On October 18, 2020 Bloomberg reported that the “world’s biggest fashion buyer is running out of room for all its used garments.
In a country that makes more than 5 billion T-shirts a year, there is a stigma to wearing old or second-hand clothes and millions of tons of garments are discarded every day. An aspirational middle class, combined with a boom in e-commerce, has turned China into the world’s biggest fashion market, overtaking the U.S. last year. Greater China accounts for a fifth of Japanese retail giant Uniqlo’s global revenue and the company’s sales in the region rose almost 27% in the 2017-2018 fiscal year to more than $4 billion. Most of China’s purchases are fast fashion – mass produced, cheap, short-lived garments.
The result: China throws away 26 million tons of clothes every year, less than 1% of which is reused or recycled, according to state news agency Xinhua.
The environmental cost of this waste is huge.”
Registered subscribers can read the article on the Bloomberg internet site