Not so fast (fashion)!

The autumn fashion week cycle may have everyone in the mood to clean out their closets and make room for some new threads, but here is a great initiative from France that encourages people to repair their clothes rather than throw them away – financial compensation will be offered to customers for clothing and shoes repair. It is an example of how economic incentive can be used to promote behaviors that reduce environmental impact due to waste. The objective is to reduce France's fast fashion waste footprint, which amounts to around 460,000 tons of landfill-bound garments every year.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/business-and-tech/20230712-france-to-pay-bonus-for-shoe-clothes-repairs-to-cut-waste

Other benefits of such programs include supporting local labor, reducing the burden on the international supply chain, and reducing the resources needed to produce new clothes (producing one pair of jeans requires around 7500 liters, or about 2000 gallons of water, for example – roughly equivalent to 7 years’ worth of water consumption for an average person (1)). For perspective on the magnitude of the problem, one fast fashion dump site in the Atacama Desert (Chile) is distinctly identifiable from space (2)…

The French program is set to begin in October, so while it is still too soon to see how effective it will be, it does demonstrate a creative approach to addressing waste problems.

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1 – United Nations (UN) (2019). ‘UN launches drive to highlight environmental cost of staying fashionable’, UN News, Climate and Environment, 25 Mar. Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035161.

2 – SkyFi (2023). ‘SkyFi's satellite image confirms massive clothes pile in Chile's Atacama Desert’, Stories, Use cases, 10 May. Available at : https://www.skyfi.com/blog/skyfis-confirms-massive-clothes-pile-in-chile.