Sustainability in the fashion industry: when you’re finished with fashion, where does it go?

Australians love donating clothes to ‘op shops’ – on global rankings, we’re one of the largest givers in the developed world, carting more than 190,000 tonnes (or 720 million garments) each year to our favourite charity stores.

This sounds extremely virtuous: who doesn’t like thinking that their once-loved clothes will find a second home? The reality is more complicated – and far less sustainable.

As a new report by the Australian Fashion Council points out, it takes an army of op shop staff and volunteers to sort and handle 720 million items of clothing, many of which inevitably end up discarded (27,000 tonnes) into landfill.

Faced with increasing pressure to cut its environmental footprint (the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of annual global carbon emissions) the sector is slowly pivoting to what’s called the circular economy: where materials are made to be reused and recycled by design.

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