All dressed up and nowhere to go … except to landfills: fast consumer fashion habits add to Hong Kong’s textile waste
- Discarded garments from changing consumer patterns on the rise as city has to explore ways to process its own material
- Durable garment quality contributing to the challenge of breaking down such products for recycling
Hong Kong shoppers are poised to splash out on apparel this holiday season, with more than HK$5 billion in sales rung up last December at boutiques around town. As new clothes pour into city wardrobes, old pieces are inevitably tossed out.
These discarded garments become part of more than 300 tonnes of textile waste that are dumped in the city’s landfills daily.
“In Hong Kong we’re famous for our consumption levels and shopping,” says Anneleise Smillie, executive director of Redress, a Hong Kong-based NGO working to reduce textile waste.
Such habits contribute to the city’s growing levels of waste, Smillie says, citing a 2017 independent survey of some 1,000 Hong Kong residents that found four in 10 people have thrown clothing away after only wearing it once.
While most is processed locally, the mainland had been a key export destination for textile recyclables that Hong Kong ships out.
Faced with the constraints, Hong Kong is working to reclaim more discarded clothes and textiles to reuse them locally. In 2016, the city recycled some 4,200 tonnes of textile waste, equivalent to a two-week build-up of such material in landfills. This included clothing recovered in waste sorting and from donation bins stationed across the city.