and cotton or polyester and nylon. They don’t even want to reveal how many clothes they actually produce each year. 100 billion pieces a year is an estimate from a decade ago, before the explosion in ultra-cheap, disposable fashion from companies like Boohoo and Shein. of Mitumba imported to Kenya is of such bad quality that it cannot be sold anymore, meaning in 2019, Kenya had to deal with 150–200 tonnes of fashion and textile waste per day.At the moment, only about 14% of polyester is produced from recycled fibers, according to standards body Textile Exchange. How close to a breakthrough is the sector in terms of recycling used garments? It’s a cliche to say that we can’t shop our way out of a climate catastrophe but it’s absolutely true,” said Pham, the professor at Pratt. “The popular emphasis on individuals knowing where their clothes are made and who made their clothes–as ways of buying ‘better’–obscures the reality that the problems with the global fashion industry aren’t individual bad brands that just need to be called out. The problems are structural and systemic,” she said.

Another large clothing market is in Kibera, Kenya. The documentary Textile Mountain. The hidden burden of our fashion waste by Make Europe Sustainable for All tells its story. TONNES OF BRAND NEW CLOTHING DUMPED IN THE CHILEAN DESERT This doesn’t mean eliminating the use of plastics in clothing entirely — but it does mean using it carefully. We can no longer use plastics to create poorly-made garments which are designed to be worn only a handful of times. Other materials, such as cotton and viscose, can also create environmental problems, so ultimately it is the scale of production that needs to change.” But the sheer volume – and poorly constructed fast fashion items that aren’t made to last – means a lot of it is impossible to use and upcycle.Brands currently "guess" how many pieces of each style they are going to produce, Lee said, and making the clothes takes three to six months before they are sent to stores or put online. What doesn't get sold at full price is marked down. "When it's so cheap, or 70% off, (people think) I don't really need it, but you know what 70% is worth it, (so) I'm going to get that. And then you buy stuff you don't really need," Lee said. When it’s left to break down in landfills, it pollutes the air, soil, and water with plastic microfibres and hazardous chemicals. It’s a shady thing that goes on because [brands] are trying to get the cheapest prices possible. Fast fashion is ridiculously, wrongly cheap. [If you look at] the price of eggs, ground beef, gasoline, a house, the price of a car, the price of gasoline during the Depression, it’s all gone up since that. But the price of clothes is the same. And that’s because [these brands] keep paying less and less and less. ‘Can you do this for 10 cents? We want it for eight.” And then the only way they can do it is to find somebody who’s off the books, who’s got illegal workers, who can do it for five cents a piece. So then the middleman makes three cents, and he’s delivering it at eight cents. Almost every piece of clothing we buy is made with some polyester, the data shows. Although the dataset is made up of mostly fast fashion retailers, it’s not just fast fashion that loves polyester. Lululemon joggers? Polyester, nylon and elastane. Gucci skirt? Polyester. A recent report even found fashion companies, such as New Look and Next, are inadvertently funding Russia’s war on Ukraine by using polyester made from Russian oil.