STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Donated clothing enters a stream of garments, many of which are shipped to poor countries where they are sorted and sold or dumped in landfills creating small mountains of waste along beaches
- Fast fashion, or cheap copies of high fashion garments sold at affordable prices, is a large contributor to the fashion industry’s dirty secret that only 1% of all clothing is recycled and most textiles ultimately end up in landfills
- The fashion industry’s goal is to make people unhappy with their clothing and feed an addiction to purchasing new clothes as often as possible. Although several companies are exploring the idea of renting clothing, this fundamentally means the clothing must be well-made and durable
- You can lower the impact of fast fashion by taking several steps, including purchasing high-quality, sustainably made clothing, repairing and reusing your clothes, swapping and exchanging clothes with friends and family and donating to local charities that keep the clothing in your community
Studies conducted during the on-again, off-again lockdowns of COVID-19 revealed how damaging social isolation was to most people. A reporter from The Conversation1 did an informal review of 33 published studies that included nearly 132,000 people from around the world and found that social restrictions increase your risk of depression over 4.5 times and the odds you would experience loneliness nearly doubled.
During this time, many people turned to what has been called “retail therapy,” or shopping for clothing, much of which occurred online during the lockdowns. While some suggest that buying new clothes could make you feel better, most people agree those positive feelings seldom last long.
What does last is the impact fast fashion has on your pocketbook and the environment. Underneath all the glamor in the store windows and beautiful photos online are dirty secrets the fashion industry doesn’t want you to know or understand. If you’re like many people, you haven’t considered what happens to your clothes after you donate them.2
You might feel like you’re doing your part by donating unwanted clothes to charity or dropping them off at a take-back bin. But the sad reality is that a large portion of these discarded clothes simply ends up in a landfill somewhere.3 The overabundance of donated clothing is the result of the push for cheap clothing by manufacturers whose sole goal is to create demand and boost their income. These actions have made them a major contributor to environmental pollution.4
In 2014, Americans bought 500% more clothing than in the 1980s5 and Canadians bought 400% more clothing.6 Although the problem is significant, there are potentially effective options from which to choose. Before discussing these ideas, let’s discover why it’s crucial we make changes to the way we buy, use, and discard clothing.
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What Happens to Donated Clothing?
Stacy Dooley is a BBC investigative reporter whose 2018 documentary, “Fashion’s Dirty Secrets,”7 shone a light on the damage retail therapy is doing in developing countries. You might be surprised to learn that fashion is second only to oil as the top five most polluting industries in the world.
As shops can quickly produce copies of high fashion items at affordable prices, people are tempted to update their look. This feeds their insatiable appetite, increasing the potential that retail therapy becomes even more addictive. Unfortunately, of the massive amount of fast fashion that reaches take-back bins and charity shops, less than 1% will eventually get recycled into new garments.
Much of the cast-offs ends up along the coast of Ghana, which Bloomberg reports is one of the largest importers of used clothing.8 As clothing gets cheaper and more disposable, the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion items each year. Bloomberg reports this is approximately 14 pieces of clothing for every person walking the Earth. Shockingly, this is more than twice the number produced just a little over 20 years ago in 2000.
Once the clothing arrives, it undergoes sorting by brokers and processors whose business is to export the clothing to developing countries where it will be purchased and worn. Once clothing has entered the deluge of garments transported to Ghana and India, there is no way to track what happens to it.
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Mark Burrows Smith, chief executive officer of Textile Recycling International, spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg, noting that in his experience with a company that processes 400 million garments annually in the U.K. and Ireland,9 “I think it needs to be understood that all textiles, whether new or recycled, will ultimately end up in landfill. The key is to keep the garment in use as long as possible.”
The cast-offs that arrive by the bale from industrialized nations are known in Ghana as obroni wawu, or dead white people’s clothes. It’s almost incomprehensible to the people of Ghana that so much clothing could be thrown away.
Accra is the capital of Ghana and just south is Chorkor Beach along the Gulf of Guinea. There you’ll find a wall of clothing more than 6 feet high. The rags have been packed down through exposure to the weather and are degrading in a putrid pile. It is here that people have built a small town on a foundation of rags.
Solomon Noi is the city’s head of Waste Management and he believes that 40% of all the used clothing that moves through the port of Accra is not worn or repurposed. Although the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to take care of the waste, banning the imports would shut down a trade that supports many people’s livelihoods.
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Recycled Clothing Is a Myth Perpetuated by Retailers
Old clothing rarely gets recycled into new garments because the technology does not exist to handle the waste produced at scale. Additionally, different fibers require different chemicals to break down the product for recycling. Many garments are made with two or three types of fiber, making recycling nearly impossible.10
Instead, clothing enters a supply chain supported by workers in third-world countries to prolong the life of the material before it eventually ends up in a landfill or piled high along the beach. The recycling myth was created and perpetuated by companies that want people to continue to purchase clothing without feeling guilty about what happened to the clothes they discard.
