Jan. 13, 2025
Seneca News
The hidden consequences of our discarded clothes
Seneca professor part of international research into textile waste
A Seneca Polytechnic professor is part of the team behind new academic research that reveals what happens to clothing and other textile items that are no longer wanted by people living in rich countries.
Sabine Weber, Professor, School of Fashion, co-authored the international study “Urban transitions toward sufficiency-oriented circular post-consumer textile economies,” which was recently published in the online version of the journal Nature Cities.
Ms. Weber and her co-authors studied clothing disposal practices in nine high-income cities, finding obvious patterns that crossed geographic, linguistic and cultural barriers.
“The behaviours we describe are extremely similar across all nine cities we analyzed,” she said. “Some cities have a slightly different diversion system or other little variations here and there, but the larger scope of the problem is essentially the same everywhere.”
Ms. Weber has previously researched the scope of textile waste in Ontario. She co-authored a groundbreaking 2023 study that estimated the amount of textile waste generated in this province to be 500 million kilograms per year.
In Toronto and almost every other city examined in the new study, researchers found that charity donation bins are the primary means of discarding unwanted clothing and other textiles.
Although this might seem to consumers like a responsible way to dispose of the items, only the highest-quality donations — a small fraction of the total — are recirculated into the local economy.
The rest are sold to commercial resellers and ultimately shipped overseas. Ms. Weber says this presents a “serious and fast-growing problem” as the least-usable items pollute the land and water of countries that do not have the infrastructure to properly handle them.
“Close your eyes and imagine a beach; you see white sand and palm trees, water and waves,” she said. “If you go to Ghana, all you can see on some of the beaches there is clothing…Or visit the Atacama Desert in Chile and see how a pristine landscape is now home to the largest textile waste dump in the world. It’s even visible from space!”
The researchers hope their work will push municipal governments to do more to reduce textile waste and create more circular economies, so that more unwanted garments can find new life while staying in their communities.
Ms. Weber says she was honoured to be selected to co-author the study alongside such prominent researchers in the field as Kirsi Laitala from Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University. She credits Ms. Laitala’s previous research as having sparked her interest in investigating issues around textile waste in Canada.