8 out of 10 Spaniards claim to buy clothes only when they need it. This would be confirmed by the latest study by Naturalizethe environmental education project of Ecoembesthereby reinforcing the idea that the majority of Spaniards are aware of their way of consuming, since They declare that they do not buy “on impulse”.
But that is the theory or what we say in front of a survey. Because reality is visible to allin those closets full of clothes at low prices that we buy compulsively and throw away almost with the same speed.
A report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) of 2024, which uses data from 2020, concludes that in that year the European Union generated 6.95 million tons of textile waste, about 16 kg per personof which 11.6 kg ended up in the trash. Spain is above that European average. We exceed 20 kg per person and year. And we are among those who recycle the least, we only selectively collect 2.1 kg per person per year, barely 4% of the total.
Travel pants
The worst of all is that recycling used clothing it doesn’t work like we thinkdenying the idea promoted by large fashion companies that we can buy it and throw it away in treatment containers because it will continue to be reused. “This idea serves more to calm consciences than to generate a circular and sustainable consumption system,” they criticize Greenpeace.
This is clear from the latest research by the environmental association which, after monitoring more than twenty garments deposited in various Spanish selective collection containers, and with which it has confirmed that they traveled more than 9,000 km on averagebefore ending up in Africa or Asia.
In the summer of 2023, Greenpeace placed tracking devices on 29 garments (of which, in the end, only 23 could be definitively extracted) and has monitored them for more than fifteen months without their journey ever seeming to stop. In total, the garments have added a journey of more than 205,121 kmwhich is equivalent to giving five times around the Earth. The investigation confirms that, after depositing the clothes in a selective collection container, far from being reused in Spain, in most cases the garments are exported to countries in the Global South, mainly Asia or Africa.
The device with which Greenpeace has been able to document the longest trip is the one that has been placed in a pair of beige pants, deposited in a Zara store in Madrid and that reached the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. But it was not a direct trip. To get there, the garment first passed through the United Arab Emirates and traveled more than 22,000 kilometersfor 215 days, before he was lost track of at a gas station north of the Ivorian city, a common parking place for gbakaswhich is what the informal minibuses used for community transportation are called there.
Landfills thousands of kilometers from closets
Thanks to the first results offered by Greenpeace geolocators, already in November 2023 it was possible to verify that the garments were beginning to spread around the world. A year later, of the 23 devices with results, 92% have been geolocated outside of Spain, in eleven countries from four continents: United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Morocco, India, Egypt, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Romania and Chile.
According to official data offered by the Tax Agency, within the batch of textile waste that Spain exported in 2023, 92% is used clothing (129,705 tons). In recent years Greenpeace has documented how a lot of these clothes end up in landfills (legal or illegal) from African or Asian countries, or burned or torn into rags. The magnitude of the impact of used clothing is such that the sector has ended up recognizing that it does not have the capacity to manage so much material.
Can something be done to avoid it?
Until now, companies in the textile sector that were responsible for the selective collection of used clothing did so on a voluntary basis. However, new European legislation requires that from 2025 The responsibility of these companies for the management of textile waste will be mandatory.
“The model that the fashion sector has promoted, of buying and throwing away clothes, has exceeded the scale that the planet can support and, however, continues to grow as will the environmental and social impacts associated with it,” denounces Sara. del Río, coordinator of the Greenpeace investigation.
The NGO assures that only 1% of all clothing that is taken to a recycling container becomes new material to make a new garment. Also remember that The textile industry is responsible for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And that “fast fashion” air travel alone generates about 16 million tons of CO2.
According to environmentalists, “it is an irrational consumption model of which companies only show their most positive side”, that supposed happiness that purchases bring, hiding the most negative aspects of this huge time bomb that no one seems willing to deactivate.
Faced with this, the head of Greenpeace proposes a double attitude: “If you have to throw away your clothes, do it in the textile containers, but if you really want to contribute, don’t buy more than you need.”