Category Archives: statistics

Sew 138 – Washing and wearing

After our clothing has been made and sold, the main environmental impact comes from the way we wash and dry it.

In The Sustainable Fashion Handbook by Sandy Black, the University of Oxford’s Chris Jardine estimates that each washing machine or dryer uses about 10 percent of an average household’s electricity consumption.

Simple options for reducing environmental impacts (and cost) of washing and drying are:

Wash full loads – the energy required for a washing cycle is the same, regardless of whether the machine is full or empty;
Wash at as low temperature as possible – heating the water uses most of the electricity required to run the machine;
Dry garments on a line, not in a dryer – line dry garments outside on a washing line, or inside on a well-spaced clothes rack. Continue reading →

Sew 130 – Fast fashion waste

The built environment shapes the way we live, food choices influence our health and the clothing we chose to wear is a statement about who we are.

Media reports today confirm that fast food is having a profound influence on our diet, with a new Australian Health Survey by the Bureau of Statistics showing we are eating 30 per cent less fruit and vegetables than 15 years ago.

Curtin University’s Professor Mike Daube is quoted as saying fast food has eclipsed vegetables as a dietary staple, which is a major concern because of the implications for health costs and disease burden in society. “The results are a triumph for the mass marketing of junk food,” he says.

Just as fast food has negatively influenced our diets, fast fashion has transformed the clothing and textile landscape. In the past decade, our entire approach has changed since globalisation made clothing cheaper and more plentiful that ever before.

Clothing waste is a very real issue, leading to organisations such as the UK-based charity TRAID working to stop clothes from being thrown away and Hong Kong-based NGO Redress promoting environmental sustainability in the fashion industry by reducing textile waste, pollution, water and energy consumption.

Tweets from the Ecochic Awards yesterday via @TRAID and @Redress_Asia quoted: “A third of all clothing is still ending up in landfill In the UK … we throw £140 million of clothes into the bin every year … according to WRAP UK 17-20% of garments made remain unsold.”

Such waste is worrying and these figures are probably similar in other developed nations such as Australia. A desire to value reject natural fibre clothing underpins my 365-day Sew it Again project to raise awareness of how we can creatively reconstruct and upcycle what already exists instead of always buying new.

Sew 130 is two op-shop found jumpers. The striped wool had a couple of small holes which I mended by hand-stitching on a few buttons. The khaki wool jumper was cut and reshaped as a jumper skirt, with the sleeves sewn together (on the diagonal to optimise length) to become a scarf. Ele has accessorised with bright blue and makes these rejects look groovy.

Sew 114 – Jeans repinafored

Fashion Revolution Day has arrived. It’s exactly one year since Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh killing 1133 workers, injuring many others, and exposing unpleasant truths about cheap, unethical and exploitative clothing.

We’re fussy about what we wear because we want to look good, feel comfy, reflect an image, belong to our tribe. Wearing any old thing is rarely enough. We want to make a statement.

Fashion Revolution Day is a chance to wear your heart on your sleeve, think about what you’re wearing, show your labels, ask the brand who made it, reflect on whether it is an ethical and sustainable choice.

Clothing the world soaks up massive resources when you do the sums – 7.2 billion people each (on average) consuming 11 kg of apparel fibre (ie clothing) every year. Look at this graph below and you’ll see how consumption is rising, with the growth mainly in synthetic fibres made from petroleum. source document Continue reading →

Sew 113 – Jean genie

Jeans are produced in their millions annually and an average pair weighs at least half a kilogram. That’s a huge resource in terms of cotton farmed, fibre spun, fabric woven, dyed, sewn, finished and marketed.

It is enthralling – and appalling – to think that 253 tons of clothing is thrown away by Hong Kong residents on the average day, according to their Environmental Protection Department.

Redress is a Hong-Kong based NGO with a mission to promote environmental sustainability in the fashion industry by reducing textile waste, pollution, water and energy consumption.

The 5-metre high mountain of second-hand clothing, photographed below, was designed as part of the Get Redressed campaign to illustrate the Chinese territory’s textile waste and is just the tip of a precipice because it represents only 7.5 tons of textiles, or 3% of the daily dumping of clothing. Continue reading →

Sew 111 – The 4T-shirt skirt

Fast fashion means new clothing has never been cheaper or more plentiful. The process of shopping, trying and buying clothing in stores (or online) is recreational therapy – replacing tailor-made or making your own clothes.

A recent Choice magazine article quotes Council of Textiles and Fashion Industries of Australia figures (based on value) that 92% of clothes sold in Australia are imported. Of these, 73% are made in China, 6% in Bangladesh, 2% in India, with the rest from Italy, Indonesia and other countries.

Global supply chains mean we have lost sight of the making process. Skills, knowledge, and understanding about where and how clothing is made are diminishing. The new clothing story is about consuming end results, limitless choice, on tap 24/7, then toss and replace once the gloss has gone (Americans toss 30kgs of clothing each per year).

The Rana Plaza clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh this time last year exposed the dark underbelly of the fashion industry – sparking a global Fashion Revolution to inspire cultural, ethical, environmental and social change in the way we engage with our clothes.

