Dry-Cleaning 

The issues with dry-cleaning are worth its individual blog post since there’s so much to discuss. As a part of this Love Your Clothes series, we will publish an article focusing solely on dry-cleaning soon so please stay tuned! 

Drying

The dryer is one of the most energy-intensive appliances in your home. Drying on clothes rack is definitely the best way to reduce your carbon footprint as well as extend the life of your clothes. 

Choosing air drying over tumble drying has the potential to reduce an average household’s carbon footprint by 2,400 pounds a year. Astonishingly, with an average household using their table dryer 20 times a month, the carbon dioxide emitted from just one tumble dryer a year is more than a tree can absorb over the course of the first 50 years of its life. 

Tumble drying can change the texture of your clothing, causing it to shrink, fade, and even lose strength. Researchers washed and dried cotton towels for 20 cycles, and they lost 50% of their strength. After only 20 cycles, the fabric became twice as easy to tear. 

Disposal 

It has become common practice to shop for clothes on daily basis. In Germany, production of clothing has continued to slowly decline since 2010, but consumption has been slowly but steadily increasing over the past decade: total expenditure on clothing and footwear rose by an annual average of 0.5% between 2010 and 2019.

Consumers do not only discard a garment when it fails to satisfy our expectation or utility of the product has been exhausted but only because it’s no longer in trend or people have seen them wearing it. 

Increasing recycling and collection could drive annual emissions abetment of around 18 mission tonnes which would reduce incineration and landfill, moving the fashion industry towards a closed-loop-recycling (CLR) operating model. Disposal of products by selling gives supplementary earnings to the consumers. CLR is crucial in order to achieve circularity. 

Currently, less than 1% of used products are recycled back into the industry’s value chain. To achieve accelerated abatement, the development of sorting and textile blend identification technologies, higher incentives for brands to enable CLR, and consumers to support this adoption.

In the ideal world, all governments and companies provide information about reuse and recycling and motivate consumers to adopt green post-purchase behaviour. Governments should also provide an organised disposal system that allows consumers to dispose of textiles without damaging the environment. Unfortunately, it is not the reality yet, but sustainability issues are attracting increasing attention on executive levels and policymakers with regional and national authorities trying post-Covid recovery efforts to sustainability objectives. 

A fashion supply chain traceability pilot study has led to the introduction of the world’s first intelligent sorting system for textiles in Germany. A charitable collection organisation in Augsburg, Aktion Hoffnung, is leveraging Circular Fashion’s identification technology to streamline how they collect and sort through goods. 

There are numbers of small changes you can make to how you take care of your clothes to reduce your environmental impact. 

What can we do better?

Washing Less

Simply reducing the washing and drying could deliver 186 million tonnes of carbon emission reductions, if consumers made changes in their behaviours such as skipping one in six washing loads, washing half of the loads at below 30 degrees, and substituting every sixth dryer usage with open-air drying. This also requires brands and retailers to offer better care instructions and sustainable and durable material choices.

Washing better

When washing clothes that contain synthetic fibres, you can use Guppyfriend bag to stop the microplastic fibres from entering the waterways. You can also use environmentally-friendly detergents, finding them is getting easier nowadays. Even if you cannot find one at your nearby supermarket or drug store, there are several brands offering sustainable detergents online such as Klæny,

Make It Last

Being environmentally conscious extends to our disposal activity. A number of factors can impact the length of a garment’s life and its environmental footprint. These factors include how owners look after their clothes, willingness to wear the same clothes for a long time, design features such as durability of its fabric or classic cuts that are versatile and never go out of style, and consumers’ ability to mend their clothes.

It would be wise to purchase not so trend-led garments to never go out of style. Minimalistic design is always the easiest way to ensure that it goes well with other pieces you own especially when layering, but it doesn’t mean you should only wear plain, boring outfits! You can still play around with prints, and volume, there are no limits in fashion!

To help you make your clothes last, we are also planning to publish an article focusing on how to mend your clothes, so please stay tuned for that, too!

Shop from Brands with Circular Business Models

Circular business models allow to extend product life, enable recycling and reduce the need for new and finite resources in products. Repair and refurbishment offered by brands and retailers could enable the industry to cut around 143 million tonnes of GHG emissions in 2030. Repairing can extend product life by 1.35x while secondhand re-commerce can extend product life by 1.7x. Both the industry and consumers must realise this adamant potential.

The best thing to do, after all, is to buy less. The Jump, a charity organisation from the UK that encourages consumers to try six shifts to protect the earth and live with joy, suggests buying only three new pieces of clothing a year. If that’s too much of a change to make, you just start by making the clothes you already own last longer. Let it be by simply continuing wearing them or selling them second-hand. What’s important the most is that they won’t end up incinerated or in landfills. And love your clothes ideally a lifetime long.