Would your fashion bargains pass the... 30 WEAR TEST?

That’s how long an outfit ought to last. So we put top brands through a fascinating lab experiment... while this MP warns our addiction to fast fashion is an eco-disaster

The business model behind the UK’s booming ‘ fast fashion’ industry is broken.

One million tonnes of clothing are thrown away every year, with 300,000 tonnes going to landfill or being incinerated.

And no wonder — T-shirts are now on sale for £2, dresses for a fiver; clothes so cheap you can throw them away after a big night out without a second thought.

A recent study of 1,500 women found we only wear clothes an average of seven times — with a third of us considering items to be ‘old’ after just three outings.

We’ve been investigating fast fashion in Parliament for over six months. What’s clear is that business-as-usual no longer fits.

In the UK we buy more clothes per person than any other country in europe. Italians are famed for being the world’s best dressed, but they only buy half the weight in clothes we do each year.

Our demand for fast, cheap fashion comes with a catastrophic environmental price tag. Textile production contributes more to climate change than international flights and shipping combined.

Cotton production consumes lake-sized volumes of fresh water and often involves pesticides. every time we put on a wash, thousands of plastic fibres go down the drain and into the oceans. Plastic-based fibres from polyester and acrylic jumpers are being found in the deep sea, in Arctic sea ice and the fish we eat.

The social cost of our clothes is also high. When we rejoice at the £5 tag on a dress, we don’t question the real cost of making it. But someone is paying the price.

Forced labour is used to pick cotton in two of the world’s biggest cotton-producing countries, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

In China, prison camps are used as textile factories. Girls in India are sold into three years of bonded labour by their families to earn their marriage dowry.

Our biggest retailers have ‘chased the cheap needle around the planet’, commissioning production in countries with low pay, little trade union representation and weak environmental laws.

We all have a responsibility to buy less and rent, reuse, repair and recycle more. Given the warnings we face on climate change and biodiversity loss, we must chart a new direction. In Parliament, we’ve been talking to businesses and designers forging an exciting, sustainable vision for fashion — making garments with reused or recycled materials, offering fashion rental and even lifetime repair services.

But they face tough competition from businesses driven to maximise profits through cost-cutting, regardless of environmental or social impact. We found retailers, including Boohoo, Amazon and TK Maxx, to be lagging behind the rest of the industry.

None has signed up to the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan to reduce their carbon, water and waste footprints or the ACT labour rights and living-wage agreement.

Producers must take responsibility for the waste they create and help pay for clearing it up. We want the Government to make retailers pay a penny for each garment produced. This could raise £35million a year to be spent on better clothing collection and sorting services.

Fixing fast fashion can’t wait; the time to act is now. Our clothes shouldn’t cost the earth.