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Clothing is one of the most intimate, constant, and inescapable forms of consumption. Our interaction with the fashion industry often begins just moments after birth, when our loved ones dress us in clothing that signifies how they wish us to be seen. It ends, hopefully many decades later, when we’re buried in a favorite dress or suit—clothing that expresses how we hope others will remember us.

In between, people often dismiss fashion as frivolous, or the heady province of catwalks and supermodels, says Claudia Henninger, a sustainable-fashion researcher at the University of Manchester. But it’s omnipresent. Through workwear or athleisure or a child’s favorite dinosaur tee, every one of us is engaged with the global fashion industry, whether we want to be or not.

The fashion industry is responsible for somewhere between 2% and 10% of global carbon emissions. In Europe, fashion and household textiles are the fourth-largest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions—behind only housing, transport, and food. The textile industry has myriad other environmental impacts, too; it’s the source of 20% of global industrial water pollution and 35% of microplastics in the oceans.

And all trendlines point upward. Textile production has quadrupled since 1970 and doubled since 2000, reaching nearly 100 million metric tons manufactured in 2020. Most of that is clothing. People purchase 62 million metric tons of apparel per year, a figure that is projected to increase to 102 million by 2030.

It’s precisely the pervasive and intimate nature of clothing that makes change so difficult. “You really are never going to feel the same way about your plastic disposable water bottle as you do about your clothes,” says Amanda Forster, a materials research engineer at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. “People just have more emotions tied up in their clothes.”

Telling people to buy fewer new clothes and keep older ones longer is a standard message of sustainability campaigns. But is that realistic? Are old-school solutions such as resale, swapping, and creative mending making a dent in the problem? And how effective are high-tech solutions, from greener ways to grow and dye cotton, to new recycling technologies, to textiles made from novel materials?

Taking measure of it all, we come face to face with an uncomfortable question: Do we have what it takes to change our clothes?

In 2015, journalist Lucy Siegle and climate activist and brand consultant Livia Firth came up with a simple heuristic for sustainability-minded consumers: Don’t buy any article of clothing that you don’t anticipate wearing at least 30 times. Nearly a decade on, the hashtag #30wearschallenge is still going strong, and the idea has spawned multiple apps to help people get more wear out of their clothes.

But slow fashion and minimalism are Davids up against the Goliath of fast fashion. That business model focuses on quick rollouts of low-priced items, rapid turnover of micro-trends, and frequent impulse purchases. Fast fashion emerged in the mid-1990s and quickly became a juggernaut. European clothing purchases increased by 40% between 1996 and 2012, and the average person in the United States now purchases an item of clothing every 5.5 days.

Contrast that with a 2023 report commissioned by the Hot or Cool Institute. Researchers calculated that if the global fashion industry remains the same, everyone would need to limit their purchases of new garments to just five items per year to keep the industry’s carbon footprint in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C.

That’s a much more restrictive standard than the 30-wears rule. What’s more, the practicalities are difficult to contemplate: the wear and tear on, say, socks alone would seem to blow right through that five-item budget.

One of the biggest surprises Henninger, an author of the report, has encountered working in the sustainable-fashion space is “just understanding how much is actually consumed” and how big the gap is between a sustainable level of consumption and the number of clothes people currently buy.

But reducing the quantity of clothes is not the only way to reduce their environmental footprint. A team of Swedish researchers, for example, has proposed replacing a large share of cotton farming in Europe with new breeds of fast-growing poplar trees. Not only can these trees produce enough fiber for clothing, they also can be grown on marginal, non-food-producing lands—drawing down carbon as they grow.

On another front, a Dutch company called DyeCoo has commercialized a greener method of dyeing textiles. Instead of water, they use pressurized CO2 to dye fabric—no process chemicals and no wastewater. The CO₂ is reclaimed from existing industrial processes, with 95% of it being recycled in a closed-loop system. And we can all reduce emissions associated with our clothes with straightforward behavioral tweaks such as washing clothes less often, washing in cold water, and air-drying rather than tumble-drying.

One way to maximize clothing life is to share and reuse garments in various ways, sometimes called collaborative consumption. Men’s formalwear rentals have long been common, but an increasing number of companies are offering women’s formal and event wear, as well as rental subscription services for business and casual clothing.

