Throwaway fashions

With festive sales and the allure of grabbing a cheap sparkly number for a Christmas party very much in season, this article looks at the waste issues of clothing and what Bristol businesses are doing to tackle it. The wastefulness of the fashion industry has been highlighted this year in the media.

BBC documentary Fashion’s Dirty Secrets led bloggers to denounce the fast fashion model (low quality, high volume, collections that change as often as weekly), and there were revelations that luxury brands including Burberry burn their excess stock. Fashion’s throwaway culture leads to 30 per cent of clothing – 300,000 tonnes – ending up in landfill in the UK annually, according to WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme).

Instead of the bin, a labelled bag of clothing (good or bad quality) can be put out with the kerbside recycling. Bristol Waste will then send it to Wilcox who sort and ship clothing to Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East as well as Africa for resale. Clothing that can’t be reused is cut up and sold as industrial cleaning rags.

Great Western Ambulance clothing bins provide an income for the charity without having a retail space

Of course, there is also the option of dropping it in a charity clothing bank or at a charity shop. The Great Western Air Ambulance clothing banks are managed by a commercial textile recycler BIU group, who give a percentage of the sale to the charity after the clothing is sold by weight to be sorted in other countries.

“Our international customers like the ‘lucky dip’ element with the possibility of designer brands and quality items,” says BIU charity relationships manager Carrie Carpenter. Clothing that can’t be sold is shredded and turned into items such as punch bag pellets or mattress filling. Many people may not realise that charity shops also sell on unwanted donations by weight to textile recyclers, particularly out of season items, low quality ‘fast fashion’ and soiled and damaged goods.

Clothing bailed and shipped abroad for sorting and resale

The culture, quality and volume of disposable fast fashion has negatively affected the second-hand textile market in the UK and worldwide. “Prices are falling and there is a surplus of unsorted clothing,” Carrie says. Along with many other UK textile sorting plants, Bristol Textile Recyclers stopped sorting in Bristol two years ago and now ship abroad. Whilst companies like BIU monitor their supply chains and end markets, there are examples of local textile industries in Africa being destroyed by the influx of cheap western clothing.

Easton-based not-for-profit company Labour Behind the Label campaigns for garment workers’ rights and highlights the human cost behind the demand for fast fashion. “There is a squeeze all the way down the supply chain,” says advocacy director Anna Bryher. “Fixed costs like fabric stay the same but variable costs like wages and factory safety get squeezed.”

Furthermore, Fashion is also one of the biggest polluting industries in the world with carbon emissions higher than shipping and flying. Chemicals and dyes poison rivers and cotton production uses so much water that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has all-but dried up because of the rivers that feed it being diverted to the cotton fields.

Worldwide, there are calls for more sustainable fashion practices and alternative models like clothing rental businesses springing up.

In the UK, WRAP manages the Sustainable Action Clothing Plan (SCAP) initiative which retailers and textile recyclers are part of to tackle the environmental impacts of clothing, although Carrie suggests that ” perhaps there has been a limited success from retailers in ensuring real change is actioned”. Locally, Bristol is home to several small businesses who are tackling wastefulness head-on with completely different business models to the mainstream.

Bristol based Antiform offering an antidote to fast fashion with clothes made from waste fabrics

Antiform in St Phillip’s uses locally sourced waste textiles from factories and consumers and produces clothing lines with local micro-producers. “We make fashion products with what we already have available,” says founder Lizzie Harrison. Instead of seasonal clothing ranges, they have waste-themed ranges, which are made from shiny, glittery and colourful fabrics.

“The current patchwork collection is made from Bristol made cloth samples that are patched together for the front section of dresses,” Lizzie says. Further along the same road, The Bristol Cloth is another business tackling waste, with a locally sourced, manufactured, non-toxic and regenerative ethos. The wool for their cloth comes from Fernhill Farm in the Mendips, and is dyed with plant-based inks that can go back into the earth unlike toxic chemicals and synthetic materials.

Bristol Cloth is made from local yarn and dyed with natural dyes.

They are currently crowdfunding to create 200 metres of cloth, which will be woven at the Bristol Weaving Mill. When asked about the scalability of this model, founder Babs Behan said the goal “isn’t trying to meet the large-scale global systems of the fashion industry, but to prove that this is a sustainable business model that can be replicated locally and internationally”.

These items aren’t available for high street prices but instead fit with the sustainable fashion principle of buying quality over quantity. Lizzie from Antiform sees the limitations of this: “For young people where clothes and fashion are a massive part of their identity, they need to have fun, engaging alternatives such as clothes swaps or apps.”

It’s something others have identified too, and clothes swaps are popping up around the city. Organisations like City to Sea have run them as fundraisers, and Stitch-up Studios, based at The Island on Nelson Street, are planning to run swaps quarterly from 2019. Jade Laing, a self-professed clothes swap queen has the following advice for anyone tempted to run a clothes swap event: “Put everything in a pile, suggest a number of clothes people can take then just start trying things on.”

And if something requires a tweak to make it fashionable, Sewing Good run upcycling workshops at events like clothes swaps to adjust garments and add embellishments.

Sewing Good upcycling clothes at a recent City to Sea clothes swap.

A wealth of options for textile repairs, upcycling, second-hand shops, ethical clothing brands and local sewing machine hire can all be found in The Good Wardrobe’s online directory.

While some, like Happy City’s business development manager Wren Aigaki-Lander, can take on the challenge of not buying clothes for a year, for many of us the high street still holds an irresistible lure. “Shop where you like but get informed,” says Anna Bryher from Labour behind the Label. “We need to get over the belief that our only role is to be a consumer. Our power is to be global citizens and activists.

“If you are unhappy with the shop’s practices, take action: I still buy underwear from M&S but send them emails demanding they pay a living wage to the makers.”

You can read all about avoiding the Boxing Day Furniture sales here: b247.staging.proword.press/lifestyle/environment/boxing-day-furniture-sales-salvation/