We’re in the Golden Age of Garbage Clothing. Pilling sweaters, stretched-out socks, flimsy denim. What happened to good garments? Walrus Monika Warzech Illustration by Kagan McLeod Oct. 24, 2024 As the $100 billion fast fashion industry has flooded the world with cheap, trendy items, shopping has become a crapshoot. Across social media, you’ll see frustrations over garments’ meagre lifespans. Studies have backed up my irritation with increasingly flimsy T-shirts: University of Kentucky textile researchers have found that they’ve become thinner over the years, as have fabrics. Denim, known for its hard-wearing history, hasn’t fared much better. Experts point to a decline in quality when comparing jeans made in the past five years or so to their counterparts from, say, the ’80s.

Mid-market shops, once a bastion of higher standards, have become hit or miss. Complaints are easy to find on Reddit: “Aritzia is starting to feel like that boyfriend that was once good to us and the letting go process has been difficult to accept.” J. Crew comes up often, with one user grumbling that a $125-plus cashmere sweater “just got a hole in it after one single year of use.” Buyers on YouTube lament the deteriorating craftsmanship in luxury brands too, hoisting up $1,000 bags that come up short. One study found that recently made designer jeans were less durable than a new pair from Walmart. It’s starting to feel like quality has become price and label agnostic. It’s difficult to consume less when items fall apart so quickly. According to the World Economic Forum, the production of clothing has about doubled since 2000, but the average garment is worn just seven to ten times. A 2021 report says Canadians are dumping 500,000 tonnes of clothes each year. Even when we donate to charities for reuse, a lot of it ends up getting exported and becoming other countries’ problems. A mountain of cast-offs in the desert of Chile is literally visible from space. A clothing landfill in Ghana exploded, burning for days. 

It took years for us to get to our current mode of shop and toss. You can’t have fast fashion without synthetics, some of which were first engineered more than a century ago, when researchers invented dupes for more expensive or scarce textiles. Rayon or viscose is a semi synthetic made from chemically treated wood pulp that became popular during the Great Depression as a cheaper alternative to silk. Polyurethane, created in Nazi Germany, was a rubber replacement that was later used to create what’s now called elastane, spandex, or Lycra. Acrylic, often used as a substitute for wool, is a plastic-based product first mass produced in the US in the mid-1940s. Nylon, a petroleum-based fabric, was created in the 1930s and became popular for its affordability and durability alongside the wartime shortages of silk and cotton. Then there’s polyester, first developed between the 1930s and ’40s by the same inventors of nylon.

As the price of the petroleum-based polyester dropped in the 1960s, shoppers flocked to it. In the US, cotton was eclipsed by polyester within a decade. Polyester was low maintenance. It didn’t need much ironing. It dried quickly. It kept the pleating in skirts and creases in trousers and easily lent itself to bold colours that didn’t fade in the wash. It was lighter than wool. Today, polyester, nylon, acrylic, and other synthetic fibres account for around 65 percent of the material that makes up our clothes worldwide. They’re blended into cotton T-shirts and underwear, used as performance material in hiking and workout wear, and sometimes rebranded as the fancier-sounding “vegan silk.” Even fashion houses rely on synthetics. They’re in $6,000 Oscar de la Renta gowns and some of Chanel’s iconic jackets.In other words, our clothes are made using huge amounts of petrochemicals and fossil fuels. When you wash the clothes, they keep polluting by shedding microplastics. Polyester comprises about 80 percent of all synthetic fibre use. Some consumers are frustrated by this synthetic creep, often holding up polyester as a sign of cost-cutting measures—it’s about half as much per kilogram as cotton and cheaper than wool. There’s also a contradiction at the heart of polyester. It’s both functionally indestructible—synthetic fabrics take forever to break down and decompose—and can sometimes pill easily, which tends to lead to garments having shorter lifespans.

“Not all polyester is created equal,” //www.tiktok.com/@wangjenniferr>" rel="noopener" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent;">Jennifer Wang, a pharmacist and fashion content creator. With a scientist’s rigour and an influencer’s charm, she breaks down what makes a good garment, and her videos have netted her nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok. In one video, she says her favourite dress pants are made from polyester. But the polyester fabric used in fast fashion is terrible and prone to wrinkling, defeating its versatile purpose. Different grades perform differently, making it tricky for consumers to live by hard-and-fast shopping rules like “no polyester.” Wang refuses to generalize by fabric type, or even brand, given the variations in quality. She broke out online with a TikTok called “Stop Wasting Your Money at Aritzia” and similar videos assessing clothes from Lululemon, Reformation, Frank and Oak, and many more. She sometimes films from the shop floor, pointing out messy seams and scrunching fabric to show how quickly it wrinkles. Based in Toronto, she’s become a kind of guerilla quality-control officer, stepping into the role just as many companies have shirked the responsibility. Synthetics are inextricable from clothing getting crappier. But there’s so much more to good clothes than just fabric......read on   https://thewalrus.ca/the-golden-age-of-garbage-clothing/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=It%20s%20Your%20Business&utm_campaign=special-black-friday    

