Clothes and recycling of textiles
At the end of this post is a 13 minutes long video, well worth your time to watch. Please do. We can only turn this containership around *together*
According to this video, 10% of global emissions stem froom the textile industry, and over 4% of global freshwater usage, but I’ve read considerably higher figures.
- Most of old clothes and overstock end up in landfill or burnt.
- Understand that shops like Parisina (or Fabricland) almost exclusively sell fabrics that are non-recyclable, because they are 90-100% mixed synthetics.
- Learn to CARE for your clothes to make them last longer.
- Look for styles that aren’t going to go out of fashion next month.
- Buy second hand whenever possible.
- Polyester is plastic. Recycled polyester is not made from old clothes, it’s made from plastic waste. It’s a petroleum product.
- Don’t let anyone shame you for buying a tshirt or whatnot in a supermarket chain – that is fine, as long as your intent is to wash and wear it, hopefully for years to come.
- What fast fashion really is is “it’s so cheap it doesn’t matter if I only wear it a couple of times before getting rid of it. If it doesn’t wash well, I can throw it away.”
- Train yourself to look at garments, look at seams, are they cut on the grain, is the overlock missing half the seam allowance etc?
- Wear older clothes as inner layers- no one is going to see it.
When I was a kid in the 70s, H&M was the cheapest of the cheap crap. They had cutting edge designers but used garbage materials and didn’t cut on the grain. You put it in the washingmachine, and didn’t always recognise it afterwards. It had twisted, lost it’s colour, etc. And that was without using tumble-driers.
Now it’s companies like She!n and temu tempting young fashionistas. Inform yourself how these companies are run, and teach your young.
Lastly, Thank you mum for scalding me when I wanted to buy it from there anyway, coz it was *cheap*, and it looked *cool*, and I was a young teen with a minimal clothes allowance, desperate to fit in.
It forced me to learn to sew and design my own, which I recognise is a priviledge.
I am happy to teach anyone who is interested in learning, but it’s a complicated skill and it takes time and practice.
Today I’m wearing shorts that used to be jeans, and a shirt cut from a pair of trousers that never fit right. I dare say you’d never know.
CatpawsCafe the blog will close at the end of May, replaced by Catpaw Writes over on substack. If you like what I write, come join me over there. It will be a little different, but it’s free.
Here’s the link to the same post
https://catpawwrites.substack.com/p/clothes-and-recycling-of-textiles
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