From Wardrobe to Waste
- Karl Selle
- Dec 15, 2025
- 8 min read
Stemming the ‘Rivers’ of Polluting Cast-off Clothing
Stand in front of your wardrobe for a moment and imagine every T-shirt, dress, and pair of jeans tracing its way across the planet after you’re done with it. Most of those garments don’t quietly “disappear” into a donation bin or recycling stream.
Every year, the world produces more than 100 billion garments and about 92 million tons of textile waste, much of it ending up in landfills, open dumps, or burned in the open air, according to a recent United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) opinion piece on textile waste tied to International Zero Waste Day.
The clothing industry is one of the world’s foremost polluters, affecting the environment sharply at every stage, from production to disposal. According to the UN, the industry produces 20% of global wastewater and 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. And cotton farming claims an enormous share of agricultural water and pesticide use.
At the same time, clothing production has roughly doubled since 2000, while people are wearing each item around 36% fewer times than they did 15 years ago, as documented in a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation titled “A New Textiles Economy.” Less than 1% of the material used to make clothes is recycled back into new clothing, meaning the fashion system is still overwhelmingly linear: We grow or pump resources, churn out garments, and discard them.
This article follows the “rivers” of textile waste from rich consumer markets to the communities downstream. It looks at how new rules—like the European Union’s (EU’s) revised Waste Framework Directive—could change those flows, and what it would take to turn today’s dumping problem into tomorrow’s circular textiles system.
Where Used Clothes Actually Go
When we picture textile waste, we usually imagine a local landfill or perhaps a thrift store that “finds a good home” for our cast-offs. The reality is far more global. Studies highlighted by UNEP’s International Zero Waste Day’s focus on fashion suggest that every second, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes is dumped or burned somewhere in the world.
Every second, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes is dumped or burned somewhere in the world.
In 2015 alone, the global clothing system produced tens of millions of tons of fiber, with more than 70 million tons of textiles entering the apparel pipeline and the vast majority ending up landfilled or incinerated after short use. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation report shows that clothing sales more than doubled between 2000 and 2015, while garments were worn far fewer times before being discarded. Europeans and Americans, for instance, remained steady, wearing garments around 100 times and less than 50 times, respectively, before tossing them. But globally, the average of wears dropped from around 200 to less than 150, while in China the average number of wears plummeted from more than 200 to just 62, the report says, citing data from 2002 to 2016.
Once discarded, textiles don’t disappear; they shed microplastics, leak dyes and finishing chemicals, and accumulate in ecosystems. An analysis by the European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that between 200,000 and 500,000 tons of microplastics from textiles enter the oceans each year globally, making synthetic fabrics a major source of microplastic pollution.
Piles of “Dead White Man’s Clothes”
Now picture Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa. Every week, around 100 containers of secondhand clothes—over 15 million fashion items—arrive at its nearby port of Tema. About 70% of these garments are destined for the vast Kantamanto Market, according to a 2024 Greenpeace Africa investigation.
On the ground, data from the Or Foundation paint a complex picture. Some 30,000 people in the market community recirculate about 25 million pieces of secondhand clothing every month through resale, repair, and remanufacturing. It is one of the world’s most sophisticated reuse hubs—and proof that informal economies can dramatically extend garment lifespans. The Kantamanto market community is, in many ways, doing the work that brands and wealthy consumers have failed to do: using clothes until they are truly worn out.
But this river of clothing has a toxic edge. Greenpeace notes that Ghana now receives every year around 152,600 tons of secondhand clothes, locally known as Obroni Wawu—“dead white man’s clothes.” A large fraction arrives damaged, unsellable, or made from cheap synthetics that quickly become waste. The Greenpeace Africa investigation and related research show that much of this surplus ends up clogging drains, littering beaches, and forming new layers in urban dumps.
When Dumps Become Landscapes
On the other side of the world, northern Chile has become a symbol of textile oversupply. Government figures cited in Environmental Health News estimate that the country imports around 123,000 tons of used clothing every year, much of it secondhand or unsold stock from brands. When these goods can’t be sold, they are often dumped in the Atacama Desert, forming colorful, toxic hills of discarded clothing even visible from space. The textile hills are toxic because of their preponderance of polyester, a petroleum product. Chile’s fast fashion waste cleanup plan has become a global symbol of fashion’s failure to manage its own leftovers.
Open-air burning and long-term degradation [of textile waste] threaten biodiversity, soil health, and nearby communities.
UNEP’s opinion piece on textile waste highlights these Atacama “micro-dumps” as part of a wider pattern: textile waste accumulating in fragile ecosystems, where open-air burning and long-term degradation threaten biodiversity, soil health, and nearby communities.
