Amy Powney

When we talk about climate change, we talk about the big stuff.

We talk about aviation, travel, shipping, logistics,

agriculture, industrialization, plastic pollution, fossil fuels.

But this is where your clothes come from, and they are playing their part.

Take a polyester dress, for instance.

It is both fossil fuel and plastic pollution combined.

When it's made, it contributes to climate change and its industrial processing.

When it's washed, it releases microplastics into the ocean, into the food chain, into us.

When you throw it away, it ends up in landfill.

And in landfill, it takes hundreds of years to degrade.

It's no different than your plastic packaging.

But it does give trashy dressing a whole new meaning.

Thank you.

OK, so how did we get here?

We buy three times as many clothes as we did in 1980 and wear them for half as long.

Your grandmother would have mended her clothes, but now three out of five end up in landfill within the first year of purchase.

It's changed within one generation, and it's set to increase by 62 percent by 2030.

So mass industrialization and the linear production model of global capitalism gave birth to the notion that we could and should have it all faster and cheaper, which means we've lost connection to our clothes.

We do not know or seem to care where they come from.

And when I say we, I mean all of us that wear clothes, but also the brands that make them.