Fast fashion is cheap, low quality clothing that is produced rapidly by mass-market retailers.
Designed to keep up with seasonal international trends, it encourages customers to shop regularly for new looks. This means we buy more, and discard more.
THE PROBLEM
On average, every Australian buys 56 items of clothing yearly, most of which are made from non-sustainable, non-durable materials. Year on year, the price of clothing continues to drastically decrease, while the negative impacts to the environment because of the fashion industry continue to increase. According to Greenpeace, the average person buys 60% more clothing and keeps them for about half as long as 15 years ago.
Australia is now the highest consumer of textiles per person in the world, surpassing even the USA. More than 200,000 tonnes of clothing end up in Australian landfills each year, the equivalent weight of almost four Sydney Harbour Bridges.
Currently, Australia has no systematic resources for the collection of unwearable clothing. As a result, textile waste has become one of the largest contributors to Australia’s waste problem.
Did you know?
The fashion industry is one of the highest polluting industries. It is responsible for an estimated 10% of global CO2 emissions.
Australians are the world’s highest consumer of textiles, BUT:
- The average person only wears 40% of their clothes.
- Of the clothes that go to charity, it is estimated that only 15% are resold within Australia.
- The rest are sent to landfill or overseas to developing nations
- In landfill, decomposing materials can take up to hundreds of years to break down whilst releasing methane and some release microplastics into the soil and eventually into our water streams.
Clothing product stewardship in Australia
The Australian Fashion Council has led a consortium to create a voluntary national stewardship scheme called Seamless. Seamless launched in June 2023 and recognises that the fashion and clothing brands who place clothes on the market are responsible for the entire life of that garment, from design through to recycling or sustainable disposal.
Conceptualised with a pathway to achieve circularity by 2030 and aiming to reduce the 200,000 tonnes of clothing that goes to landfill each year, Seamless will improve the design, recovery, reuse, and recycling of clothing by transforming outdated business models, driving innovation, changing citizen behaviour, and recycling clothing in high value applications.
Signing up is voluntary and imposes a 4 cent per garment levy on the signatories’ sales, with the money to be put towards initiatives such as sustainable design, the resale of used items, and textile recycling.
Of 30 major Australian brands approached to be founding members, only six signed up: retailers BIG W, David Jones, and The Iconic, as well as Australian labels Lorna Jane, Rip Curl, and R.M. Williams. Each organisation has committed $100,000 to fund a 12-month transition phase while the scheme is established over the course of the decade.
However then-Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek told the rest of the fashion industry it had 12 months to sign up or else face regulation directly.
