In his textile recycling factory on the industrial outskirts of East London,
Lawrence Barry wades across a floor feet-deep in other people's discarded
clothing. Above him, precarious fabric dunes lean against the walls and
reach up to the corrugated iron roof. The air is heavy with mothballs and
the sweet, cloying stench of stale sweat.
There was a time, 58-year-old Barry says, when the clothes coming into his
warehouse reeked of love, instead. “People used to buy a good-quality suit
and that was it. That was their suit,” he says. “The clothes that ended up
here were worn to death, treasured, loved.” Now the 100 workers at LMB
Textile Recycling spend their days sorting through the detritus of our
addiction to throwaway fashion - cheap, synthetic, often unworn, rarely
loved. And Barry and his employees have unwittingly found themselves at the
cutting edge of British eco-policy.
Textiles have never been a great concern for keen-to-be-seen-to-be-green
governments that get more brownie points from an easy tonne of glass or
paper. But the textile problem has become too vast to ignore.
In February the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
will launch a “sustainable clothing roadmap” to try to reduce the
environmental impact of our clothes. In preparation, it has commissioned a
series of studies in which the true extent of our shopping habit is revealed
in stark detail.
In the past five years, with the rise of “value retailers” such as Primark, H&M
and TK Maxx, and supermarket fashion ranges, the price of clothing in the UK
has plummeted by up to 25 per cent. At the same time, the amount of clothes
we buy has increased by almost 40 per cent to more than two million tonnes a
year.
Instead of two annual seasons for clothes - winter and summer - we are now
offered, and can afford, new apparel every few weeks. We buy fresh holiday
wardrobes, which we wear for a fortnight. Our style icons are celebrities
who are never seen in the same outfit twice. And as our high street stores
reel from the credit crunch, still we are cashing in - packing out the
shops, desperate for discounted clothes.
As a result, textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK.
About 74 per cent of those two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year
end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester,
viscose and acrylic blends.
On a recent fact-finding trip to a waste-disposal site in Croydon, South
London, MPs from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee learnt
that the proportion of textile waste to other rubbish at council tips across
the country has risen from 7 per cent to 30 per cent in five years.
Staff at the tip call the problem “the Primark effect”. Less than ten miles
away, in Central London, the budget retailer's 70,000sqft flagship store
flogs piles of ever cheaper, ever more disposable clothes. Even in a year
ending with the most severe economic downturn in recent history, Primark
recorded a 21 per cent sales increase in 2007/08.
Meanwhile, the poor quality of our cheap fashion fixes has caused the bottom
to drop out of the recycled textile industry. The value of recycled material
has fallen by 71 per cent over the past 15 years. Factor in collection and
sorting costs, and many rag dealers and charities, forced to find outlets
for donations that are too shabby to sell in their shops, find themselves
paying out to recycle.
Furthermore, far less second-hand clothing is recyclable in the first place -
a mere 3.5 per cent of that looming two million tonnes, or just under a
third of the paltry 13 per cent of waste textiles that are recovered through
charities, textile banks and rag dealers each year. (The remaining 13 per
cent - clothing neither recovered nor sent to landfill - is incinerated.)
Lawrence Barry is no eco-warrior. He came into the business to make money. But
back then, the trade was built on recycling. “When I started I was recycling
90 per cent of the clothes that came through,” he says. “Today it's down to
30 per cent.”
He speaks wistfully of the hard-wearing, workaday fabrics of yesteryear -
linsey-woolsey and gabardine. They may have been coarse and drab but they
were natural products and enjoyed second lives as industrial wiping cloths,
insulation and stuffing.
Today, about two thirds of the fibres, yarns and fabrics coming into the UK
are synthetic. They are blended into every conceivable combination -
sometimes rendering them dangerously flammable in the process - and are
nearly impossible to pick apart after use. Barry's recycling figure of 30
per cent is the norm across the second-hand clothing industry.
Most of the remaining 70 per cent is sent abroad, to Africa and Eastern
Europe, where a booming industry has grown up around our unwanted exports.
Critics have long condemned the practice for distorting fragile markets in
developing countries. The donating public, too, has sometimes found it
difficult to reconcile the friendly image of charity shops with the
necessarily hard-nosed businesses behind them.
