The Department of the Agriculture, Water and the Environment has brought leading members of the Australian fashion industry to Canberra to urge them to address the ‘ugly side’ of fast fashion.
This includes hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste generated from clothing which is entering landfill every year.
Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley said the first National Roundtable on Clothing Textile Waste brought together industry disruptors, retailers, reuse charities, fibre producers, academics, and waste management companies.
“This roundtable is not about ending our love of fashion, it is about creating new economic opportunities to what is an unfashionable problem,” Ms Ley said.
“We want to keep clothing out of landfill, where it can take hundreds of years to break down while releasing harmful carbon emissions along the way — and we do not want to bombard our charities with clothes that are not fit for reuse.”
She said clothing charities were great places to thrift shop “but they are not the place to send our tatty, pre-loved clothes that are barely hanging by a thread”.
Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, Trevor Evans said Australians discarded close to 800,000 tonnes of clothing and textiles each year.
“We need to find new solutions to this problem and today we are prioritising textile waste in a big way,” Mr Evans said.
“Seed funding through the National Product Stewardship Investment Fund will encourage one of our most creative industries to collaborate, innovate and find solutions to a very untrendy problem.”
