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‘It’s the industry’s dirty secret’: why fashion’s oversupply problem is an environmental disaster
As many as 40% of clothes made each year – 60bn garments – are not sold. Experts say tackling such obscene waste will require radical changes in production – and legislation
There are several reasons brands produce more than they sell: manufacturers insisting on minimum order quantities; an increasingly fast retail cycle fuelled by frequent deliveries of new product; a failure to read the market. “There’s a lot of human toil that goes into our clothes, from the cotton picking, spinning and weaving to the garment workers and how often they don’t see their children because of the hours they work,” says Christina Dean, the founder of the anti-waste charity Redress. Mooted EPR schemes propose a financial levy of as little as €0.06 an item, to be paid by the producer, and a responsibility to contribute to managing a product’s end of life through initiatives such as textile-to-textile recycling, upcycling, downcycling, rental, resale and repair.
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