International Repair Day 2024

Here are a few things you should know about the fashion industry, textiles waste and why mending matters...

👖More than 8 million people in the UK have thrown away clothes that needed mending because they didn't know how to fix them.

🗑️ These clothes are in amongst the approx. 350,000 tonnes of clothing waste that is sent to landfill every year (just in the UK).

🪡 But just one repair can take the average lifespan of a garment from 3.9 years > 5.2 years. That's 1.3 years added on average for for a single repair!

💨 Reducing the demand for new clothes has also helped to reduce CO2 emissions associated by manufacture in the UK by 700,000 tonnes.

💦 And water use per tonne of clothing sold in the UK between 2012-2016 dropped by 13.5% due to more sustainable clothing care habits - with repair being one of them.

🧵 Reviving these traditional mending skills gives us the chance to slow down and get creative. We can turn our clothing into a wearable scrapbook that not only celebrates the damage and lives we're living in them, but also honours the garment workers who made it in the first place.

♻️ Choosing and learning to repair our clothes shows the big companies that we don't want to be a part of their exploitative and disposable industry, instead fighting for a more fair and circular system.

📉 Stats found via eubusinessnews.com and WRAP.ngo