In India, the city of Hyderabad offers another snapshot of the crisis. Every day, the city collects about 9,000 tons of municipal waste, of which 750–800 tons are discarded clothes, according to a recent report from The Times of India. Officials estimate that around 40% of this textile waste could be recycled, but most of it is simply mixed with other garbage and dumped. The same article notes that the city lacks true sanitary landfills, meaning dyes, chemicals, and synthetic microfibers from clothing seep directly into soil and water.
The Fast Fashion Craze
In recent years, the biggest accelerants to the global textile-waste glut have not been legacy fashion houses but ultra–fast fashion platforms, such as Shein and increasingly Temu, both based in China.
These companies churn out thousands of new styles daily and are often priced so low that garments are treated as disposable, says Grist, an independent media outlet that tracks climate change. Shein alone reportedly emitted 16.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023—more than what four coal power plants spew in a year—and, with around 76% of its clothing made from polyester, only about 6% of that polyester is recycled.
Rather than reducing “waste,” this model amplifies it: Garments wear out, are discarded quickly, and add to the global mountains of landfill and incineration.
Addressing the textile-waste crisis will therefore require rethinking not only regulation and disposal, but the very economics of fashion, advocates and experts advise. Rather than relying on quotas or trade restrictions, consumers and policymakers might do well to create space for quality, longevity, and circular business models—such as clothing rental, repair and resale, or truly durable design. Brands could be encouraged (or incentivized) to design for longevity, material recovery, and reuse rather than pushing constant novelty.
At the same time, consumers can shift demand by buying fewer items, better-made items and resisting the cheap-price impulse that fuels throwaway consumption. Over time, if enough people and companies embrace a slower, more considered approach to clothing, the “rivers” of textile waste could shrink—and flow instead toward loops of reuse and recycling.
Realistically, a circular economy won’t happen without concrete improvements in textile recycling and reuse infrastructure. Encouragingly, some companies—including fast fashion players themselves—are experimenting with chemical and fiber-to-fiber recycling to recover polyester and synthetic fibers and reincorporate them into new garments. Advances in automated sorting (for example using near-infrared imaging combined with artificial intelligence) are improving the feasibility of separating mixed-fiber garments so that they don’t all end up as low-grade waste.
New Rules for Clothing Producers
Policy is starting to catch up with this reality. In October 2025, the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive entered into force, introducing extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules for textiles across member states. The law requires producers—including e-commerce sellers—to fund the collection, sorting, and treatment of textile waste, and it sets targets to reduce food and textile waste as part of a broader circular economy push. The same EU textile EPR rules note that the bloc generated about 12.6 million tons of textile waste in 2019, with only about one-fifth separately collected for reuse or recycling.
Americans produced 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, landfilled about 11.3 million tons, and recycled only 2.5 million tons—a recycling rate of just 14.7%.
In the United States, the federal government has not yet adopted nationwide EPR for textiles, but the scale of the problem is clear. According to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) textile waste data, Americans produced 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, landfilled about 11.3 million tons, and recycled only 2.5 million tons—a recycling rate of just 14.7%. Those EPA figures show textiles making up a significant share of municipal waste, even before accounting for exports.
Other governments are watching the EU closely. Chile, for example, has begun to integrate textiles into its own circular economy strategy and EPR framework in direct response to the Atacama disaster, building on the issues highlighted by UNEP and reporting by various media from the Atacama Desert.
These are important steps, but they will succeed only if they change the flow of textiles at every stage—from design and production to export and disposal.
From Dumping to Stewardship
So, what would it mean to truly “rethink the rivers of textile waste”? The evidence from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report, the EEA microplastics analysis, and community-level studies suggests a few clear priorities:
Turn off the tap of overproduction. Brands need binding targets to reduce volumes and design for durability rather than disposability. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular textiles vision emphasizes longer garment use, better design, and business models based on services (rental, repair, resale) instead of endless new units.
Make producers responsible for the full life cycle. EPR schemes, like the EU’s new textile waste law, can shift the cost burden away from municipalities and import-dependent communities and back onto the companies that profit from selling clothes. Done well, these schemes can fund high-quality sorting, textile-to-textile recycling, and social enterprises that build on models like the Kantamanto market community.
Respect the limits of import-dependent markets. Countries like Ghana and Chile should have the right—and the data—to cap imports of poor-quality goods that are likely to become waste. Campaigns like Greenpeace Africa’s “return to sender” analysis of secondhand flows argue that exporters must stop treating African ports as pressure valves for overproduction.
Invest in local recycling and repair, not just waste-to-energy. Hyderabad’s example, where the Greater Hyderabad textile waste figures show 750–800 tons of clothing discarded daily, demonstrates both the scale of the challenge and the potential to create jobs in sorting, repair, and fiber-to-fiber recycling instead of sending everything to landfills or incinerators.
The question now is whether policymakers, brands, and consumers will act quickly enough to stop people’s clothes from becoming the next dominant “landform” on the planet.
*Karl Selle is a freelance writer who lives in Bowie, Maryland, US.
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