Bloomberg reports11 that in 2013, H&M began a used clothing collection program across 40 countries to tap into growing environmental awareness. The H&M’s blog once claimed: “H&M will recycle them and create new textile fiber, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M.”12
Today, H&M acknowledges that only 1% of garments collected are recycled each year and most end up in landfills,13 but the damage has already been done. Other fashion chains began their own recycling campaigns and none acknowledged that the capability of recycling at that scale did not exist. In 1950, New York department store tycoon, Earl Puckett said:14
“It’s our job to make women unhappy with what they have in the way of apparel. Basic utility cannot be the foundation of a prosperous apparel industry. We must accelerate obsolescence.”
In 1974, Norman Wechsler, president of Saks Fifth Avenue, said obsolescence in women’s fashion was “the name of the game.”15 By the 1980s, the Spanish clothing company Zara had pioneered a model that allowed them to roll out thousands of designs each year.
Rancid Piles Fed by Fast Fashion Pleasure-Inducing Compulsion
The new production model changed the shopping habits of Zara consumers as they began visiting the store four times the usual number each year. A 2007 study16 found that the company had inadvertently tapped into strategies that support addictive behavior.
The researchers found that the decision to purchase a product was related to how much the individual anticipated they would gain and lose. A consumer purchase could be predicted by looking at specific patterns of brain activation that showed they weighed a combination of preference for the item and price considerations. In other words, your brain likes to find a bargain.
Bloomberg reports17 that in the past 20 years, the average number of times a person wears their clothes before getting rid of them has dropped by 36%. In America, that equates to wearing clothing less than 50 times on average. In China, the average number of times an individual wore their clothes dropped from over 200 to just 62 times.
With a greater eye on the environmental impact, several companies have explored the idea of renting your wardrobe. The business model is described by researchers as “providing consumers with the ability to focus on using their products instead of ownership.”18 One research team surveyed 362 adults19 born between 1997 and 2002 and found the attitude of the Gen Z consumer helped mediate the intention to use a rental service.
However, while this may help feed the consumer’s desire for new clothing and keep a particular garment in circulation longer, the fundamental idea of rental clothing means the garment must be well-made and durable.
The fashion industry used to have four seasons but today collections are updated on a nearly weekly basis. In a 2018 CBC Marketplace report,20 journalist Charlsie Agro investigated the claims made by retail take-back programs and took a Canadian family behind the scenes to show them the journey clothes donated at their local charity take on the way to Africa or India.
Claudia Marsales, senior manager of waste and environmental management for Markham, Ontario, believes the take-back programs are a losing proposition and nothing more than a form of greenwashing. It does nothing to address “the broken business model of fast fashion,”21 and is really just circumventing rather than addressing the real problems.
In short, the industry business model is the root issue, and recycling programs are a simple way to make the industry appear more responsible without actually altering the way they do business.
Help Lower the Impact of Fast Fashion
In addition to being chemically dependent and conventionally produced, cotton also needs water — lots of water. Chemicals and toxic dyes are released from these textiles, adding to our global water pollution problem. At the end of the day, the answer to lowering global waste lies with every individual doing their part to reduce total consumption.
The solution requires consumers to purchase high-quality, sustainably made clothing that is cared for and worn much longer than fast fashion. When you purchase clothes, seek fabrics that are made with organic cotton, hemp, silk, wool and bamboo. Consider exchanging clothing with your family and friends, especially when you have clothes hanging in your closet that have not been worn for more than 6 months.
Find ways to repair and reuse your clothing and consider selling or swapping online. Keep in mind that most donated clothing ends up in landfills, so consider seeking out reputable charities that serve the needs of your local community, such as your local church.
In the past I didn’t give much thought to my clothing, but I’ve since dedicated myself to wearing sustainably produced organic clothing and supporting the “Care What You Wear” movement through Regeneration International.22 I added a line of organic clothing grown and sewn in the USA to my webstore, and we support the SITO brand — a GOTS-certified organic clothing brand by the biodynamic certification agency Demeter.
The Mercola-RESET Biodynamic Organic Project is also helping 55 certified organic farmers in India convert to biodynamic production of cotton on 110 acres of land. Biodynamic farming is organic by nature, but it goes even further, operating on the premise that the farm is regenerative and entirely self-sustaining.
Biodynamic farming brings animals and plants together to form a living web of life, a self-sustaining ecosystem that benefits the surrounding community. RESET (Regenerate, Environment, Society, Economy, Textiles) will pay all organic biodynamic farmers in our project a 25% premium over conventional cotton prices, which will be paid directly to the farmers.
So, going forward, give some serious thought to cleaning up and “greening” your wardrobe. Your choices as a consumer will help guide the fashion industry toward more humane and environmentally sane manufacturing processes, and not just stopping short at a façade of sustainability through take-back recycling programs that do very little to curtail our global textile waste and environmental pollution problems.
- 1 The Conversation, April 11th, 2022
- 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17 Bloomberg, November 2, 2022
- 3 CBC, January 19, 2018
- 4 UN Environment Program, November 12, 2018
- 5 The Atlantic, July 18, 2014
- 6 YouTube, January 19, 2018 Min 3:54
- 7 BBC, October 9, 2018
- 13 H&M, Let’s Close the Loop
- 16 Neuron, 2007; 53(1)
- 18 Sustainability, 2021;13(15)
- 19 Study Finds, August 12, 2021
- 20 CBC News January 19, 2019
- 21 YouTube, January 19, 2018 min 9:40
- 22 Regeneration International
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
