FASHION’S SHAMEFUL SECRET

Burberry’s decision to burn £28.6m of its own stock has shone a light on one of the world’s most wasteful industries

What did Burberry do?

The luxury fashion house burnt unsold clothes and other goods worth £28.6m last year, so as to protect its brand value. If they hadn’t been burnt, the goods would have been sold cheaply on the “grey market”, thereby undermining Burberry’s cachet. There is nothing particularly unusual about this: Burberry has disposed of £90m’s worth of goods in the past five years. H&M and Nike have been accused of similar actions. “The received wisdom is that many labels would rather burn past-season items than risk damaging their brand by selling them at a reduced price, but very few admit this,” said Morwenna Ferrier, the fashion writer, in The Guardian. Greenpeace said that this was just “the tip of the iceberg”.

Why is burning clothes “the tip of the iceberg”?

Because fashion is an exceptionally wasteful industry. According to EU figures, clothing is the eighth largest sector in terms of household spending, but the fourth in terms of detrimental impact on the environment: only housing, transport and food are worse. Across the developed world, and particularly in Britain, people are buying more clothes and disposing of them ever more quickly. HMRC data show that in 2016, Britons bought 1,130,000 tonnes of clothing, up from 950,000 tonnes in 2012. A 2017 survey suggested that UK consumers got rid of 680 million items of clothing last spring (of which 235 million ended up in landfill). From 2000 to 2014, world clothing production doubled, driven by growing middle-class consumption in poorer countries, and big increases in per capita sales in rich nations.

Why do we get through more clothes today?

Globalisation has driven prices sharply downwards in recent decades; British clothes today are largely made in Asia. And with this – in Britain, Europe, the US, Japan and more recently China – has come the rise of “fast fashion”, which focuses on speed and low cost in order to deliver frequent new collections inspired by catwalk looks and celebrity styles. It’s a vicious cycle: cheaper, less well-made clothing is less likely to endure. The recycling not-forprofit Wrap estimates that the average piece of new clothing is used for about 3.3 years – which would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago. According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, clothing utilisation – the average number of times a piece of clothing is used before being chucked – has decreased by 36% worldwide in the past 15 years.

Why does this matter?

Because the environmental impact is so unnecessarily high. In 2016, according to Wrap, clothing in the UK had a total footprint equivalent to 26.2 million tonnes of CO2, up from 24 million tonnes in 2012. Some eight billion cubic metres of water were used to make our clothes, mainly in growing cotton, a thirsty crop (1kg of cotton, enough to make a pair of jeans and a shirt, uses 10,000 to 20,000 litres of water.) Furthermore, 20% of industrial water pollution globally is attributable to the dyeing and treatment of textiles – only agriculture contributes more. The current situation is widely deemed to be unsustainable. The Ellen Macarthur Foundation estimates that, on current trends, clothing sales will triple by 2050, with impacts that will be “potentially catastrophic”.

How could the impact be reduced?

The current system is linear: a “takemake-dispose” model whereby large amounts of resources are extracted to produce clothes that are then, relatively, barely used. The largest single use of energy related to clothing is the production of fibre: growing cotton, and synthesising polyester and other fibres from oil. But these resources are mostly lost when the clothes are disposed of: globally, less than 1% of clothing material is recycled into new clothing; 13% is recycled in some way, usually into lower-value uses such as insulation; 73% is landfilled or incinerated. In the UK, about half of our unwanted clothing that is collected is reused and recycled, but £100m’s worth goes to landfill or incineration.

What happens to recycled clothing?

Only 10% to 20% of the clothes that UK consumers give to charity are actually sold in second-hand stores; the majority of cast-offs are traded abroad for profit. Wrap estimates that over 70% of all British reused clothing is sent overseas – sold by charities to textile merchants, who then sort, grade and export the garments. Top destinations for UK clothes include Ghana, Uganda, Pakistan and Ukraine. Perhaps a third of all globally donated clothes end up in sub-saharan Africa. Increasingly, though, this doesn’t look like a solution to Britain’s clothes habit. Demand for used clothes from abroad is falling: partly, according to recycling firms, because clothes are less durable; but also because some recipients, particularly in Africa, complain about the detrimental effects on their economies (see box).

What can be done to improve the situation?

Waste is a hot topic in fashion at the moment: the promo for a recent Stella Mccartney collection was shot at a landfill site. Many big companies, representing 12.5% of the global market, have signed up to Global Fashion Agenda’s commitment to a “circular fashion system”. They are trying to ensure that more textile fibres discarded by consumers are passed through a closed loop (i.e. are used again in new garments). The UK industry has committed itself to a Sustainable Clothing Action Plan, which has driven down landfill waste, along with carbon and water use. The problem is that the gains are largely offset by the increase in the volume of clothes being purchased. If, as a consumer, you want to help, there’s a simple solution. “Ultimately, the best thing we can do is to keep our clothing in use for longer,” writes Patsy Perry, a lecturer in fashion at the University of Manchester – “and buy less new stuff.”