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12 Ways To Lower Your Carbon Footprint For Clothes

Every little thing helps, and every effort adds up — if we do it collectively.

Julie X
8 min readSep 17, 2019
Photo by Artificial Photography on Unsplash

With an estimated 80 to 100 billion pieces of apparel produced each year, the apparel industry is saturating the world with clothes — more clothes than we’ll ever need, with dire consequences.

Apart from being responsible for 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution, the apparel industry also generates 92 million tonnes of material waste every year. It’s the equivalent of 4% of the world’s waste.

As clothing brands continue to churn out new micro-seasons of clothes for profit at the expense of the environment, it’s up to us consumers to influence the course of fashion pollution.

Here are 12 ways to stop contributing to fashion pollution, or at least, curb it significantly.

1. Love what you have

When it comes to the negative environmental impacts of clothes, the best action could simply be no action — don’t buy, don’t throw, maintain the status quo.

Most of us have more clothes than we need. If we love what we have, we’re not going to need new clothes unless what we have gets worn out, and we won’t have to be on the lookout for new clothes all the time.

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Julie X
Julie X

Written by Julie X

A minimalistic millennial trying to make her life mean something.

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