fashion: Why our current level of clothing consumption is unsustainable?

Catastrophic. That is the word used to describe the current trajectory of the fashion industry. If annual clothing sales continue to grow at the current rate, they will reach 160 million tonnes by 2050 – more than three times the volume we are producing today. In order to make these millions more items of clothing, most of which will be surplus to requirements, we will use 300 million tonnes of non-renewable materials that the Earth simply doesn’t have the resources to produce.

How consumption patterns have changed over time

We are buying more and wearing it less. In the last 15 years, clothing production has doubled and the number of times we wear those clothes is decreasing We’ve all seen the stories of the Instagram ‘influencers’ who wear an item once for a single post and then leave it in the back of their wardrobe, or worse, simply throw it in the trash. We are now producing around 150 billion items of clothing per year and we’re throwing away into landfill or incinerating a garbage truck full of clothes every minute.

Often, the reason given to justify the growth in production is that demand is increasing, particularly in emerging markets including Africa and China. The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 – an increase of 2.4 billion people between now and then . Even with current levels of population growth, the rate at which production is set to grow does not make sense. Business as usual is not an option.

 Sustainable Apparel Materials: An overview of what we know and what could be done about the impact of four major apparel materials: Cotton, Polyester, Leather, & Rubber:

https://matteroftrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SustainableApparelMaterials.pdf