FEATURE THE NEW FAST FASHION?
While many of us might think that donating our used clothing to charity shops or putting them in collection banks is doing somebody a favour, it’s not always a particularly charitable deed given that many clothes are so cheaply made that they cannot be reused or properly recycled.
The BBC reported that one of the dumping grounds for our unwanted clothing is the rapidly growing fast fashion graveyard in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Traders in Chile import unwanted clothes of all types, mainly from Europe and the US, to resell both locally and to other Latin American nations. But more than half of the 60,000 tonnes of clothes imported into Chile each year ends up in illegal desert landfills, with dire consequences for the environment and the local communities.
Sadly, it’s typical of an all too familiar story in our throw-away culture – how the demand for fast fashion is contributing to long-term waste and seriously impacting the environment. As the Daily Mirror has more recently reported, Britain’s love of fast fashion is fuelling an environmental catastrophe in Ghana’s capital which has a toxic mountain of ditched clothing rotting on a beach. The Mirror identified that unsold used clothing in the UK is sold to textile merchants, going on to say that while some of the lowest quality items may be recycled for mattress stuffing, underlay or cleaning rags, large numbers of garments pass through international networks and are dumped as waste.
While it’s a relatively new buzzword to some, fast fashion is certainly at the heart of the sustainability debate in the clothing industry. As far as protective wear is concerned and, especially given its short lifecycle, poorer quality and throwaway working clothes are effectively becoming a new kind of fast workwear.
Fast fashion is cheap clothing produced to satisfy a short-term mass-market demand. That’s precisely what cheap, poorer quality protective wear does. It fulfils a demand for low-cost workwear satisfying a conscious buying decision and a desire for cheaper products. Consumers believe they are investing in a cost-effective solution and saving themselves money. But cheap protective wear comes with a hidden cost – because of its short life cycle it’s not sustainable and our environment is starting to pay the price.
So just how big is the throw-away clothing problem in the UK? It’s said that each Briton owns an average of 115 garments and that the UK is the fourth largest textile-waster in Europe. In 2018, £12.5bn worth of the UK’s clothes went to landfill. Sadly, most consumers are blissfully unaware that the clothing industry is resource intensive. Globally, the fast fashion industry uses 1.5tn tonnes of water each year and, given the volume of chemicals used in the manufacturing processes, it is
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Avoid poor quality workwear and invest in good quality, sustainable working clothes to help protect the environment, says Peter Dumigan, Managing Director of the Hultafors Group UK, which owns Snickers Workwear, Solid Gear safety footwear and Hellberg Safety PPE.
the second biggest polluter of water supplies and also responsible for 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. What’s more, these figures are not about to start decreasing given that the demand for raw materials in the industry is expected to triple by 2050.
PIONEERING SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES The leading protective wear brands are beginning to
think carefully about sustainability by considering the processes and resources required to make clothing. They are also advocating buying better-quality garments that will last longer, as well as incorporating recycled fibres into their fabric and garment materials technology thereby reducing our carbon footprint.
For the likes of the Hultafors Group, and in particular its protective wear brand Snickers Workwear, the transition to adopting sustainable business practices and product development is a priority. Sadly, the linear business principle followed by some cheaper workwear brands is a 'take, make, dispose' practice for producing cheap clothing. Once those garments have reached the end of their useful life, wearers dispose of them – without any real consideration for environmental impact.
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