How to fight climate change: re-wear your clothes – if we all used them for twice as long as now, emissions from clothing would fall 44 per cent
- It’s no secret that the fashion industry has a climate problem – buying less, wearing things for longer and renting or reselling clothes reduces that problem
- Wearing the stuff you own for longer means that you will buy less, thus avoiding the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated producing new items
A small, simple and cheap way to help limit climate change is to wear the clothes already in your wardrobe roughly twice as many times as you might have otherwise before tossing them.
If everyone doubled on average the number of times that they wore a garment, this could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from clothing by 44 per cent, according to a 2017 report from the charity Ellen MacArthur Foundation, later echoed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Here’s why: wearing the stuff you already own likely means that you will buy less in the future, thus preventing emissions generated during the production of new items.
“The way that the sales were growing, people were starting to own more and more clothes,” said Laura Balmond, Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s fashion initiative lead.
The numbers are undeniable. “It wouldn’t be physically possible to get as much wear out of your items as it previously had because people have got a lot sitting in their wardrobes,” she says.