Fashion's Plastic Problem: Textile Waste & How We Move Forward
Plastic Free July is the largest waste-avoidance campaign on the planet, with a staggering 174 million participants globally in 2024. The idea behind the award-winning campaign is to empower community, corporate, and government action to reduce plastic waste.
Sustainability is a year-round initiative at Custom Collaborative, but this month has us thinking specifically about fashion’s role in the plastic crisis and ways the industry can address this growing concern.
THE PROBLEM: PLASTIC ON THE RISE
When you think of plastic pollution, images of beverage bottles and takeout containers may come to mind — for good reason! Packaging accounts for around 40% of the planet’s plastic waste, and fashion certainly contributes to this number. If you’ve ever worked retail (or just love to shop online), you may have noticed the massive amount of plastic individually wrapping each item. That’s ignoring any plastic used throughout the supply chain, which increasingly requires shipping pieces across multiple countries to be completed.
However, a recent study published in Nature Communications reveals that the largest source of fashion’s plastic pollution comes from mismanaged synthetic clothing, which has exploded in popularity since the 1990s. The polyester blouses, acrylic sweaters, and nylon leggings that dominate store shelves (and most of our closets) are not biodegradable, unlike cotton, wool, and other natural fibers that will break down naturally over time.
This is particularly problematic, considering that 85% of all textiles end up in landfills or are incinerated.
THE SOLUTION: RECYCLE & REUSE
Proposed solutions for reducing waste across the industry usually fall within two categories. The first is to scale down the overproduction of cheap synthetic clothing and instead opt for high-quality products made from natural fibers. The second focuses on improving textile recycling infrastructure, which currently doesn’t exist at nearly the scale required to tackle the level of waste we’re generating globally. Similarly, more investment is needed to improve methods for effectively recycling mixed-fiber fabrics.
We believe deeply that both of these approaches are necessary to improve the industry’s sustainability, but think the conversation could benefit from increased focus on a third solution — upcycling!
Approximately 80 billion new pieces of clothing are produced every year, and a staggering 40% are never sold. We are overproducing at such a rate that we could clothe the next six generations with garments that already exist.
With such a massive amount of existing textiles, one of the most sustainable actions consumers and the industry at large can take is to increase the longevity of every piece. The number of times a garment is worn has declined by around 36% in 15 years, and reuse will always be less resource-intensive than the process of creating an entirely new piece.
At Custom Collaborative, we aim to be a part of the solution by ensuring sustainability throughout our program. Everything participants create in our 15-week Training Institute is made from overstock fabric that was donated or headed for the landfill.
We even collect scraps and cuttings to ensure they are properly recycled whenever possible!
Upcycled looks created and modeled by Custom Collaborative graduates at the Remake Wear Your Values fashion show.
Pairing this with a curriculum focused on sustainability, mending, and collection development helps participants strengthen a skill that we see as paramount to the future of fashion as a sustainable industry — understanding how to design within the confines of existing materials, whether that’s a ready-made product or overstock fabric.
Mountains of textile waste have already forced a reuse industry in countries around the world, particularly in the Global South, where the vast majority of discarded clothing is exported. Earlier this year, thousands of clothing recycling and upcycling businesses from Ghana’s Kantamanto market — one of the largest secondhand markets in the world — were displaced after a devastating fire tore through.
Yes, we want to see textile recycling grow and brands design with that kind of circularity in mind, but we don’t have time to wait for the industry’s largest players to decide they want to do what’s necessary.
Sustainable fashion can and should be accessible to all people. Through education and resources, we’re helping low-income women leverage fashion’s wastefulness as a catalyst for economic opportunity, bringing a fresh vision for sustainability to vulnerable communities most at risk from climate change.
THE FUTURE: UPCYLE INNOVATION
Always aiming to improve, we’re working up even more ways for our ambitious community to be a part of the solution to fashion’s waste problem with cutting-edge techniques.
Recently, the sustainable fashion pioneers over at Eileen Fisher generously donated one of their felting machines to our Garment District studio. Determined to salvage every scrap of fabric from their clothing takeback program, Eileen Fisher developed a felting technique that bonds layered swatches from discarded garments to create new fabrics with one-of-a-kind, abstract designs.
Steve Madden is generously supporting our work to educate and expand access to this innovative upcycling technique. Later this year, we will start hosting community felting workshops in our newly renovated space, opening fresh creative pathways for textile reuse that keep plastic waste out of landfills.
If you want to stay in the know about upcoming workshops and events, the best way is to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media @customcolab