If you have Made in Bangladesh on your labels, read more about Where your clothes are really made in this well-researched Women’s Weekly article published six months after the Rana Plaza collapse.

The first Fashion Revolution Day campaign is Who Made Your Clothes? Take a look at the label, ask questions, consider whether it was ethically made by someone who was adequately compensated for their work. Post a selfie with the hashtag #insideout to support the campaign. Continue reading →

Sew 108 – Resewing existing clothing

Weird, eccentric, alternative, unusual, different, unique, junky, ragged, rustic, rough, bodgie, wasted, original, rad, scrappy, yuck, quirky, bespoke, creative … adjectives describing various results from taking scissors to existing clothes and resewing them.

There are professional designers creating cutting-edge clothing from upcycled materials all over the world, with the best collated by New York-based academic Sass Brown in her latest book Refashioned and website Eco Fashion Talk.

I’m an amateur, learning by doing, having a go with what I have, resewing rejected natural fibre clothing using home-sewing techniques and posting results on sewitagain.com every day this year.

One doesn’t have to look far to see evidence of clothing waste, millions of tonnes of it every year. Americans throw out 30kg of textiles per person per year, according to Elizabeth Cline in Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. And at least half of donated clothing ends up being shipped overseas to African countries, according to Beverly Gordon in her book Textiles: The Whole Story. Continue reading →

Sew 96 – Creative inspiration

It is affirming to be around people who value your work, as it was for me yesterday meeting many wonderful women of threads at the Australian Textile Artists and Surface Designers Association Queensland social day.

Upcycling existing clothing is not new but many have lost the skills and confidence it requires or are not prepared to spend time and effort in doing so. We all have different priorities and are at different stages of life, but textile artists, designers and quilters, get what I’m about.

A common first-world problem is wardrobes bulging with clothing – we often keep stuff we bought in previous years and (on average) we each go on to buy another 11kg of clothing every year, according to FAO fabric apparel statistics. Multiply that by 7 billion people in the world and you begin to appreciate the impact clothing habits have on global resource use and ecological health. Most of the rejects end up as landfill.

To demonstrate what 11kgs of clothing looks like, I boxed up some cast-offs (thanks Sally) photographed right. To show fibre types, the synthetics nearly fill a 50-litre storage box, the cotton about half a box and the wool, linen and cellulose fibres are about one garment each.

In the front of this photo, there’s a measuring stick distilling the FAO figures from which I’ve calculated that on average, each person in the world is each year consuming 6.6kg synthetic, 3.74kg cotton, 400g cellulose fibres (eg viscose), 200g of wool and 150g flax/linen. In reality, the world is drowning in clothing. You almost can’t give it away except to third-world countries where most first-world cast-offs end up, leaving skill-displacement and disposal problems in their wake. Continue reading →

Sew 94 – Repair rather than toss

Being mindful about consumption – of food, energy, clothing, technology, sweet stuff – leads to outcomes that are best for our selves and our world.

A recent Rabobank calculation found that every minute there are 158 new mouths to feed (and dress) in the world and that by 2050, on current trends, there will be just 0.5 hectares of land per person on the planet.

From my own research last year, this graph (below) from a FAO World Apparel Fibre Consumption Survey visually demonstrates the rate of fibre use increasing by 80 percent in two decades. The report is written from a consumption perspective on recession impacts but I interpret it as an overall warning because per capita consumption between 1992 and 2010 increased from 7 to 11kgs per person per year. Continue reading →

Sew 93 – Getting your stuff together

Desire, buy, use, reject and toss are the five stages of engagement with stuff that make our world go around.

New Scientist magazine this week says humans are materialistic by nature, but we have an odd relationship with the things we own. Possessions enrich our lives but they also come at a cost, both environmental and psychological. In a fabulous 10-page spread, the magazine dissects our relationship to material goods and ponders the future of ownership.

Alison George writes that tools for hunter-gathering were our first possessions and over time objects became valued not just for utility but also for prestige to advertise the owner’s skill or social status. When people began to live in one place their possessions began to accumulate. Continue reading →

Sew 70 – Waistline issues

This dropped-waist dress was created by cropping the waistline from a zippered A-line skirt and sewing it to a reversed polo skirt sans collar.

We know charity op shops are bulging with perfectly good clothing. After pondering why so many quality garments are being moved on, I’ve come up with a theory. People are literally outgrowing them and need to upsize. Bingo.

There’s an obvious correlation between our bulging waistlines and the burgeoning mountain of waste clothing. Australia is ranked as one of the fattest nations in the developed world, with three in five people (over 60%) now overweight and that figure is growing all the time.

One of the reasons I sew is to adjust clothes to fit my changing shape. Most people don’t sew – and since clothing has become so cheap it is easy to just upsize by buying new and tossing out the too-tight old stuff.

In their book Plant Obesity How we’re eating ourselves and the planet to death, Garry Egger and Boyd Swinburn link obesity with consumerism and climate change. They suggest we can help ourselves by living a low-carbon lifestyle, changing our way of thinking about how we live as much as our actual behaviours. Continue reading →