How to buy clothes without destroying the planet
Shopping tips that will help protect the environment from further damage, from an expert on sustainability and fast fashion
The combination of the start of a new school year followed so quickly by the change in season often feels like a good reason to shop for new additions to your wardrobe. But before you go out to buy more, consider some statistics found in US author Elizabeth Cline’s latest book, The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good.
Data like:
●A third of the microplastic pollution junking up our oceans is coming from what we wear.
●A garbage truck’s worth of unwanted fashion is landfilled in the United States every 1.3 minutes; in Britain, it was predicted that 235 million items of clothing would be sent to the dump in 2019.
●For every 2 million tonnes of textiles we keep in circulation and out of landfills, we can reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road.
Cline walks readers through the impact that clothes, “our most personal and universal possession”, have on the environment. In her 2012 book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Cline drops knowledge that clothing brands’ frequent churn of new styles and more affordable fare (aka “fast fashion”) sway consumers to buy more.