• How Buying Stuff Drives Climate Change State of the Planet Columbia Climate School Renée Cho December 16, 2020 Did you know that Americans produce 25 percent more waste than usual between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, sending an additional one million tons a week to landfills? This holiday season, with online shopping the preferred gift giving method for many, we will likely generate even more waste mailing packages all over the country. In addition, over two billion Christmas cards are mailed every year, with enough paper to fill a football field 10 stories high. More than 38,000 miles of ribbon are thrown away and usually end up in landfills. Over the holidays, Americans discard half their total yearly paper waste, mostly holiday wrapping and decorations—about nine billion tons. And each person wastes almost 100 pounds of food. 

• The problem with stuff......As more people around the world enter the middle class and become affluent, the problem is worsening. What’s all this got to do with climate change? In fact, our consumer habits are actually driving climate change. A 2015 study found that the production and use of household goods and services was responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, wealthy countries have the most per capita impact. A new U.N. report found that the richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice the amount than the poorest 50 percent; moreover, the wealthier people become, the more energy they use. A typical American’s yearly carbon emissions are five times that of the world’s average person. In 2009, U.S. consumers with more than $100,000 in yearly household income made up 22.3 percent of the population, yet produced almost one-third of all U.S. households’ total carbon emissions. After basic needs are met, consumers begin buying items for social status; as people try to acquire more and more status, more and more expensive status products are needed. Producing all these things generates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact, across its life cycle, the average product results in carbon emissions of 6.3 times its own weight, according to a studydone by Christoph Meinrenken, associate research scientist at the Earth Institute’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. Technology can provide energy efficiency measures that help combat climate change, but “consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades,” according to a June paper. The research concluded that it is not enough simply to “green” consumption by buying more sustainably produced goods—it is essential to reduce consumption.....read onhttps://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/12/16/buying-stuff-drives-climate-change/

• This is because 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come solely from the production of the things we use and buy every day. After basic needs are met, consumers begin buying items for social status; as people try to acquire more and more status, more and more expensive status products are needed. Producing all these things generates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact, across its life cycle, the average product results in carbon emissions of 6.3 times its own weight, according to a study done by Christoph Meinrenken, associate research scientist at the Earth Institute’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. Technology can provide energy efficiency measures that help combat climate change, but “consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades,” according to a June paper. The research concluded that it is not enough simply to “green” consumption by buying more sustainably produced goods—it is essential to reduce consumption.....read on    https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/12/16/buying-stuff-drives-climate-change/

Red alert: Kofi Annan on the photos that capture our choking planet. From a masked Tokyo commuter in a crush to the plastic particles killing our oceans, the former UN secretary-general hails the photographers shortlisted for tonight’s space-themed Prix Pictet prize.Guardian Kofi Annan  Thu 4 May 2017 .Guardian Kofi Annan  Thu 4 May 2017  We are Consuming the Planet and running out of space. Fly over Africa at night and you will see mile after mile of fires burning red in the dark as scrub is removed to make way for human beings. Satellite images of nocturnal Europe or America show vast areas lit up like an enormous fairground. From Shanghai to Sydney, from Moscow to Mexico City, the skylines of our major cities are no longer fixed and familiar. Where we cannot build into the sky, we construct vast chequerboards of smogbound, low-rise dwellings that stretch from one horizon to the other.

Our cities expand in every direction as we fight to house a population that is growing at the rate of 200,000 each day. That adds up to a headcount the size of Germany every year. To feed this growing number requires ever more land to farm: each year, more than 150,000 square kilometres of natural forest are lost to agricultural or urban development.

We speak reverentially of the savage beauty and teeming biodiversity of the world’s great wildernesses, from the tropical rainforests of Amazonia and central Africa, to our wetlands and deserts, and on to Patagonia and the frozen wastes of Antarctica. We are increasingly aware of the threats to such spaces and have encouraged sustainable conservation and ecotourism.But still the threats remain.The greatest unexplored space on our planet lies beneath the oceans. Yet rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing acidification, which disrupts food chains and marine habitats. Huge floating masses of plastic dumped in the oceans turn into hazardous waste that endangers not only marine life but also, indirectly, human populations – and the planet itself. Overfishing, illegal and damaging trawling practices and past whaling have emptied the oceans before we have even properly understood what riches they contain. In 150,000 square kilometres of natural forest are lost to agricultural or urban development.......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/04/kofi-annan-photos-capture-choking-planet-prix-pictet-space