Can fast fashion go slow?

Recycled, re-used and renewable textiles only go so far in solving the fastfashion crisis, writes Alexandra Carlton. The answer may lie with consumption.

Australia holds the inglorious distinction of being the second-largest consumer of clothing in the world, generating 800,000 tonnes of textile waste per year. Individuals consume about 27 kilograms of new clothing per annum and at the same time dispose of 23 kilograms of textile waste. Globally the numbers are even grimmer, with an estimated 92 million tonnes of clothing waste created every year. A garbage truck full of clothes ends up in landfill every second.

If we want our discarded loungewear and leggings to stop clogging up the planet, you’d think that re-using and recycling would be the loudest voices in the conversation. But complete garment recycling – breaking the pieces down to their naked fibres and creating new ones – is a difficult proposition.

Clothes are made of different fibres, fastenings and embellishments, which historically have needed to be laboriously separated by hand. But innovation is happening, such as at Swedish large-scale sorting facility Siptex, where fabrics can be graded by colour and material using infrared technologies.

Another sustainability-focused Swede, Renewcell, has worked out how to recycle textiles into a patented biodegradable material called Circulose. The company forecasts that the fashion industry will have an annual baseline demand of six million metric tonnes for similar recycled fibres by 2030.

Slowing down the start of the cycle is also critical. Brands like Adelaide’s Autark emphasise minimising output. “I try to keep my collections really tightly curated and my production numbers really slim,” says designer and director Sophia McMahon. Sometimes that means she doesn’t have the exact garment someone wants in stock but McMahon’s customers are patient while she makes items to order because they understand the ethos of her business.

Giving garments a second life with startups such as AirRobe is likely to be an increasingly important part of the answer. The clothing resale market is currently worth an estimated $49 billion and is on track to reach $103 billion by 2025. AirRobe allows customers to add new purchases to their digital “AirRobe” so they can be resold later without the need for uploading photographs or writing descriptions. “What I call the ‘re-economy’ – the whole re-use, recycle section of the market – is going to be a real opportunity for us,” says The Iconic’s CEO, Erica Berchtold, who introduced AirRobe to the online retailer’s 17 million monthly visitors last year.

A widespread consumer change of buying fewer but higher-quality clothes would eclipse any of these innovations, say researchers Samantha Sharpe, Monique Retamal and Taylor Brydges from the University of Technology Sydney. “You might think it’s too hard,” they wrote on The Conversation. “But the status quo of constant growth can’t last.”