Threadcycle
Fast fashion and discard culture have created a global environmental catastrophe. After short periods of use and reuse, almost 800,000 tonnes of second-hand clothing get shipped to low-income countries each year, where 85% simply ends up in landfill or incinerators.
The health of the ecosystems and communities where our clothes go to die is hanging by a thread — and low income countries, as ever, bear the brunt of this.
In 2022, photographer Tamara Merino and I reported on clothes dumps in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, for National Geographic.
I appeared in an episode of Human Footprint on PBS (July 2025) exploring the side effects of fast fashion, and Tamara and I are continuing to develop the project to incorporate the consequences of manufacture, dyeing, recycling and discard of textiles around the world.
