Latest news with #textilewaste
Malay Mail
4 days ago
- Business
- Malay Mail
Sweden struggles with textile waste surge, lets torn clothes be thrown away with regular trash
STOCKHOLM, July 19 — Sweden said Thursday that some used clothes can now be thrown away with regular trash, after an EU ban on textile disposal overwhelmed municipalities and flooded recycling centres. The decision, effective October 1, follows the European Union's decision this year requiring member countries to implement separate textile recycling, alongside existing processes for glass, paper and food waste. Textiles are then sorted to either be reused or recycled as padding, isolation or composite materials. But recycling centres in Sweden and other EU countries have struggled to keep up with the influx that ensued. 'Since the start of the year, the amount of textile waste collected has increased significantly, and with it the costs of sorting,' the Swedish government said in a statement. The new regulation defines which textiles are to be sorted and which can be directly thrown in the trash, such as torn socks, stained textiles and overly worn clothes, environment minister Romina Pourmokhtari told reporters. Humana Sverige, which collects and sells used clothing, told AFP Thursday that 'the influx of textiles we receive has dramatically increased'. Humana told AFP that it was closing 600 of its 1,300 collection points in order to limit the flow. 'It's impossible for us to handle everything,' the organisation explained. The issue is not limited to Sweden, Sverige said: 'Damaged clothes are sent to sorting centres in Europe, but the entire sector is overwhelmed due to this regulation.' — AFP
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
PBS Docuseries Unravels Fashion's Final Destination
If fashion sales maintain the modern-day throwaway-culture momentum, estimates anticipate that the global fashion industry will create 148 million tons of textile waste each year by 2030, according to academic publisher Taylor & Francis. That projection is up 60 percent compared to the textile waste generated in 2015. The crisis is about to be front and center—on television sets, at least—as the popular PBS show 'Human Footprint' returns to explore the global impact of Earth's most ingenious, destructive and adaptable species: Humans. More from Sourcing Journal Podcast: Inside the Material Innovation State of the Industry Report 2025 Material World: Sparxell Spills Ink, Modern Meadow Moves Mercedes Zalando Drops First Collection with Circ Lyocell 'We try to meet audiences where they're at with what they're understanding and then you sort pull back the veneer a little bit. You're like, 'OK, actually, that's not what this is.' It flips it on its head,' Nathan Dappen, producer and director of Human Footprint, told Sourcing Journal. 'Personally, filming with someone like Frederick Anderson—an artist who puts everything he has into something really special for everyone involved—and then juxtaposing that with this place where people don't give a damn, it's just replicas thrown away in the desert—to me, that's powerful. I think it makes both [sides] feel more impactful because you can see how we've been manipulated to participate and be complicit in this problem.' Hosted by Princeton University professor and American evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, the Emmy-nominated docuseries is part science, part travel and entirely introspective. 'This human obsession, transforming nature into clothing and accessories, has helped us thrive in every habitat. But we don't just dress for the weather. Our desires—to fit in, to stand out and to express ourselves—are woven into our DNA,' Staton says at the top of the episode. 'As humans conquered the globe, fashion created the fabric of our civilization. But what's the cost of eight billion people looking so fly?' The cost, it turns out, is complicated. 'If you allow for these kinds of labor abuses, if you create loopholes in waste management, people are simply going to want to participate. They want to have that thing the rich person has, or what their friend has, and I don't think they're a bad person for wanting that,' Dappen said. 'I'm not an economist, but I do know that the world would be a better place if we were not allowed to buy five $10 T-shirts.' The second season's ninth episode, 'Dressed to Kill,' begins in Wyoming's Rocky Mountains. Ryan Jordan, a material scientist, discussed the performance of wool in extreme conditions, highlighting the fiber's natural properties. 'We can't replicate wool,' said Jordan, a gear-tester as well as founder and publisher of Backpacking Light. 'We have not cracked that code.' That code considers the fiber's structure: an elastic core, a textured surface and a waxy coating called lanolin. 'And so, what you end up with is this fiber that interacts with water and heat in a way that keeps you warm if it's cool and cool when it's warm,' Jordan said. 'This is what gives wool its technological edge in terms of comfort when you're pushing it to the limits in an outdoor environment.' What sets humans apart isn't just the ability to turn nature into clothing, per Jordan, but the inability to stop tinkering. 'Wool is a biotechnology that we've developed over hundreds of years,' he said. 'I always think there's performance increases to be had. We're always pushing those limits.' The team then travels to Edinburgh to explore the historical significance of wool in Scotland—because 'there's no better place to witness our obsession with wool than the Golden Shears World Sheep Shearing Championships,' Staton said. The competitors can hawk about a sheep a minute, though the shearing competition is just one aspect of the Royal Highland Show, Scotland's biggest agricultural event. 