The environmental impact of such schemes varies with the item and how often it is worn, Henninger says. “If you think about a wedding dress you only wear once, it makes sense to rent,” she says. But for an everyday staple, the environmental impact of sending a T-shirt to a rental service and cleaning between wearers is larger than buying it outright.

An important question is whether reuse displaces new purchases or just adds to overall consumption. A life-cycle analysis of a formal dress–rental service in Stockholm revealed that if renting fully substitutes for formalwear purchases, it reduces the climate impact of a dress by 80%. But a survey of customers suggested that rentals substitute for only about 70% of dress purchases.

Then there’s the secondhand-clothing market, which now goes far beyond traditional thrift shops; apps and other ways of reselling are popping up like so many mushrooms. According to a 2024 report by the online secondhand retailer thredUp, the global secondhand market is growing three times faster than the overall apparel market and is projected to reach $350 billion in 2028.

Each garment purchased used rather than new saves an average of 0.3 kg of carbon emissions per year, according to a 2019 thredUp report. Independent research is hard to come by, but a life-cycle analysis of secondhand fashion in Japan revealed that used clothing items have just one-third the carbon footprint of new items.

Still, secondhand clothing represents a relatively small proportion of the fashion industry, projected to account for just one-tenth of global sales by 2025. In the United States, thrift stores sell only about 20% of textile donations they receive, with much of the remainder shipped abroad, downcycled for rags or stuffing, or landfilled.

Clothing repair is also becoming trendy. But for repair to make sense or even be feasible, a clothing item must be of sufficient quality in the first place. Some brands, such as Patagonia and Darn Tough Socks, make durability a selling point and offer lifetime warranties to repair or replace items. But many fast-fashion garments are produced so cheaply that they fall apart after a few wears and aren’t practical to repair.

Not surprisingly, many in the fast-fashion world are placing their sustainability bets on recycling. The battle here is for scale. Only about 15% of textiles in the United States are currently collected for reuse or recycling, and less than 1% of those are recycled into new fibers.

The first challenge is figuring out what to do with a particular garment—is it destined for resale, rags, recycling? Recycling technologies are usually specific to a particular fiber type (cotton, polyester, wool), so recyclers prefer pure feedstocks for maximum efficiency. Right now, the initial steps are labor-intensive: textiles are sorted into different grades and types of fiber piece by piece, all by hand.

Researchers in Europe and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. have been investigating functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess fiber types and automate sorting. Others are developing ways to embed fiber type and other information in the garment itself, such as via QR codes on labels or specialized fibers invisibly woven into the fabric.

At the recycling stage, the problem is fabric blends. To tackle the issue, researchers are experimenting with ways to chemically separate fibers. Recently, one team developed a technique that breaks down blended fabrics, using chemicals and microwaves. The process, which takes 15 minutes, completely degrades polyester and spandex into their molecules while producing intact cotton and nylon. Earlier this year, another team reported a new way to chemically separate elastane (those ubiquitous stretch fibers) from nylon. Still another group of engineers is using fungi to break down cotton into a syrup and separate it from polyester.

Ultimately, we’ll need to look upstream and build recyclability into garments from the start. This could include developing totally new kinds of biodegradable or easily recyclable textiles, such as fabric made from living algae that would actually capture carbon while in use and could be easily broken down at the end of life. Researchers have also produced materials similar to cotton and leather from fungi—and have even grown edible fungi on textile waste.

And here, we come full circle in fashion sustainability. There’s often a trade-off between durability and recyclability: Do we make clothes last longer so we can reuse them? Or should we reluctantly accept the appeal of fast fashion and go all in on recycling?

One way to sew up the problem is to think about the purpose of different articles of clothing, suggests Kelsea Schumacher, a circular-economy researcher at NIST. Raincoats are best designed with longevity in mind, while more ephemeral items such as socks could prioritize recyclability. “There is no one-size-fits-all” approach, she says. Maybe the solutions to the clothing sustainability problem are as diverse as the wearers.

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Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance science journalist based in Seattle covering biology, medicine, and the environment. Her work has appeared in Anthropocene, Nautilus, Nature, Newsweek, New Scientist, Spectrum, and a variety of other publications.

Image credits. Top: ©Anthropocene Magazine; Second: ©Anthropocene Magazine, AI-generated; Third: ©ThredUp distribution center; Fourth: By Ilia NesolenyiAdobe Stock