THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Oh the glamour and the glitz, the handbags and the glad rags on parade at the recent Galway Races and Dublin Horse Show. We are blessed with beautiful women. But is it the cloth that maketh the woman or would they look just as alluring in sackcloth?
Certainly, young women today – teenagers too – seem more attuned to how they dress, more the dedicated followers of fashion – whether it’s well-cut, ripped jeans with designer trainers for partying or an outfit more befitting the workplace or college. That said, our younger generations are, by all accounts, familiar with the idea of ‘clothes sustainability’.
Sustainable clothing is about reducing textile waste by extending the life cycle through donation to ever-increasing charity shops, resale or recycling by handing down to their younger sister, their still young-at-heart mother – my daughter and her Mother are typical of this – or best friend. Charity shops and clothes banks play a big role in this process, all part of being aware of increasing landfills in this time of climate change.
Textiles in landfills can be just as challenging to the environment as discarded plastics. Textiles account for 10% of global emissions, more than global shipping and aviation combined. Operating within a linear ‘take-make-waste’ model, the sector globally consumes new materials at a pace that far exceeds nature’s capacity for regeneration.
According to ChangeClothes.org, Ireland is the second largest producer of textile waste in Europe after Belgium, each of us here consuming 53kg of textiles a year, more than double the average.
Today, we acquire too many clothes, far more than we actually need. I am as guilty as the next in this respect – my hoard of trainers enough to upset the late Imelda Marcos. Fast Fashion is the euphemism, and a lot of it coming from Asian sweatshops.
Meantime, according to ChangeClothes.org, we have enough clothing for the next six generations.
In Ireland the clothes industry will be an estimated €4.1 Billion for 2025, according to IBISWorld, with the past five years seeing an annual 8.7 per cent growth.
On the charity shop front, those who support them, arguably, participate in the circular economy, by minimising waste and over-stretched landfills. And contribute to worthy causes. We need more people shopping like this – you’d be doing good to rummage for something of a one-off vintage.
A wonderful woman I shared my life with for some 10 years was a regular at the charity shop in Kingcourt, giving and buying, and had introduced me to the concept of clothes sustainability. One day she dropped some items off, and bought a pair of silver, sling-back heels. That evening she put on a, em, fashion show for me and then, looking down at the heels, said: “These seem vaguely familiar.” And then the penny dropped. “Oh dear, I gave these to the charity shop two weeks ago!”
As far as I know, she still has those heels
The clothes banks I find disconcerting. Clothes, socks, T-shirts, underwear and cheap-cut jeans, bought en masse at you-know-where, usually end up in these banks, two or three washes having put paid to their wearability. In Ireland three out of five textiles end up in landfill within the first year of purchase.
(One Irish company that supplies and manage these clothes banks has, since 1992, grown its network to 1,200 such pods across Ireland).
The thing is I am not sure where the contents of these banks or pods actually end up. There are those who say the clothes are recycled in garment factories, machinists using part of the discarded items to complement and add to new garments. Back in the days of my childhood, women in the home darned their husbands’ socks so nothing was ever wasted and hand-downs were the dress code of the day. My mother’s brother Harry was front of house at a small Dublin shirt factory where his main customers were well-heeled housewives who brought in their husbands’ good white shirts to have the frayed collar ‘turned’. His was a thriving business and charity shops were an unknown entity.
Others contend that a lot of these clothes end up in Africa and in some cases just literally dumped there, simply because there are too many of these garments that are just not wanted or unwearable for being in tatters.
I have seen this scenario in Africa – those ‘above ground’ landfills, where the clothes, once on your back, are left to rot.
Clothes that cost the earth…