'I think looking to the past and how people made clothes in the past, the relationship with the raw material can tell you so much about the past society,' said Sally Tuckett, fashion historian and professor at the University of Glasgow. But there's also a social element to clothing: status. 'Sometimes you just want to strut,' said Orlando Palacio, master craftsman and proprietor behind Manhattan's Worth & Worth—one of the last remaining custom hat makers in the United States. 'And there's nothing wrong with strutting, right? I mean, a peacock is a peacock.' And those struts have tribes, fashion designer and philanthropist Frederick Anderson said on camera, noting that tribalism is a basic human function. But what happens when those tribes start to travel at the speed of social media? For the FGI's 2022 Rising Star Award for Womenswear recipient, it's fast fashion: what ultimately boils down to 'how quickly can we get it in your hand and how quickly can you throw it away so you can buy something else.' 'I think people put a label on fashion itself as being wasteful; high-end is not wasteful. We actually can't afford to be wasteful,' Anderson told SJ. 'These are complex conversations. There's not a turnkey idea of 'this is bad, this is good.' Not everyone is everything; there are different stories to be told.' Anderson observed that dichotomic mentality play out, in real time, during a screening of the episode late last month. A handful of attendees walked out after realizing the gathering was for critical thinking, not carousel content. While the situation was amusingly bleak, Anderson applauded PBS and Days Edge for the eerily apt timeliness of the series. 'I think the people who walk out, who don't want to look in that sort of internal mirror, that's a source of the problem,' Dappen responded, noting that regulation is one of the simpler solutions available; just look to speed limits. 'I think that the world has made it too easy to have things that cost other people a lot,' he continued. 'Most of us are detached enough that if something happens on the other side of the world, it's just like, I know, but I'm trying to get there faster.' For Clare Sauro, a fashion historian and curator at Drexel University, 'knowing the difference between clothing and fashion' can help mitigate the cheapening of not just garments, but the value awarded to textile production. 'A lot of mass-produced fashion today is only made to be worn about seven times before it starts, pretty much, falling apart,' Sauro said. 'I mean, you can just wear the same clothes over and over again and just replace them when they wear out.' Virginia Postrel, author of 'The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World,' agreed. The journalist said that garments are likely taken for granted because the Industrial Revolution made fashion less laborious—ergo no longer exclusive to the elite. 'As soon as there's available resources, we start doing things that really make no sense,' Sauro said. 'History has shown we do things without thinking about the future.' After the 'very real arms race' of World War II, Staton said, another began—this time in middle-class America, by way of synthetic textiles. Think big crinoline skirts and colorful lingerie and 'all of these things that would have been out of reach for most people,' Sauro said. 'Things are brightly colored. You can buy multiples. It's not so serious, it's fun.' This abundance of fun, inexpensive fabrics that brought fashion to the masses ultimately led to the documentary's next stop: Iquique, Chile. 'You're not just seeing a current problem. You're seeing a future problem,' John Bartlett said. 'And people know they're not supposed to do this, which is why they've been burning the clothes—getting rid of the evidence.' Bartlett, a Chilean cricketer and journalist, captured those consequences for National Geographic in April 2023, exploring where clothing goes to die: the Atacama Desert. With no import tax or duties for American businesses, the region became a dumping ground for the United States to ship unwanted clothes. While every country has its own 'sort of receptacle country where a lot of this clothing ends up,' per Bartlett, it's usually 'the poorer and developing countries' who foot the bill. 'The fact that [clothing] is such a basic need makes it inherently manipulable,' Bartlett said. 'Corporations have taken full advantage; you can make people dress basically in any way you want with all of the tools that marketing people have nowadays.' The episode closes in San Diego, where Staton pondered how one can reconcile the human desire to express oneself with clothing with the cost accrued, including the millions of metric tons of plastic entering marine environments annually. Estimates suggest that 92 percent of the 5.25 trillion plastic particles on the ocean surface are microplastics, according to a 2020 case study published by Science Direct. 'Not only do we know that [microplastics] are found all over the planet, but they're found in all organisms,' said Michael Burkart, biochemist at the University of California, San Diego. 'They've found microplastics in every organ of our body. That's kind of scary.' Burkart researches sustainable alternatives to plastics and polyester, such as green algae, not unlike the efforts of Algenesis Labs. Co-founded by Bukart and funded by the Department of Energy to work on biofuels, the company brings algae-based polymers out of the lab and into production. There's an abundance of opportunities for such pivots, he continued, as there's plenty of technology available to make fashion more sustainable. The transition needs more than tech, per Staton, however, to incorporate the human element. 