Every year, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced globally, and most of it ends up in landfills, incinerators, or dumped in the open environment. The environmental damage spans soil contamination, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and microplastic release that reaches every corner of the planet. Here’s how each of those pathways works and why the problem is accelerating.
The Scale of What Gets Thrown Away
To put 92 million tonnes in perspective, that’s roughly the weight of 460,000 blue whales worth of fabric discarded in a single year. The vast majority of this waste is not recycled. In the United States, only about 13 percent of textiles from clothing and footwear are recovered for recycling. Another 3.2 million tons are burned in waste-to-energy incinerators. The rest goes to landfills.
Globally, just 8 percent of textile fibers in 2023 came from recycled sources. That means the clothing industry runs on an almost entirely linear model: raw materials go in, garments come out, and discarded clothes pile up with very little looping back into production.
What Happens in Landfills
Clothing buried in landfills creates two distinct problems depending on the fabric. Natural fibers like cotton and wool do break down, but in the oxygen-poor conditions of a landfill, that decomposition produces methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon, and acrylic are derived from petroleum and can take up to 200 years to decompose. During that time, they slowly fragment into smaller and smaller plastic particles.
Both types of fabric also carry chemical residues from the dyeing and finishing process. As rainwater filters through landfills, it picks up these substances and forms leachate, a toxic liquid that can seep into surrounding soil and groundwater. Research on textile-contaminated areas has found cadmium, chromium, nickel, arsenic, and lead migrating from waste sites into soil, agricultural crops, and eventually into the food chain. These metals don’t break down. They accumulate, persisting in the environment long after the original garment has disintegrated.
Toxic Metals and Aquatic Ecosystems
When textile chemicals reach rivers, lakes, or coastal waters, the effects ripple through entire food webs. Lead is toxic to fish and invertebrates. Cadmium disrupts aquatic ecosystems broadly. Chromium bioaccumulates, meaning organisms absorb it faster than they can expel it, so concentrations increase as you move up the food chain from plankton to small fish to larger predators. Mercury, arsenic, copper, and nickel all show similar patterns of toxicity to aquatic life.
These metals also alter soil chemistry around waterways, changing pH levels and influencing how other pollutants dissolve or settle. The result is a compounding effect: textile waste doesn’t just introduce one pollutant, it changes the local chemistry in ways that make other contaminants more mobile and more bioavailable.
Microplastic Pollution From Synthetic Fabrics
Synthetic textiles are one of the largest sources of microplastic in the world’s waterways. Fiber shedding during laundering alone accounts for an estimated 4 to 35 percent of all primary microplastic emissions, depending on the study and region. That range is wide, but even the low end makes laundry a significant contributor to ocean plastic.
What’s less discussed is what happens when synthetic garments are discarded. As polyester and nylon clothing degrades in landfills or open dumps, it sheds larger plastic fragments (macroplastics) that continue breaking into microplastics over decades. A 2024 study in Nature Communications described this disposal pathway as “a potentially growing source of plastic pollution, yet mostly overlooked.” Eleven percent of all plastic waste now comes from clothing and textiles, making the fashion industry a major player in the broader plastic crisis.
Open Dumping in Vulnerable Regions
Not all clothing waste stays in managed landfills. A significant portion of discarded garments from wealthier countries is shipped to developing nations under the label of secondhand trade. When those clothes can’t be sold locally, they’re dumped.
Chile’s Atacama Desert is one of the most visible examples. Over 59,000 tons of unsold, returned, or defective clothing arrive annually at the port of Iquique in northern Chile. At least 39,000 tons of these garments, mostly made of non-biodegradable synthetics, end up abandoned in the desert. The clothing sits in massive open-air piles, exposed to wind and sun, slowly fragmenting and releasing plastic particles and chemical residues into one of the driest ecosystems on Earth. If current practices continue, the volume of discarded clothing in the Atacama is expected to rise by 30 percent over the next decade.
Similar dumping occurs along coastlines in Ghana and Kenya, where bales of unsellable clothing end up in waterways and on beaches, creating both a terrestrial and marine pollution problem simultaneously.
Greenhouse Gases From Incineration
Burning clothing waste avoids the landfill problem but creates its own. Incinerating textiles releases carbon dioxide, methane, and a range of chemical pollutants into the atmosphere. Synthetic fabrics are particularly problematic because they’re essentially burning plastic, which produces more CO2 per ton than natural fibers. In the U.S., combusted textiles made up 9.3 percent of all municipal solid waste burned with energy recovery in 2018.
The emissions from incineration are immediate rather than slow-release. Where a landfill leaks methane over years, an incinerator converts the carbon stored in fabric into atmospheric CO2 in minutes. For synthetic garments made from fossil fuels, this is functionally identical to burning oil or gas: it adds carbon to the atmosphere that was previously locked underground.
Why the Problem Keeps Growing
The clothing industry has roughly doubled its output since 2000, driven by fast fashion’s model of cheap, trend-driven garments designed to be worn a handful of times. Prices have dropped, purchase frequency has risen, and the average garment is kept for a shorter period before being discarded. The result is a widening gap between how much clothing is produced and how much can realistically be reused or recycled.
Current recycling infrastructure can’t keep pace. Fiber-to-fiber recycling, where an old garment becomes material for a new one, remains technically difficult and commercially limited. Most “recycled” textiles are downcycled into lower-value products like insulation or rags, which eventually end up in landfills themselves. With only 8 percent of textile fibers coming from recycled sources globally, the industry remains overwhelmingly dependent on virgin materials, and the waste stream keeps expanding.
The environmental toll of clothing waste is not a single problem but a cascade: greenhouse gases from decomposition and burning, toxic metals leaching into soil and water, microplastics accumulating in oceans and organisms, and visible mountains of discarded garments in some of the world’s most fragile landscapes. Each garment that’s thrown away contributes to all of these pathways at once.