Australia sends six tonnes of clothing to landfill every ten minutes. New EPA and European data show the United States and EU discard textiles even faster, as demand for fast fashion outpaces recycling.
In a recent LinkedIn post, the Circularity Hub shared a video clip from the first season of the Australian documentary television series War on Waste, in which host Craig Reucassel is standing atop a six-tonne mound of clothing: shirts, jeans, and barely worn sneakers in a heap. He asks passerby how much time they think it takes Australians to produce that much clothing waste. Guesses range from months to days. But the answer is that the pile is what Australians throw away every ten minutes: roughly the weight of a full-grown elephant. By the time the clip loops, the country has dumped another one just like it.
“Fast fashion has made clothing cheaper, faster, and more accessible than ever before,” Circularity Hub explained in the post. “But behind every $5 t-shirt and every micro-trend lies a much larger story — one of water consumption, carbon emissions, resource extraction, and growing mountains of textile waste.”
Australians discard 23 kilograms of clothing per capita each year, and that adds up to six tonnes of textiles and clothing reaching landfill every ten minutes. It is a startling number for a country of roughly 26 million people, and it turns out to be the small version of the problem. The picture widens in larger economies. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency counted 17 million tons of textiles generated in 2018, the most recent year with full federal figures, of which 11.3 million tons were landfilled. Spread evenly across the year, that works out to about 215 tons of American clothing, linens, and footwear buried every ten minutes, and it is thrown away far faster than it is recovered. The agency’s full breakdown put 66 percent of textile waste in landfill, 19 percent burned for energy, and only about 15 percent recycled that year.
Europe throws away at a comparable clip. The European Environment Agency estimates that each person in the European Union generated about 16 kilograms of textile waste in 2020, only a quarter of which was collected separately for reuse or recycling. Across the bloc’s roughly 449 million residents, that is more than 130 tonnes of textiles discarded every ten minutes by the same arithmetic, most of it mixed into ordinary household rubbish rather than sorted.
The landfill clock keeps running
The engine behind the numbers is speed. The European Environment Agency describes an industry that has shifted toward a fast-fashion model, turning out inexpensive clothes made of cheap materials, meant to be worn for a season or less and then discarded. European consumption hit a record in 2022, when the average person bought 19 kilograms of clothing, footwear, and household textiles, up from 17 kilograms three years earlier.
“Dressing to kill could kill the planet,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last year, describing an industry that sends the equivalent of one garbage truck’s worth of clothing to landfill or an incinerator every second. The fashion sector is responsible for up to eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and draws 215 trillion liters of water a year, according to the same UN briefing. Experts cited there estimate that doubling how long a garment stays in use could cut its emissions by 44 percent.
Where discarded clothes actually go
Much of what does get collected never stays home. The European Environment Agency reports that used-textile exports from the EU tripled over two decades, climbing from just over 550,000 tonnes in 2000 to almost 1.7 million tonnes in 2019, a flow that frequently lands in countries with little capacity to process it. Guterres framed that traffic as a crisis of its own. “The rich world is flooding the Global South with garbage, from obsolete computers to single-use plastics,” he said, noting that many countries cannot handle a fraction of what washes up on their shores.
The waste piling up in Australian landfills, in other words, is one visible edge of a global sorting failure, and the volume keeps climbing while separate collection and recycling capacity lag well behind the pace of new production. Guterres pointed to a few openings all the same. “Consumers are increasingly demanding sustainability. In many countries, resale markets are booming,” he said.
Resale has a ceiling, though, and the clothing that clears it does not simply vanish. A great deal of what wealthy countries send abroad lands in places asked to absorb what the original market would not. In Accra, Ghana, the sprawling Kantamanto market takes in roughly 15 million secondhand garments a week, and the Or Foundation, a nonprofit that has worked in the market since 2011, estimates that about 40 percent of them leave again as waste, too worn or too flimsy to sell. The overflow does not stay inside the market either; the same nonprofit says it now hauls more than 18 tonnes of textile and plastic waste off Accra’s beaches every week, where discarded clothing washes in with the tide.
The pattern repeats on the other side of the world. Around 59,000 tonnes of used and unsold clothing arrive each year at the Iquique port in Chile’s Alto Hospicio free zone, and at least 39,000 tonnes that no merchant will buy are trucked into open dumps in the Atacama, the driest desert on earth. Much of it cannot be sent to an ordinary landfill at all. “The problem is that the clothing is not biodegradable and has chemical products, so it is not accepted in the municipal landfills,” Franklin Zepeda, the founder of EcoFibra, a company that turns discarded garments into insulation panels, told AFP.
Some clothing never earns an afterlife because it is denied a life at all. The European Environment Agency estimates that between 4 and 9 percent of all textile products put on the European market are destroyed before they are ever used for their intended purpose, pulled from warehouses as unsold stock or rejected returns and sent straight to shredders and incinerators. Processing and destroying those goods is responsible for as much as 5.6 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions a year, the agency has estimated, a figure roughly on par with Sweden’s annual net emissions.
The fabric problem
Part of what makes the afterlife so long is the fabric. Between 60 and 70 percent of textiles are made of plastic, mostly polyester spun from oil and gas, which is why a heap of fast fashion behaves less like cotton and more like the packaging it arrived in. Clothing that is synthetic or chemically treated can take roughly 200 years to break down, and while it sits there it is, as the recyclers working the Atacama piles describe it, about as inert and as toxic as a mound of discarded tires.
The garments shed the whole time; roughly 30 percent of the primary microplastics reaching the world’s oceans come from laundering synthetic textiles, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, each cycle sending fibers too small to see down the drain and, in time, into water and food. All told, washing synthetic clothing is estimated to flush about half a million tonnes of microfibers into the sea each year. A shirt bought for one summer can outlast the person who wore it and keep polluting long after the trend that sold it is forgotten.
Chile has started to respond, folding textiles into an extended-producer-responsibility law that pushes the cost of disposal back onto the companies that import clothing, requiring importers rather than Chilean towns to take responsibility for the clothing they bring into the country. The deeper fix, the people closest to the waste argue, has to come earlier, in how much is made and bought to begin with. Rosario Hevia, who founded the Chilean textile-recycling company Ecocitex in 2019, has watched attitudes change as the mounds have grown. “For many years we consumed, and no one seemed to care that more and more textile waste was being generated,” she told AFP. “But now, people are starting to question themselves.”
The Circularity Hub cautions that the next time a trend appears and disappears overnight, “perhaps the better question isn’t:’Can I afford to buy this?’ But rather: ‘Can the planet afford for me to throw it away?'” The answer, increasingly, is no.
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