Category Archives: Garment Disposal

Designing Out Landfill; some notes and stats.

Thanks to Jo Angell at Puff and Flock for writing up some notes of the Designing Out Landfill Conference that took place on June 15th.  

It seems some highlights of the morning presentations included some interesting statistics.

Sophie Thomas, co-founder of Greengaged

  • UK households produce over 25 million tonnes of waste every year.
  • UK currently has 106 sq miles of landfill
  • One pair of shoes takes 8,000 litres of water to make
  • 1 computer requires 1.83 tons of raw materials to make

 

Kresse Wesling, founder of E&KO

Presented two case studies where 50% donated back to the material source.

  • bags from used fire hose pipes (West End belt worn my Cameron Diaz in June Vogue, p.95)
  • bags for Sainsbury’s from coffee sacks used to deliver the raw coffee

Nick Morley, Oakdene Hollins

  • 1 gallon of oil to make 1 kilo of polyester
  • ‘comingled collection’ bad for textile recycling through cross contamination
  • ‘diversion’ schemes good: Morley gave a shout out to Vancouver’s own Mountain Equipment Co-Op for encouraging their customer to sell and trade their used MEC products with other customers online.

 

Casper Gray, Director of Wax, Sustainable design and research

Suggested possible causes for the death (end of life) of textiles:

  • Fashion
  • Boredom/change
  • Bad fit
  • Wear
  • Damage
  • Loss

Other Causes:

  • Off cuts and errors (during manufacturing)
  • fabric samples

According to Angell, Gray “implied that designers could have a stronger role in improving these aspects.”

Click here, for the full write up at Puff and Flock, a London based textile collective, that it’s a great resource for critical textile design thinking.

Source: Puff and Flock

The nature of your garment is to fall apart?

 

 

Another interesting article taken from The Independent today, discussed some frustrations in dealing with products that not only fall apart, but are designed to fall apart.

 

Thought it might be time for another poll.




feeling fashionably overweight?

The “Household Textile Environmental Impact Calculator” wants your closet to think about going on a diet.

The calculator asseses you based on annual water usage, energy usage, use of non-renewable resources, and pollution. Unfortunately the calculator doesn’t account for non conventional fabrics, such as hemp. What is impressive however, is the fact that the calculator takes you through the lifecycle of your garments: purchasing, care, and disposal.

The year is almost up, so Dec. marks a perfect time to start calculating and re-calculating to think about consumption practices for the year ahead. It doesn’t take long to calculate your annual textile environmental impact, and you may be surprised at how easy it is. I don’t know about the accuracy of it all, but one thing is for sure: the exercise promotes the process of  reflecting on the lifecycle of your waredrobe.

So how did you rank?



 

Source: In the Loop and Ecotextile News