What Consumers Do With Their Unwanted Clothing?

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Recommended: Environmental impacts on textile productions

What Consumers Do With Their Unwanted Clothing?

Keywords: Sustainability, textiles, discard

In today’s fast fashion culture, people are disposing of clothes faster and more frequently than ever before. The waste from this disposal accounts for 13 million tons of solid waste per year (US EPA, 2009). Finding out how consumers dispose of their clothing is the first step in making a more sustainable lifecycle for textiles. This exploratory study used the Personal Mind Mapping technique to learn what consumers do with their unwanted clothing. Mind mapping is helpful because, unlike a survey, it allows respondents to write freely about their experiences including the possibility to bring in new ideas in and different perspectives. This study revealed motivations, reasons, and methods for disposing of clothing. Since clothing is a product that is never fully consumed, when we get rid of it, it is never actually gone. What is done with clothing at the end of its life is important for sustainability.

Thirty-two people were contacted about the research and there was a response from 14, resulting in a 44% response rate. Participants were given instructions on how to complete a mind map, then were asked to fill out a mind map of their own. The three prompt words given were: recycle, donate, and trash. Participants were asked to write their ideas and thoughts about each word. These words were chosen because they are three of the most used methods of clothing disposal. Studies show that the most common methods are donating them to charity, handing them down, selling them to stores or online, and throwing them away (Domina and Koch, 1999; Birtwistle and Moore, 2006). Trash was the most used category for the participants in this study. F...

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...were the small sample size. Future research could evaluate whether education materials distributed through donation centers would improve the consumer discard process.

Works Cited

Birtwistle, G. & Moore C.M. (2006) Fashion clothing- where does it all end up? The International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 35, 210-216.

Koch, K. & Domina, T. (1999) Consumer textile recycling as a means of solid waste reduction. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 28, 3-17.

Koch, K. & Domina, T. (2002) Convenience and frequency of recycling: implications for including textiles in curbside recycling programs. Environment and Behavior, 34, 216-238.

US EPA (2009) Municipal solid waste generation, recycling, and disposal in the United States: facts and figures for 2009. [WWW document]. URL http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw2009-fs.pdf

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