According to a new Kantar survey conducted for the clothing brand Asphalte, French women and men wear half of the T-shirts in their dressing room. A waste of clothes has to do with not throwing it away, but continuing to buy new clothes.
Every day it’s the same: you open your closets wide to see what you can carry on your back, but your eyes quickly fall on those freshly laundered and ironed clothes that you didn’t wear until last week. No wonder, considering you often flip five or six outfits at the expense of the rest of your dressing room contents.
If you recognize yourself in this description, you are probably one of those many French men and women who only wear half of what their wardrobe contains. Although this Kantar* survey only focused on t-shirts, it illustrates the trend well as respondents own 17 t-shirts on average… 7 of which they never wear!
Tiredness, wear and tear or simple forgetfulness? For 89% of the respondents, the second option prevails. But throwing a worn-out T-shirt in the trash seems complicated to them: these T-shirts are kept in the closet for an average of two to five years!
This does not prevent buying new ones at the same time: in 2021, 59% of the French population will declare that they have bought at least one t-shirt a year. And 92% would rather buy a new T-shirt than a second-hand one. For the French surveyed, a good T-shirt is a piece of clothing that makes you feel good (51%) and is inexpensive (49%).
“This research shows that our consumption of T-shirts is a vicious circle: each of us is well aware that a T-shirt costing 11.60 euros will not last more than a few washes, and despite everything, buy it because it reacts to an immediate need or impulse. But this represents a significant environmental and social cost: the production of a single cotton T-shirt consumes 2500 liters of water and generates 5 kg of CO2 equivalent. And on average, each worker who participated in the production will receive only 0.6% of its value as salary.
William Hauvette, founder of the Asphalte brand.
However, there are several tips for recycling your old T-shirts: turn them into a rag, a tote bag (a chance to learn to sew if you haven’t already?) or even a tawashi, this famous Japanese waste-less sponge, which is made of fabric and can be used for washing dishes or cleaning the house.
And to reduce the financial and environmental costs associated with the compulsive purchase of T-shirts, why not turn to second-hand or rental clothing?
*Kantar study conducted for Asphalte with 12,500 French subjects aged 15 years and older.
(ETX Daily Up)