Researchers Find Apparel Industry Accounts for 14 Percent of Global Plastic Pollution

Plastic waste and plastic leakage continue to plague the health of the environment—and the apparel industry just keeps piling it on.

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A new study conducted by researchers with North Carolina State University , Cotton Incorporated , Quantis, the University of California at Santa Barbara and more has found that apparel’s contribution to plastic waste and leakage was sky high in 2019.

The report, titled “The Global Apparel Industry is a Significant Yet Overlooked Source of Plastic Leakage,” shows that 14 percent of global plastic pollution, which amounts to 8.3 million tons, came from the apparel industry in 2019.

Jesse Daystar, Cotton Incorporated’s chief sustainability officer and one of the paper’s co-authors, said that amount of plastic said that amounts to 820 times the mass of the Eiffel Tower.

The report breaks down both plastic waste and plastic leakage. Plastic leakage accounts for plastic that get into the environment beyond waste management systems.

“Think of a bottle on the ground, or a polyester T-shirt that isn’t put in a managed waste system, or maybe is left on the ground. That’s plastic leakage,” Daystar explained.

In 2019, the researchers note, the global apparel industry’s estimated plastic consumption came in around 32 million tons, of which synthetic fibers accounted for about half. Even while using that amount of plastic, the industry generated about 21 million tons of overall plastic waste in 2019, with the vast majority of it being macroplastic waste. According to researchers, synthetic apparel at the end of its life made up 81 percent of that 21 million tons. Meanwhile, in the cotton value chain, the majority of plastic waste came from packaging.

Of the plastic waste created by the apparel sector, 8.3 million tons leaked into the environment, which means about 40 percent of all plastic waste from the industry is mismanaged and negatively impacts the environment further. Synthetic apparel’s life cycle accounted for nearly 90 percent of the leakage. The major problems in synthetics’ life cycle is end of life management, whether in the primary or secondary market.

Daystar said that even recycled synthetics continue to pose a risk of plastic leakage, despite being considered by some as a more sustainable alternative to virgin synthetics.

“Whether it’s virgin synthetics or recycled synthetics, the plastic leakage would likely be very similar at a garment level in most situations,” he explained. “If you’re using synthetics, you’re going to cause plastic waste, and you’re very likely going to cause some level of plastic leakage.”

The secondary market, too, is a dangerous game when it comes to plastic leakage.

The U.S. outsources pre-used synthetics to countries like Guatemala, India, the Dominican Republic and Pakistan, where the scores on the Mismanaged Waste Index (MWI), or the country-specific ratio of mismanaged goods, remain high. The EU28 high-income countries similarly export to Pakistan, Tunisia, Ghana, Cameroon and the United Arab Emirates, while countries like Japan export to the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Pakistan and China.

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According to the report, “For apparel originally sold in the EU28 high-income countries, Japan, the U.S. and EU28 low-income countries, 93 percent, 80 percent, 80 percent and 77 percent of the plastic leakage due to mismanaged synthetic apparel waste occurs in secondhand export countries, respectively.”

The research states that, when waste is transported to secondary markets, part of the issue becomes the shift from a geography with robust waste management systems in place to areas with less solid waste collection infrastructure.

In the U.S., Europe and Japan, the report said, the main driver of this kind of waste is not population—as it is in India and China—but consumption per capita, suggesting that consumers in the three aforementioned companies have an issue with overconsumption.

Daystar said, though it can be a challenge to do so, educating the consumer could help them understand the negative effects of their choices on the environment. It could also inform them of the value of purchasing items made primarily of cotton or other natural fibers, in turn forcing brands’ and retailers’ hand on synthetic sentiment. If consumer demand for natural fibers becomes high enough, it could impact the entire value chain, he said.

“Designers are going to try to create a product that consumers want, and when they design something they think consumers want, they’re going to find a manufacturer for that product. If there’s strong demand from designers, from brands for natural fibers , the manufacturing supply chain is going to figure out a way to create that product and sell that product to the brand which they can sell to consumers. Signaling has to be strong to a supply chain that prioritizing natural fibers,” he told Sourcing Journal.

Infrastructure, too, will play a role in attempting to lower plastic leakage. While Daystar said some parts of the world, like the EU and the U.S., may have more robust waste management systems, other areas lack that same infrastructure.

While it plays a smaller role in the overall numbers, many companies still use plastic for packaging, which, particularly in the cotton value chain, continues to cause pollution. Richard Venditti, a professor in North Carolina State University’s forest biomaterials department and co-author of the study, said integrating more paper into the value chain could help decrease the amount of plastics needing to be disposed of at all, but acknowledged its difficulties for brands.

“I think there’s a big trend for people to be using paper packaging rather than plastic,” he said. “Paper, for boxes and bags, really works [well]. It’s a natural material, so it’s not going to have the exact same water resistance and the exact same tear strength. So paper is challenged with, how do you make something that you can shrink wrap with paper?”

Though the researchers have not yet studied the continuing the apparel industry’s plastic pollution problem for any of the years after 2019, both Daystar and Venditti said they would hypothesize that the amount of plastic waste coming from the industry would have increased since then.

“Unless there’s some radical changes in how we treat our clothes at the end of life, the amount of consumption is going have a big impact on how much plastic pollution there will be,” Venditti said.

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