You are what you wear

The global textile industry produces 150 billion items of clothing and generates 93 million tons of waste annually. But only 1% of all textiles used for clothing are recycled. We also face this problem in Slovenia. Despite the fact that a lot of textiles are collected in textile containers, exchanged at swap shops, donated to charity and sold in second-hand shops, large amounts still end up in municipal waste containers, landfills or incinerators.

In Slovenia, NGOs have been drawing attention to excessive consumption of clothing for several years now. However, we do not have exact data on how much clothing is imported to Slovenia, how much is produced here and how much waste is actually generated.

This project aims to obtain the missing data and analyze it. The analysis will be shared with the public in order to raise awareness about the amount of clothing waste in our country. We will explain the impact of excessive clothing consumption on people and the environment through simple examples. By raising awareness we hope to change some of the normalized buying habits, limit clothing consumption and transform clothing consumers to clothing users. At the same time, we will turn to legislators that allow large amounts of textile waste to be generated in Slovenia, and urge them to take appropriate measures for change.