Clothing and textiles — fibers, water and microfibres

Cotton, oil, dyes, garment-making, washing, durability and secondhand use.

A garment begins in a field or a well

Three fibers, three very different physical origins

A piece of clothing can begin its story in physically very different places depending on what fiber it is made of. Cotton needs arable land, irrigation or rainwater, and a full course of farm management — sowing, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting — before the raw fiber reaches a spinning mill. Polyester, by contrast, comes mainly from fossil raw materials: chemically, it is a type of plastic spun into fiber form, with an origin much closer to that of a plastic bottle than to that of a plant. Viscose and other so-called "man-made cellulosic" fibers sit somewhere in between: they start from plant cellulose, often sourced from wood, but require a substantial industrial chemical process to turn that cellulose into spinnable fiber. Once the fiber is obtained, spinning, weaving, dyeing, washing, drying and stitching it into a finished garment consumes energy, water and chemicals at each successive stage, and the garment then still has to travel between factories, distribution warehouses and shops before reaching whoever eventually buys it.

Washing is not just a matter of water and electricity use

Over a garment's years of use, every wash directly consumes water and electricity, but it also sheds tiny fibers into the environment — a phenomenon especially pronounced in synthetic fabrics, though not exclusive to them — simply through the mechanical friction of the washing process itself, without the garment needing to already be worn out. Beyond the wash itself, the electric dryer and the iron can, in some homes, end up dominating a surprisingly large share of the total household energy spent on clothing care. Washing less often when real hygiene allows it, waiting for a full load instead of washing loose items, choosing a wash temperature suited to the fabric and the actual level of soiling, and prioritising air-drying over the electric dryer all genuinely reduce the service consumed, with no need to buy any new wardrobe labeled "sustainable" to achieve that saving.

At the end of its service life, very few garments become fiber again

When a garment stops being used, if it is still clean and in reasonable condition, it can be reused directly by another person, whether through donation, second-hand sale or exchange. But turning an already-worn garment back into usable fiber for making new clothing — so-called "fiber-to-fiber" recycling — turns out to be technically very difficult in the vast majority of cases, precisely because most garments blend several different fiber types in the same fabric, incorporate elastane for stretch, carry buttons and zips made of other materials, are dyed with colourants that complicate the process, and the fiber itself has already partially degraded over years of use and repeated washing. In practice, some discarded clothing becomes low-quality filling or industrial rags, some is exported to other countries, and the rest is incinerated or landfilled. Donating used clothing, however well-intentioned, also does not automatically guarantee that a specific garment will actually be used by someone else: a volume of donations that far exceeds real demand can, in practice, end up shifting the same clothing surplus to a different country, without having resolved the underlying problem.

The most prudent garment is usually, simply, the one that lasts

Faced with the complexity of comparing exact environmental footprints between different fibers and manufacturing processes, a much more robust and easier-to-apply decision is to buy fewer garments overall, use each one for longer before discarding it, repair them when reasonable instead of replacing them at the first sign of wear, exchange them with other people when no longer wanted, and demand genuinely durable design from manufacturers from the outset. Comparing a specific garment's build quality and the real number of uses it will get matters, in practice, far more than being guided by a single fiber labeled "eco-friendly" or "sustainable" on the packaging.

The garment that lasts

Buy less, use more: how many times a garment actually gets worn matters more than the specific fiber it is made of.
Repair before discarding: a button, a seam or a broken zip are almost always repairable at a lower cost than replacing the whole garment.
Wash with judgment: less often when hygiene allows it, full loads, a temperature suited to the fabric, and air-drying over the dryer when possible.
Exchange or sell before throwing away: a clean garment in good condition still has use value for someone else.
Demand durable design: compare build quality, not just an "eco-friendly" fiber label.

Don't rely on fiber-to-fiber recycling as the main solution

Fibre blending, elastane, dyes and wear-related degradation make recycling a garment back into usable fiber technically difficult in most cases. Extending the life of the garment you already have matters more than trusting it will be recycled well at the end.

The numbers, with their source

93 billion cubic meters of fresh water a year, just to make clothes

Manufacturing the clothing consumed worldwide requires around 93 billion cubic meters of fresh water a year, equivalent to about 37 million Olympic swimming pools. Global clothing production also doubled between 2000 and 2015, while the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded fell 36% over that same period, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation — more clothing is being produced while each individual garment is being used less.

Sources: report cited on committees.parliament.uk (SFI0090 — Evidence on Sustainability of the fashion industry); Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Household washing, the largest single source of microfibres

Household clothes washing releases, worldwide, on the order of 13 million tonnes of textile microfibres a year, the largest single source of microfibre pollution identified so far. If the fashion industry continues with its current production model unchanged, an estimated additional 22 million tonnes of microfibres will reach the world's oceans between 2015 and 2050. Some fabric finishing treatments, such as certain coatings, can reduce fiber shedding by up to 50%, and using a specific washing bag can reduce it by up to 86%.

Sources: UNEP — Fashion's tiny hidden secret; compiled studies on microfibre release during household washing.

What this table is missing

These global figures do not distinguish between the impact of a rain-fed cotton garment, one made from cotton artificially irrigated in an arid region, and a synthetic garment derived from oil: every combination of fiber, country of manufacture and specific dyeing and finishing process has its own specific footprint, which no global average can replace.

Sources

The European Environment Agency analyses fashion's environmental impact in Textiles and the environment.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation documents the textile industry's production and disposal model and proposes circular alternatives.
UNEP summarizes the textile microfibre problem in Fashion's tiny hidden secret.