Fashion, by its very nature, encourages a culture of disposal. Consumers buy the trendiest shirt available at Topshop, wear it for a season, then put it in the Oxfam clothing bank.
Dr Lucy Norris is interested in the question of where the clothes go once they’ve been dropped off for recycling. She’s currently co-curating an exhibition at the Horniman Museum in south London, illustrating the voyage clothes take from Oxfam clothing banks and other charity shops.
“Disposability has caused an explosion of problems,” she said. “Clothing is now given in such huge quantities to British charities that they can’t sell it all in the shops. The volume is increasing, while the quality is decreasing.”
Most charities, as a result, export the extra clothes for sale, not for donation.
Oxfam’s Rob McNeil explained: “It takes too long to ship things to disaster areas, and to air-freight them is too expensive.”
Most clothes end up in Asia, Africa and eastern Europe. In Panipat, India, color-coded mounds of clothes are shredded and re-spun into recycled wool which is then made into cheap blankets.
Oxfam is not considering the environmental benefit of recycling clothes when it ships them around the world, its’ operating for profit. In fact, the environmental benefit is negligible, at best, considering the fuel spent on shipping old fabric half way around the world.
|
|
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.