As overconsumption culture deepens its hold on today’s fashion industry, clothing manufacturers are churning out cheaper products at larger volumes than ever before in order to keep up with demand. The Swiss market is no exception.
Even clothing collection and recycling companies, such as Texaid and Tell-Tex, are struggling to accommodate the costs of keeping used clothing out of landfills.
What’s happening?
With the rise of fast fashion — the cheap and rapid production of apparel to keep up with fleeting trends, often at the expense of textile quality — many of us consumers have developed a concerning tendency to shop on trend, throwing out old clothing before wearing it through.
In Switzerland, per Blue News, clothing collection facilities receive over 60,000 tons of used clothing each year, only a little over half the total volume thrown out. The rest contributes to the overcrowding of landfills.
Nowadays, even these clothing collection sites are finding it increasingly difficult to uphold their recycling mission at such a large scale. According to the latest report from Blue News, by compromising on fabric quality, sellers are making their garments virtually impossible to recycle. The synthetic fibers used frequently by fast-fashion companies must be incinerated instead — a lose-lose for collection facilities and for the environment.
Meanwhile, the costs of collecting clothing and maintaining a textile recycling base only make the whole endeavor even more financially burdensome.
“If you want to have sorting and recycling in Switzerland, money has to flow,” remarked Tell-Tex’s Sascha Sardella.
Why is fast fashion concerning?
The problem, at the heart, is the rampant tendency to buy more than we need and throw out perfectly usable garments in order to purchase newer ones. To give context to the size of the issue, an Earth.org statistic indicates that 101 million tons of textile waste end up in landfill sites each year — and that doesn’t even account for collected and recycled apparel.
In Switzerland, as conventional textile recycling becomes less viable, companies have to resort to “thermal recycling,” according to Blue News: burning the used clothes and “recycling” the heat for local industrial processes.
Unfortunately, while repurposing thermal energy can offset some industrial carbon pollution, the incineration process itself releases its own plethora of planet-warming gases.
What’s being done about fast fashion?
Some collection incentives, including Tell-Tex’s Fabric Loop project, are hoping to invest in newer technologies to carry out some of the sorting labor involved in textile recycling, to help keep pace with the inflow of clothing at a manageable cost. But for that, the research and innovation to develop such technologies require considerable funding.
Meanwhile, you can engage with friendlier alternatives to fast fashion, such as donating to and shopping at thrift stores. In addition to saving you money, secondhand shopping can help keep usable and even exciting finds from piling up in landfills.
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