Europeans throw away 2 million tonnes of textiles each year. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.
Many of us donate our unwanted clothes to charity shops & clothing collection banks - but do we really know what happens to them then?
Globally, 70% of our donated clothing is baled and sold to textile merchants who ship them overseas for resale in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Textile Mountain exposes the social and environmental cost of the second hand clothing trade, tracing the path of our unwanted garments from recycling bins in Europe to landfills and waterways in the Global South.
Shot in Kenya, Ireland and Belgium, this film calls on us to re-imagine the way the way we design, wear and reuse our clothes - so that our fashion waste no longer becomes another country’s burden.
Background
The world is producing, consuming, and throwing away more clothes than ever before. Clothing production doubled from 2000 to 2014, with more than 150 billion garments produced annually. Europeans throw away 2 million tonnes of textiles each year. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.
Many of us donate our unwanted clothes to charity shops and clothing collection banks - but do we really know what happens to them then?
Globally, only 30% of collected clothing are resold on domestic markets, due to poor quality and low re-sale value. The rest are baled and sold to textile merchants who ship them overseas to Sub-Saharan Africa to sell in countries like Kenya, Ghana and Senegal.
While exporting our used clothing to the Global South increases the life span of garments, provides access to cheap clothing for low income communities, and creates new local economies, not all of the impacts are positive.
The influx of vast quantities of cheap second-hand clothes from the West has largely killed off once vibrant local textile industries, drastically reducing the numbers of people employed in textile production. Kenya’s own textile industry employed over half a million people a couple of decades ago, from cotton farmers to weavers to tailors – today that number is less than 20,000. In 2018, Rwanda became the first country in East Africa to impose a ban on the import of second hand clothes, opting to prioritise the recovery of its own textile industry.
The environmental cost is also stark. In addition to the increased carbon footprint of shipping used clothing across the globe, only 70% of imported garments are can actually be resold in the host country. Two thirds of the remainder are cascaded to lower-value goods and one third is dumped. Receiving countries often lack adequate waste & recycling infrastructure to deal with textiles, and so the West’s unwanted garments ultimately end their lives in overflowing landfill sites and blocked waterways in the Global South.
Documentary directed by (Fellipe Lopes) me and Produced by Caitriona Rogerson. Financed by the Europe Sustainable for All project funded by the European Union. It was made in partnership with the Irish Environmental Network.