But the problem is of our own making. We are offloading more and more clothing
to charities and textile banks, but more and more of it is unsellable in the
UK. A negligible 1.7 per cent of our annual clothing purchases will end up
being sold second-hand in Britain, and on average charity shop sales account
for just 10 per cent of a charity's income.
“The rise of discount clothing and a culture of discarding have led to a clear
reduction in the quality of many donated textiles,” says David Moir of the
Association of Charity Shops. “This has put some pressure on donated stock
for sale.”
“We have noticed more and more cheap clothes coming in but we can't sell them
in the shops,” agrees Rob McNeill, a spokesman for Oxfam. “Who would buy a
second-hand Primark T-shirt for a quid when there's a Primark down the road
selling them new and probably cheaper? We can't compete.”
Instead, Oxfam sends the clothes up to its recycling centre, Wastesaver, in
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where a team of 45 women sorts through 120
tonnes a week. Their manager, Tony Clarke, says that their weekly record is
160 tonnes: “We're pushing for 24-hour sorting lines. We get more than we
can possibly process.”
As at LMB in London, about 30 per cent of the garments sent to Wastesaver are
recycled. Oxfam receives £50 to £60 a tonne for them - less than the cost of
sorting and transport.
The rest are sent abroad, mainly to Africa, in huge vacuum-packed,
cellophane-sealed blocks of compressed trousers, jackets and shirts. Each
item has a market price. Bras are the most valuable items, fetching £2,500 a
tonne (“Africa lacks an inexpensive, good-quality bra manufacturing
industry,” explains Clarke). This may sound a lot to pay for our old
underwire and padding, but it bears no comparison to the profit that Oxfam
would make if it could sell more good-quality items back to us.
“In the UK we sell retail,” says Clarke. “When we send clothes overseas, it's
wholesale. Lots of other people are making a profit along the chain. The
difference for us is astronomical.”
What is more, in the past few years Chinese and other Asian clothes exporters
have begun cutting out the circuitous route across Europe, through our
wardrobes and back again, and selling directly to Africa, pushing prices for
second-hand clothing down even farther.
This has led to another, arguably more fundamental, problem. As profit margins
have tightened, charities and rag dealers have been forced to cut corners.
Unlike LMB and Oxfam, most of them now ship out clothes unsorted, trusting
that any costs incurred will be borne by the developing world - and knowing
that what cannot be recycled will end up in their landfills, not ours.
The Salvation Army Trading Company, an arm of the charity that deals solely in
second-hand clothing exports, operates almost a third of the textile banks
in the UK and collects some 75 million items - 34,000 tonnes - of clothing a
year. All this is sent to Eastern Europe. None of it is sorted.
“We scan it for overt waste,” says Paul Ozanne, the trading company's national
recycling co-ordinator. “The rest goes out unsorted.” The Salvation Army
claims that once the clothes reach their destination, 94 per cent will be
reused or recycled. The rest go to landfill. “Of course, that landfill isn't
in this country,” Ozanne laughs.
Yet for every tonne of polyester clothing that ends up in a landfill - whether
in Poland, Uganda or the UK - large amounts of energy will be used to
produce new items to replace the gap in our collective wardrobe.
As well as using up resources, the production process itself adds to the
world's landfills by generating waste by-products. As a nation we buy 460
million new T-shirts a year. Every one that we chuck on the tip will join
the almost half a kilo of waste that it took to create it.
Nearly 300 organisations in the clothing and textile industry have already
signed up to Defra's sustainable clothing roadmap, pledging to reduce waste,
increase energy efficiency and source materials ethically. The initiative
will be launched with plenty of shiny pamphlets and snappy marketing.
But the real solution is surely far simpler, and closer to home.
“I had a wonderful e-mail from an American supermodel,” says Dr Julian
Allwood, a lecturer at the Institute of Manufacturing and co-ordinator of
the Institute's Sustainable Manufacturing Group. “As a British male
academic, it was the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me.”
She offered to fly him to New York to discuss what could be done about
sustainable clothing. After much soul-searching he declined the offer and
advised her, instead, simply to stop changing her clothes.
“Female celebrities need to demonstrate that it's possible to be happy while
wearing the same thing,” he says. “It's where we were 20 years ago. Lives
weren't ruined by lack of clothes. It's a habit that we could break.
“If we spent exactly double the amount of money on each garment and bought
exactly half as many garments, nobody would be impoverished by that.”
