GoKawiilNearly half of every T-shirt goes to waste before you even buy it
The global consumption of clothing is enormous. However, a significant portion of the textile fibres is lost before the garments even reach the market.
“When we talk about textile waste, the debate often focuses on the clothes we throw away. But the problem starts much earlier,” explained former NTNU master’s student Rakib Ahmed, currently a researcher at SINTEF Industry.
The EU has introduced several initiatives aimed at collecting used clothing and managing the waste, once the garments are no longer in use.
“But much of the material used to make the clothes is lost before the garments even reach the consumer. This aspect gets far less attention,” he said.
Ahmed has recently written an article examining what percentage of textile fibres is lost in the process of making a finished garment. The work has been done as part of Associate Professor Johan Berg Pettersen’s research group at NTNU’s Industrial Ecology Programme and in collaboration with Senior Researcher Christina Meskers at SINTEF.
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100 billion garments a year?
It is impossible to know exactly how many clothes we buy, and estimates vary widely. However, one thing we do know is that the environmental impact is enormous.
A common estimate is that the fashion industry accounts for approximately 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is significantly more than, say, air travel.
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