How To Turn Waste Into Something Beautiful

According to the British Department for Environment (Defra) 2 million tonnes of textiles are consumed in the UK each year with approximately 50% destined for landfill. Of this over 1 million tonnes is clothing and 0.5 million tonnes is collected for reuse or recycling. Similar figures are true for Germany; the German organisation FairWertung estimates that German households dispose of approximately 1.5 million tonnes of textiles and clothing each year. This is a huge amount and doesn’t even include pre consumer waste, off-cuts and damaged fabrics that go to waste even before the new collections hit the stores.

Go Green Bag by Ecoist

But there is an increasing number of brands out there who utilise exactly this problem as the starting point for their collections. They give new life to unwanted clothing, disposed plastics and production leftovers. Among them are recycling pioneers From Somewhere and Junky Styling but also younger brands like Dirtball who make eco-friendly apparel for action sports, claiming that for every 100,000 pieces they produce they keep 700,000 water bottles out of landfills. English Retreads repurposes inner tubes collected from local truck stopps and turns them into eco-chic handbags and accessories. Ecoist works with major companies, such as Coca-Cola and Disney, and fashion and industrial designers to make handbags and other products from post-industrial waste, thereby preventing millions of candy wrappers from ending up in landfills. Mia fuses recycled second-hand clothing, that is imported from Europe and the US to be sold on Malawian street markets, with traditional Malawian textiles.

All of these brands convincingly demonstate that something that most of us would just regard as useless waste can actually be turned into something beautiful. Waste can reveal a huge potential and economic value if we rethink the way we deal with it. This is also the opinion of a research programme called The Waste of the World that examines how rethinking waste impinges on some of the core concerns of contemporary social science.