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Faster fashion, more wastage

Yet, those second-hand shops deal only with durable products of luxurious brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel.

People who have unwanted fast fashion clothes can only give them away or simply discard them, an act that would add to the burden of local landfills.
The Environmental Protection Department has warned in its website that "the remaining landfill space will last only for six to 10 years if waste levels continue to increase at current levels".

According to the department, 193 tonnes of textiles – as heavy as about 40
adult African elephants – were dumped at landfills each day in 2005 and 2006.

The unwanted textiles included cotton, man-made fibres, and old clothing.
Marcus Yuen Chun-wah, associate professor of the Institute of Textiles and
Clothing at the Polytechnic University, said many of those discarded textiles were made of fibres such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, or known as man-made wool.

Like plastic, those materials would take at least 100 years to be degraded in
landfills, said Dr Yuen, who is an expert of chemical testing of textiles.

But Godfrey Chung Kwong-yiu, deputy director of the consumer testing services department at SGS Hong Kong Ltd., said it was hard not to use synthetic fibres such as polyester and nylon in making clothes because of their flexibility in application, special functions and easily controllable costs.

SGS Hong Kong Ltd. is an inspection, verification, testing and certification company that promotes the use of eco-friendly materials.

Even cotton, the easily degradable material commonly used in clothes, may
harm the environment during the agricultural process, which consumes 10
per cent of the world's herbicides and contaminates rivers and fields, according to the Friends of the Earth.

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