How dirty is your closet?

February 9, 2022


Thredup partnered with independent environmental research firm Green Story Inc. to create thredUP’s Fashion Footprint Calculator.

How dirty is your closet is a test and tool anyone can use to quickly determine their carbon footprint associated with clothing purchase, care, and disposal habits, and to find out how small actions like shopping secondhand or air drying your clothes can make a big impact in reducing it.

🤜 Take their fashion footprint quiz and see how your shopping habits are helping (or hurting) the planet.

This is my result after taking the quiz. It is based on my personal closet and personal shopping habits as well as how I look after my clothes and not based on my sustainable fashion label Michaela Jedinak.

The result is shocking. Especially when you put them in context how my fashion footprint is equivalent to 2.6 from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Did you know that the UK is the epicenter of fast fashion in Europe, with each person buying an estimated 26.7 k of clothing every year, compared to an average 15.6kg for people across Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden?

But with that growth in consumption comes a growth in waste with fashion items becoming – effectively – another type of single-use product.

Every year, global emissions from textile production are equivalent to 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2, a figure that outweighs the carbon footprint of international flights and shipping combined.

The emissions from all the new clothes bought in the UK each month are greater than those from flying a plane around the world 900 times!

Looking beyond textiles production to the environmental impact of clothes washing and how clothes are discarded conjures an even more bleak image: an annual CO2 footprint of 3.3 billion tonnes-  – equal to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the fashion industry were a country, its emissions would rank almost as high as the entire European county.

Therefore it is important to understand how our shopping habits hurt the planet, so we can make positive adjustments. So, how dirty is your closet is a great way of getting started.

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