'When Ford started pumping out cars, there were a bunch of people that were like, 'I have a horse.' But over 20 years, it was like, 'No, I don't have a horse anymore, that would be silly,'' Mayfield said. 'Eventually, that's what will happen with our polymers. But it will take 20 years, we know that.' While this episode of 'Human Footprint' explored the industry's top-down issues—challenges in sustainability and sourcing and consumer manipulation—against the race to the bottom mentality of corporations, Dappen considers a bottom upside. 'We've been trained to become satisfied with the relationship of not cherishing anything in our lives,' he said, using the analogy of having 200 acquaintances over two solid, true-blue friends. 'That relationship of cherishing the things in our lives—whether its people or the things we wear or that we eat—has been completely lost in our world nowadays. And because of that, it's shielded us from the terrible things that happen downstream in the supply chain.' Anderson nodded. 'Value systems—it's all value systems,' he said. 'One-hundred percent.' 'Buried in Style: Dressed to Kill' premieres July 9 on PBS. Solve the daily Crossword
Al Jazeera
10-07-2025
- Lifestyle
- Al Jazeera
Fast fashion and the dark side of textile recycling in India
101 East exposes the dark side of our fast fashion obsession, revealing its toll on India's environment and workers. Fast fashion has become a global wardrobe staple. It's an affordable way to stay on top of ever-evolving trends, but at what cost? Many items are discarded after just a few wears, with shipping containers of textile waste flooding into India, now known as the world's textile wasteland. For workers tasked with recycling these cast-offs from Western countries, the consequences can be severe – both to their health and the environment. From influencers and consumers to second-hand clothing collectors and textile recycling plants, 101 East investigates the real price of fast fashion.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Hey Dibi: How do I Avoid Talking Politics With the In-Laws?
Editor's Note: Have a question for Dibi Fletcher? She's definitely got answers. Or at least a perspective. Don't hold back, shoot her a DM on Instagram and ask away. Here's this week's dispatch from the Matriarch of Radical… Hey Dibi… My daughter wants to be 'sustainable' but also wear whatever's trending on TikTok. How do you raise kids to think long-term when everything they see is built to be disposable? - EcomindedMomFirst, I believe it's an illusion to think everything is 'built to be disposable'. Synthetic fabrics used in fast fashion are often non-biodegradable and contribute to the plastic pollution in landfills and the ocean. With an estimated 85% of all textiles ending up in landfills annually. That translates roughly to a staggering 11.3 million tons of textile waste pre year in the U.S alone. I do not know what the long-term solution is to the massive global problem, but I do know according to what you said, your daughter wants to be 'sustainable', that's a start. I was raised by a mom who sewed almost all my clothes. She knit bikinis for me and all my friends; she even crocheted my sister's wedding dress out of ribbon. She taught me to recycle my clothes by adding patches, drawing and painting on them to make them uniquely my own. Perhaps you and your daughter can start a new TikTok trend by taking something you might think of discarding and creating something new and fantastically unique out of it. You might not be thrilled with the results at first but keep at it as you build skills. I'm sure it wouldn't take much coaxing to get a few of her friends to join in. Before long you've started a new fashion happening and created a new way for you and your daughter to share time together. Hey Dibi…I used to be a surf competitor in my 20s; I now work full time and still surf most weekends. My teenage son is really ripping and has dreams of being on tour, should I encourage him? - SurfLocal2You didn't mention whether your son is now competing and consistantly finishing in the top, which is the first step in the preparation to being on tour. As you know from your own experience the tour is fierce and your son may rip, but the pressure of competing is different animal all together. Going to all the contests on the amateur circuit and getting the experience that only comes from competition is the first consideration in the decision process. If he's doing that, I believe the next issue is financial. Is there some sponsorship that is going to help with travel, has he worked and saved money, or are you going to pay the full freight? It's not cheap and there aren't the travel budgets in the companies there used to be and there isn't the sponsorship money that surfers previously could live on. These are a few of the things to consider off the top and I'm sure he has heart set on the dream of being on tour. It's your job as his dad to understand the harsh realities and help him make the right Dibi… Ma'am, I'm 19 and arrived at Pendelton from Iowa thinking out here in SoCal surfers would be completely chill, good vibes and all that. But every time I go into San Clemente, I feel like I walked into the wrong movie. Cold stares, no eye contact, what happened to that groovy, endless summer scene? - ScusethehaircutPlease let me say 'Thank you for your service' and apologize for those who are so dimwitted and small minded they don't know or have forgotten what it means to be gracious. It speaks volumes about them as your choice speaks clearly about you. I hope for your sake you shake it off and don't let a bunch of spoiled kids keep you from enjoying the time you have here and making it the surf scene of your dreams. Hey Dibi… I grew up idolizing