Sunday, April 22, heralded Earth Day 2012, is a day launched by the Earth Day Network in 1970 to encourage yearly global events focusing on environmental awareness.
The Earth Day Network supports sustainable practices and rewards individual and larger organizational efforts for measurably reducing carbon emissions.
This work in raising awareness has impacted fashion by exposing the staggering amounts of water, energy, electricity, and other resources wasted by textile factories, in addition to the pollution generated by mass production.
New York and China are prime examples of massive textile waste.
“Over five percent of NYC’s residential waste stream consists of textiles like clothing and towels,” says GrowNYC.org, an environmental website. “All told, New Yorkers discard 193,000 tons of textiles every year in NYC, at a cost to taxpayers and our environment.
An article by Christina Dean on the eco-fashion forward website Ecouterre reveals that “an average of 234 tons of textiles are discarded every day into Hong Kong’s landfills, according to 2010 statistics.”
