Abstract
The amount of clothes bought in the EU per person has increased by 40 % in just a few decades, driven by a fall in prices and the increased speed with which fashion is delivered to consumers. Clothing accounts for between 2 % and 10 % of the environmental impact of EU consumption. This impact is often felt in third countries, as most production takes place abroad. The production of raw materials, spinning them into fibres, weaving fabrics and dyeing require enormous amounts of water and chemicals, including pesticides for growing raw materials such as cotton. Consumer use also has a large environmental footprint due to the water, energy and chemicals used in washing, tumble drying and ironing, as well as to microplastics shed into the environment.
Less than half of used clothes are collected for reuse or recycling when they are no longer needed, and only 1 % are recycled into new clothes, since technologies that would enable recycling clothes into virgin fibres are only starting to emerge.
Various ways to address these issues have been proposed, including developing new business models for clothing rental, designing products in a way that would make re-use and recycling easier (circular fashion), convincing consumers to buy fewer clothes of better quality (slow fashion), and generally steering consumer behaviour towards choosing more sustainable options.
In 2018, the EU adopted a circular economy package that will, at the insistence of the European Parliament, for the first time ensure that textiles are collected separately in all Member States, by 2025 at the latest. The European Parliament has for years advocated promoting the use of ecological and sustainable raw materials and the re-use and recycling of clothing.
About 5 % of household expenditure in the EU is spent on clothing and footwear, of which about 80 % is spent on clothes and 20 % on footwear. It has been estimated that in 2015 EU citizens bought 6.4 million tonnes of new clothing (12.66 kg per person).1 According to European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates, between 1996 and 2012, the amount of clothes bought per person in the EU increased by 40 %. At the same time, more than 30 % of clothes in Europeans' wardrobes have not been used for at least a year. Once discarded, over half the garments are not recycled, but end up in mixed household waste and are subsequently sent to incinerators or landfill.
Several trends have contributed to this increase in consumption. One is the fall in the price of garments in the last few decades. According to the same EEA report, between 1996 and 2012 the price of clothing increased by 3 %, but consumer prices in general rose by about 60 %. This meant that, relative to the EU consumer consumption basket, the price of clothing fell by 36 %. At the same time, the share of clothing in household consumption stayed largely the same: it was 5 % in 1995 and 4 % in 2017.
The other significant trend was the rise of fast fashion. Epitomised by the multinational retail chains, it relies on mass production, low prices and large volumes of sales. The business model is based on knocking off styles from high-end fashion shows and delivering them in a short time at cheap prices, typically using lower quality materials. Fast fashion constantly offers new styles to buy, as the average number of collections released by European apparel companies per year has gone from two in 2000 to five in 2011, with, for instance, Zara offering 24 new clothing collections each year, and H&M between 12 and 16. This has led to consumers to see cheap clothing items increasingly as perishable goods that are 'nearly disposable', and that are thrown away after wearing them only seven or eight times.