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In a dusty yard on the edge of the desert around 100 miles from Expo City Dubai, the venue for COP28, 20 tonnes of textile waste is perishing, clothes spilling out of plastic wrapped bales, being whipped by the sand and bleached by the sun. Its presence underscores the challenges facing the fashion industry when it comes to collecting, sorting and recycling unwanted clothing — and the emptiness of some companies’ “zero waste to landfill” promises.
The waste came to the attention of Dubai-based sustainability expert Anita Nouri in early October, after she received a call asking for her help in tackling it. (Nouri has chosen to protect the caller’s identity to shield them from any repercussions.) The waste’s exact origins are unknown. But this isn’t unusual for a global trade that excels in transporting used or unwanted clothes from one market to another without assigning responsibility to anyone — whether brands, retailers or exporters — for what happens to them.
With no one responsible for overseeing or ensuring integrity in the management of garment and textile waste globally, there’s also no clear strategy or solution — nor funding to implement any would-be solution — for what to do with it.
The UAE is one of the world’s top importers of used clothing, according to the OEC, and there are more than 40 “multidisciplinary free zones” in the country: areas where foreign investors can have full ownership of their companies and are now known as hotspots for the importation of secondhand clothing due to financial exemptions and independent regulations. Free zones have led to problems with waste in other countries and in Chile’s Atacama Desert, some 60,000 tonnes of textile waste has accumulated — the unsellable remnants of what’s imported via the Alto Hospicio free zone.
It’s a growing problem. “Between 2000 and 2022, global fibre production has grown from 58 million tonnes to 116 million tonnes, so we’re consuming a lot more clothing and disposing of it much quicker in greater volumes, and we don’t have the scaled infrastructure to deal with it,” says Dr Patsy Perry, a reader in fashion marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University. “When it’s exported, it’s out of sight out of mind.”
Unlike household waste, which is more likely to be collected and processed by local authorities — particularly in the Global North — no one is directly responsible for collecting or processing textile waste. In the void created by this lack of either accountability or centralised infrastructure, a fragmented system of collection, sorting and recycling has emerged, says Megan Stoneburner, fibres and materials director at Textile Exchange.
Countless private textile collectors exist in fashion’s key consumer markets, collecting from clothing banks, retailers and charities. Although each has its own systems and priorities, what often links them is a zero waste to landfill promise. Many fashion brands make similar promises with their take-back programmes.
Among the bales in the UAE, an identifying stamp is visible on the side of one disintegrating plastic covering: “Property of Statewide Cleaning Cloths Australia Pty Ltd”. On its website, Statewide Cleaning Cloths Australia (SCCA) claims to be “Australia’s Zero Waste Textiles Collector”, which collects unwanted donated clothing, shoes, bags and toys from charities and ships them all to its sister company, Australian Textiles Manufacturing Malaysia (ATMM), for sorting. According to SCCA, 45 per cent of what’s collected is processed into products like cloths and mats; 55 per cent is exported worldwide as “affordable textiles”, without additional detail as to what that means.
Items are sorted into over 500 different categories, according to factors like local terrain and cultural preferences, ATMM CEO Dale Warren tells Vogue Business. This is designed to ensure that no products are deemed unsuitable for use when they reach their end market. The UAE is among the countries the group exports to.
Speaking on behalf of the group, Warren says that — based on the colour of the straps around the bales and the presence of plastic among the 20 tonnes of waste — he believes the stamped coverings in question could have been collected and used by others further along the chain. Warren emphasises that dumping textiles is not representative of SCCA’s standards. “This is a small action of a rogue processor [or] trader and is not reflective of the textiles recovery industry,” he says. “Our zero waste policy extends across our entire operation, irrespective of geographical borders.”
This underlines what Perry calls the “porous” nature of secondhand clothing exportation.
Pledging to send zero waste to landfill (as many companies do) is admirable in theory, but it’s impossible in reality, given the way the industry is set up today, experts say. The geographic expanse of fashion’s dumping grounds is spiralling, and does not happen at the hands of only a few rogue actors. “Technically, there is no reason why any textile should go to landfill, although that may then mean you’ll be sending some to energy for waste,” says Ross Barry, managing director of UK textile recycling company LMB Co. “But the sheer volume of clothing in the world against the capacity of recyclers makes me know that [zero waste] is absolutely impossible.”
Between 40 and 50 per cent of the secondhand clothing bales that arrive in Ghana and Kenya almost instantly become waste, according to The Or Foundation and Changing Markets Foundation — both because the people doing the sorting can never fully know what the site-specific needs and cultural preferences are in the places they’re sorting on behalf of, and the clothes arrive in such large volumes and with such frequency that the supply automatically outstrips demand in local markets.
In the UAE, 20 tonnes is an enormous problem locally; but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what’s found in other high-import countries. Communities are stepping in. Tailors at Kantamanto Market in Ghana, which receives 15 million items per week, recirculate secondhand clothes to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of items throughout their careers, while the Ecocitex textile waste recycling factory in Chile was founded in response to the country’s growing textile waste problem. Nonetheless, these are scrappy and grassroots efforts that are taking on the responsibility of managing waste, which experts say should be shouldered by the companies making these garments at the outset.
After she received the call in October, Nouri immediately referred the issue on to Araceli Gallego, country coordinator for Fashion Revolution UAE, who in turn, formed a small group of Dubai-based sustainable fashion advocates, including Nouri, to tackle the waste. Links with local charity retailer Thrift for Good and FabricAID — a social enterprise that provides secondhand clothing to marginalised communities in the MENA region — have been formed to redistribute the sellable clothing through formal retail channels, and there is a plan for damaged items to be refurbished or upcycled by designers within the group of advocates and via partnerships with universities.
While Gallego is determined to save as much as possible through various means, she admits that some items will likely be in such poor condition they will have to go to landfill. “We are working together to find a solution for this huge problem,” says Gallego. “This is happening in our backyard.” They are frantically trying to source avenues for funding or sponsorship for its processing and transportation.
Gallego notes the beauty in the power of community — but, the reality is they have little choice because the flow of waste doesn’t subside.
Who’s responsible?
While communities re-sort, redistribute, upcycle and recycle, the brands and retailers who put the products on the market in the first place are free to continue overproducing with consequences and wash their hands of responsibility from the point of sale.
“It’s easy to overproduce because brands aren’t really seeing the cost of producing too much. The cost is on the environment and on other stakeholders,” says Perry.
A few brands are starting to accept some responsibility — to varying degrees of success. Take-back schemes offered by fast fashion brands, but operated by third parties, still result in clothing being exported and dumped, according to a July 2023 report by Changing Markets.
Print on-demand brand Teemill has taken a more joined-up approach. The company makes its clothing from 100 per cent cotton so that every item it produces can be recycled by its partner and turned back into yarn for new “remill” products. Until recently it accepted its own brand products back for recycling, but with the launch of its new programme, Thread Not Dead, it has opened up to any 100 per cent cotton clothing from any brand, in any condition.
CEO Chris Houghton pinpoints a holistic approach that is sorely lacking. “Everything we’ve ever done has been designed from the start to be recovered or remade,” he says. Until that level of certainty for end-of-life solutions — whatever the solution and whoever the provider — is universal, the evidence of broken “zero waste to landfill” promises will continue to show up in fields, on beaches and on the fringes of cities across the Global South.
“Brands have got a massive responsibility, because they’re the ones designing things in the first place,” says Houghton. “They’re the ones deciding how big of a problem we have; they have determined how expensive or difficult it’s going to be to clean it up.”
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