Although we should know better, Canadians keep producing more residential waste. According to Statistics Canada, household garbage output was 218,558 tonnes higher in 2014 than in 2006. We have a constant desire for new stuff, especially clothes: Statscan also reports that fashion sales rose steadily between 2004 and 2015.
A few fresh items every season probably seems benign, especially if you're leaving old clothes out on the porch for a charity or donating them to a thrift store. Canadians are into that: the online classified service Kijiji just released its fourth annual "Second-Hand Economy Index," which puts the value of the used stuff that we shared and sold in 2017 at $28.5-billion.
The eBay-owned company enlisted a research team at the University of Quebec at Montreal to analyze how we attempt to repurpose old stuff. After surveying 5,625 people, they estimated that 2.3 billion items were passed on from one person to another in Canada last year, and the number one category of items bought or sold was clothing, shoes and accessories.
At first that sounds great, as though a whole bunch of people sold their old clothes to another bunch of people, allowing unworn apparel to find a loving home. But the report also says that 62 per cent of "sellers" are actually donating, not making a profit off, old goods. Unfortunately, when it comes to clothing, charity is too often just a way of passing on garbage.
Donated clothing is rarely given directly to someone in need. Most charities that collect clothes sell them to a business such as Value Village that puts the best things out for sale – but it's increasingly unlikely that someone else will want what's being tossed.
In the same time period that the volume of fashion sales increased steadily, the prices paid for clothes (including shoes and accessories) declined by a significant 13 per cent. Not coincidentally, 2004 is the year the Swedish company H&M entered the Canadian market, right before Joe Fresh (a Canadian contender that launched in 2006) and Forever 21 (a Los Angeles brand that landed here in 2007).
These are three major "fast-fashion" brands, known for stimulating our appetite for new threads by constantly restocking shelves with clothes that are super cute – and also fairly cheap, not made to last past this trend cycle. If you think last fall's shirts are over-stretched, pilly or generally unwearable, chances are that thrift store owners will, too.
Secondhand stores sell what they don't want to wholesalers, which then sell them abroad. In recent years, though, the international market has dried up: in 2015, in an attempt to reinvigorate local textile industries, the six countries in the East African Community imposed high tariffs on imports of used clothes, with a plan to ban them entirely by 2019.
Meanwhile, a post-Second World War industry in India that transformed used textiles into blankets for emergency relief missions has been undercut by new product from China. Recycled yarn out of Panipat, India that was worth as much as US$300-million annually in the 1990s is valued at just US$62-million today.
The Seattle company Evrnu has had some success turning old fibre into liquid then respinning it, but the ability to affordably recycle fabric into new gear for first-worlders is fairly limited. Deconstructing natural fibres, such as cotton and silk, means chopping long, smooth threads into smaller pieces that produce rough, less valuable material. Synthetic or mixed fibres can be impossible or toxic to disentangle.
Even the fast-fashionistas admit this: in 2016, H&M put recycling bins into its stores, and began exchanging store vouchers for castoffs. Though the marketing implied that the clothes would be remade into new duds, development sustainability manager Henrik Lampa told Newsweek at a launch event that 0.1 per cent of all clothing donations actually become new textile fibre.
Green innovators are trying to interrupt this cycle, and old jeans do occasionally become insulation. But the sad truth is that North Americans add 12 million tons of textiles to landfills every year. If reducing that is a real goal, we're going to have to buy fewer clothes.
So indulge that spring cleaning impulse and evaluate your cluttered closets, but consider if anything old can be made exciting again with a bit of a tailor or tuck. Resist the immediate urge to replace tossed items with something new. Think about forever style, not today's fashion – make the next thing you buy worth wearing for seasons to come.