Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy

by Rebecca Burgess

Over eighty billion individual garments were sold last year globally, a doubling in only fifteen years, supporting a $1.3 trillion textile industry that employs three hundred million people in nearly every country.

According to a Greenpeace analysis published in 2015, the average person today is buying 60 percent more garments than he or she did in 2000 and keeping them for half as long.

Two brands closely identified with Fast Fashion, Zara and H&M, together produce one billion items per year, a large portion of which are thrown away after only a few wearings. Only 15 percent of used clothing in the US is recycled; the rest winds up in landfills, more than 5 percent of all the municipal waste generated annually.

Polyester, an oil-based synthetic fiber, is used in 60 percent of our garments today, more than double the amount used in 2000. It consumes nearly 350 million barrels of oil every year and accounts for 282 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, three times higher than the amount for cotton, which will make it increasingly difficult for the world to meet the two- degree Celsius climate goals set down in the Paris Agreement.

Their experiments found that when synthetic jackets are washed in a machine, approximately 1.7 grams of microfibers are released and travel to the local wastewater

It is further estimated that Europeans ingest up to eleven thousand pieces of microfiber per year through shellfish consumption.