85%

Of All Textiles Are Burned Or In The Landfill Each Year

Around 81.5lbs per person per year in the U.S. this comes to an average of 11.3 million tons a year.

As of 2019 as a planet we are producing so much clothing waste per year that by the end of it we could fill the entire Sydney Harbor in Australia full of clothes. The Sydney Harbor is the largest natural port in the world with a size of about 21 cubic miles large and holds about 132 billion gallons of water. If clothing is made with non-biodegradable fabrics it has the ablility to sit in landfills for up to 200 years

Textile production uses on average 93 billion cubic meters of water ever year. It takes up to 2000 gallons of water to make a single pair of jeans

Around 5.5 years of drinking water for one person

With donations to either thrift stores or charities it then becomes their problem if it does not get sold. The companies then are forced to spend their own profits into sorting these unwanted garments and then of which about 25% goes directly to the landfill. An additional 40% - 50% gets exported overseas to secondhand clothing trade. This then overflows countries like Ghana and Chile and later ends up in landfills there.

With so much textile waste making its way to the landfills every single year it is important to note that they are the 3rd highest producer of methane emissions. They are only behind the burning of fossil fuels as well as farming and agriculture. #3

Clothes are being bought more than ever, in the past 15 years alone consumers have been buying 60% more clothes than they previously were. this is going to eventually lead to even more clothing in landfills and burned if no action is taken. Currently around 56 million tons of clothing are bought each year as study taken place in 2020. If we continue this number is expected to rise to 93 million tons by 2030 and all the way up to 160 million tons by 2050.

At the current rate, the fashion industry will end up using 1/4 of the entire global carbon budget by 2050.

2.6 MILLION

Tons of returned clothing ended up in landfills in 2020 in the United States alone. This lead to 16 million tons of CO2 emissions created by online return in the U.S. in 2020. This is the equivalent to the emissions of 3.5 million cars on the road for a year.

1% OF CLOTHES ARE RECYCLED INTO NEW ITEMS