style and soul surfing. Now the same surfers seem to be pitching everything from sunscreen to protein bars. Is it possible to have a soul surfing career? - DisillusionedSurfFanI think 'growing up' and idolizing someone's surf life is a bit unrealistic to start with. Before social media in the era of big surf brands, surfers were paid by their sponsors to go on exotic trips with magazine photographers and would appear in fantastic picture editorials and occasionally sponsors print ad programs. So, the advertising aspect of their careers was a bit more sublime and not so easily recognized. With most of the big sponsorship now gone surfers must be their own magazines and advertise themselves with social media posts, so it seems much more in your face. The truth is that like it or not it's expensive to 'surf' for a living and the surfers who relied on sponsors now find themselves in a position where they are forced to be more entrepreneurial. If you want to be that 'soul' surfer, I suggest you get a great paying a job that gives you a couple weeks off and you can surf without ever having to hawk some product yourself to enjoy Dibi… Every time I go to my in-laws for dinner the whole evening is spent arguing about politics. When I mention it to my husband on the drive home, he always says 'Don't worry about it, we always discussed politics during meals.' I find it very uncomfortable; I like his family but don't want to get into politics over dinner. What should I do? - NeutralmindsetWhy don't you invite his family to your home for dinner? Make a special meal, set the table like you would for a party. Maybe invite another couple or mutual friend. Changing the setting will change the routine that your husband and in-laws naturally fall into at the table. If politics do come up, you can politely steer the conversation in another direction with a gentle prompt or having enlisted the cooperation of your husband beforehand he can say something about how great it is to have you all together and perhaps suggest spending time like this more often. The conversation has changed and you're creating new ways to enjoy having family meals together. Hey Dibi: How do I Avoid Talking Politics With the In-Laws? first appeared on Surfer on Jun 30, 2025
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
H&M Foundation-backed Circularity Initiative Expands in India
In 2021, a small pilot project called Saamuhika Shakti launched in Bengaluru, India, with the goal of reducing the amount of textile waste that ends up in landfills while also empowering workers handling that waste. Since then, the initiative has grown exponentially, and now it's being replicated and implemented in 12 additional Indian cities. Funded by the H&M Foundation, Saamuhika Shakti employs informal waste workers to collect and sort discarded clothing in 16 neighborhood sorting centers that feed diverted garments to a central textile recovery facility. Developed by the Circular Apparel Innovation Factory and implemented by waste picker advocacy organization Hasiru Dala, the project aims to divert 800,000 kilograms of post-consumer textile waste and support 500 waste picker livelihoods by 2026. More from Sourcing Journal Walmart Plans to Bring 100K New Indian Small Businesses Online Iskur Denim Joins Denim Deal Circulose and Mango Team Up to Scale Circular Cellulose So far, Saamuhika Shakti has achieved 55 percent of its waste diversion target and supported more than 400 waste pickers. Part of that success lies in the collaborative design of the project, where municipal authorities, NGOs and waste picker collectives jointly set the terms, ensuring shared ownership and long-term viability. 'What makes this model so powerful is that it's not a top-down solution—it has been co-created with waste pickers, who know the problem best,' said Maria Bystedt, program director at H&M Foundation. 'It proves that circularity isn't just about materials or recycling tech—it's about how we design systems that are inclusive, effective and climate-resilient.' Textile waste is a huge problem in India. The country accounts for 8.5 percent of global textile waste or 7793 ktons, according to Fashion for Good. That waste can be broken into three categories: domestic post-consumer (51 percent), pre-consumer (42 percent) and imported post-consumer (7 percent). According to Hasiru Dala, India's waste management is made up of two primary systems—formal and informal. The informal system is completely managed by waste pickers, waste sorters and waste traders, who comb landfills and other waste collection facilities for recyclable materials. Waste pickers often are women and children, and particularly in landfills, they work in extremely difficult conditions due to the elements and risk of contamination from garbage and make very little money. Saamuhika Shakti aims to change that by empowering those waste pickers to improve their working conditions while also raising their profile as essential components of a circular economy. The Saamuhika Shakti project has received more than $20 million in funding from the H&M Foundation in two phases. Along with the foundation, the Circular Apparel Innovation Factory and Hasiru Dala, the initiative has received additional support from Bal Raksha Bharat, BBC Media Action, Sambhav Foundation, Sattva Consulting, Social Alpha, Sparsha Trust, Udhyam Learning Foundation and WaterAid India. Bystedt said that the key to Saamuhika Shakti's success lies in the workers who've been given agency through the project to improve their work conditions and economic standing. 'We're seeing that when waste pickers are recognized as essential climate actors, cities can build solutions that scale and inspire new models of inclusive circularity globally,' she said.
