I recently discovered how foolish it is to assume that all long-term travellers are environmentally conscious people. It is ideal to assume that that is the case because they carry and own less, they also generate less trash.
But that myth was shattered when I heard from one of them, their tactics on how to manage clothes during long-term travel. Buy cheap clothes that could be discarded after three months (without guilt, because, you know, they will go to Africa). I was appalled.
Fast fashion is the world’s second-most polluter after oil. Fashion chains have long since adapted themselves to selling cheap clothes to scale up their profits.
In the previous years, fashion cycles have haphazardly grown from four to five in a year to at least 15, sometimes even more, to accommodate more clothes and replace the old ones in wardrobes that are stacked with pale, unusable clothes bought from these leading fashion retailers (like H&M, Zara, Primark, NewYorker, Bestseller and even UCB).
A study by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) states that, “two million tonnes of clothes are purchased every year, of which one million tonnes are thrown away.”
That is, exactly 50% of the total clothes purchased end up in a landfill. Most cheap clothes are made from polyester, comprising extremely strong, non-biodegradable fibre, even resistant to most forms of chemicals.
Tonnes of disposable clothes from the developed countries are shipped to East African countries. In Germany, around where I live, huge metal boxes painted in bright colours, in street corners, invite people to donate their clothes and shoes, supposedly to clothe the poor African folks.
While it eases the guilt arising from excessive consumerism, most of these clothes end up in a landfill, albeit only in a distant land. The salvaged ones, though, fuel a thriving second-hand clothing economy, resulting in severe pressure on the local players in the home-grown markets in Africa.
This prompted six East African nations, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan, to decide on a ban on imported second-hand clothes and shoes by the year 2019.
Where do used clothes go?
They had a valid argument. “It would help member countries boost domestic clothes manufacturing.” But the US will hear none of it. Soon the US Trade Representative warned that trade benefits to these countries would be reviewed (and possibly cut) after they banned imports of used clothing.
Elizabeth L Cline, in her book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, details the ways in which cheap clothes harm the environment (and economy to an extent).
In her attempts to bust the cheap fashion sentiment, she considers deeper questions — do cheap clothes have an afterlife or where do they go to die? How damaging is cheap fashion to the society, environment, and economic well-being? Perhaps very, she concludes.
Global economy
Long-term travel or otherwise, disposable clothes are as perilous to the environment as they are to our pockets. This is not even considering the conditions in which garment factory workers function in poor countries, like Bangladesh, to fuel the global $ 3 trillion annual industry.
Earlier this year, I made a resolution that I would stop buying new clothes altogether until the end of the year. Before the resolution was made, I might have made the mistake of buying these disposable clothes, attracted by their price tag and unaware of their environmental impact. Those still languish in my wardrobe, but I have no intention of throwing them away, until they become threadbare, after which they will be designated as tiny pieces of washcloth, and spend their afterlives in my bathroom or above my kitchen sink.
The writer is an independent journalist who lives in Stuttgart, Germany, and often writes stories that intersect food and travel