Most Clothes Are Plastic Now
Polyester is 59 percent of all the fibre made in the world. Here is what that has done to how long a garment survives, and how to tell a durable one from a disposable one while you are standing in the shop.
By Teona Abuladze · 7 min read
In 2024 the world produced 132 million tonnes of textile fibre. About 78 million tonnes of it was polyester, 59 percent of everything made, and 88 percent of that polyester came from fossil feedstock. The count is Textile Exchange’s, in its Materials Market Report 2025. This is the industry auditing itself, not an activist estimate.
Twenty-four years earlier the total was less than half that. Per person, the world made 8.3 kilograms of fibre in 1975 and 16.2 in 2024.
Add polyamide, another 7 million tonnes, plus acrylic, polypropylene and elastane, and close to two-thirds of everything spun on earth is plastic. The European Environment Agency puts the plastic share of textiles at 60 to 70 percent. Cotton is 19 percent and slipping. Wool is 0.9 percent.
In 2000 the world made 58 million tonnes of fibre. In 2024 it made 132 million.
The 36 percent figure does not mean what it is used to mean
Almost every article about fast fashion quotes the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s line from A New Textiles Economy(2017): “clothing utilisation, the average number of times a garment is worn before it ceases to be used, has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago.” In China, the same report says, the drop was 70 percent.
Go to the endnote. Number 7 reads: “Circular Fibres Initiative analysis based on Euromonitor International Apparel & Footwear 2016 Edition (volume sales trends 2005–2015).” Endnote 8, for the China figure, says “Ibid.”
Nobody counted wears. Both numbers are derived from retail sales volumes over ten years, presented as a fifteen-year change. They may point in the right direction. They are not measurements of how long anyone wore anything, and should stop being quoted as if they were.
The companion claim is worse. The same report says “some garments are estimated to be discarded after just seven to ten wears.” Endnote 10 cites a 2009 paper by Morgan and Birtwistle, and “Barnardo’s, Survey of 1500 women as part of #MyBarnardosDonation Campaign (2015).” That second source is a children’s charity’s press campaign; Barnardo’s Scotland ran a Glasgow version the same June reporting that the average woman there wore a typical purchase six times. From a donation drive, a global statistic about garment lifespan was born, and it now gets repeated as though it describes your coat.
Kirsi Laitala and Ingun Grimstad Klepp at Norway’s SIFO reviewed seventeen quantitative disposal studies run between 1987 and 2020. Physical wear and tear accounted for 37 percent of disposals, poor fit for 28 percent, and loss of perceived value for 35 percent. Nearly two-thirds of clothing is thrown out while it still works, which is a more uncomfortable finding than the one everyone quotes.
In 2025, writing in Frontiers in Sustainability, Koria and colleagues took apart the Foundation’s other famous number, the $460 billion of value “lost” annually to underused clothing: it prices used garments at what new ones sell for. Valued at what secondhand textiles fetch, the sum is $10 to $17 billion.
What actually breaks
None of this means garments are not getting flimsier. It means the evidence is physical rather than statistical, and physical evidence is checkable by hand.
Start with staple length. USDA Agricultural Handbook 566 classes upland cotton in thirty-seconds of an inch, from 24/32 to 44/32. American Pima, the extra-long-staple type, runs from about 1¼ inches upward. The handbook states the relationship plainly: there is a high correlation between fibre strength and yarn strength, and fibre length governs how fine a yarn can be spun and how even it comes out. Short fibres have fewer contact points holding them into the yarn. They migrate to the surface under friction, and that fuzz becomes a pill.
Twist is the second variable. More twist packs fibres tighter and resists that migration, up to a point past which the yarn goes stiff. You cannot read twist off a label, but you can see its consequence. Hold the fabric to a window: a loose jersey shows daylight through gaps between the loops, a dense one glows evenly.
Fabric weight, GSM, is grams per square metre, and it is the number that correlates best with how long a knit lasts, because it measures how much material is there. Some brands print it. Where they do not, weigh the garment against another of the same size on a kitchen scale. A jersey t-shirt of 110 grams and one of 190 grams are different products wearing the same word.
Seams are where cheap manufacturing shows first, and they are free to inspect. Turn the garment inside out and count stitches along an inch of side seam. Ten to twelve is the normal apparel range, and research going back to Amirbayat in 1994 found seam strength rising with both stitch density and thread size. Six or seven means the maker saved thread and machine time, and the seam will fail before the cloth does. Pull gently across a seam on a woven garment: if the yarns slide and open a ladder of holes along the stitch line, that is seam slippage, and the fabric is woven too loosely to hold a seam under load. One last tell: fusing, the glued interlining in collars and waistbands, delaminates in the wash and leaves a bubbled surface nobody can repair.
Ten to twelve stitches per inch is normal. Six is a garment that will open at the seam before the cloth wears out.
Why elastane goes first
Elastane, sold as spandex or Lycra, sits in a large share of modern clothing at 2 to 5 percent, far more in swimwear. It is the first thing in a garment to die, and the chemistry explains why.
Elastane is a segmented polyurethane: rigid urethane and urea blocks tied to flexible polyol segments. Those linkages hydrolyse in hot water. Anderson Development’s testing on polyurethane elastomers found that raising immersion temperature from 50°C to 70°C cut the half-life of polyether-based material from roughly two years to five weeks, and of polyester-based material from four or five months to two weeks.
So the jeans that bagged at the knee after eight months were not badly sewn. They were warm-washed, tumble-dried, and their 2 percent elastane cooked. Once elastic recovery goes, fit goes, and fit is the second-largest reason clothes get thrown out.
Elastane also ruins recycling. Jean Hegedus of the Lycra Company gives the thresholds: 2 to 5 percent can be mechanically recycled, 5 to 10 percent ends up as insulation or car seat filling, above 10 percent is the real problem. Emanuel Boschmeier at TU Wien is blunter. Elastane is so elastic that textile shredders cannot cut it, so it soils the machine, clogs filters and clumps.
The money came out of the cloth
Clothing has genuinely got cheaper, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has the receipts. In 1994 the apparel CPI stood at 133.4 and the all-items index at 148.2. In 2024 apparel was 131.5 and all items was 313.7. Nominal apparel prices sat slightly below where they were thirty years earlier, while everything else more than doubled. In real terms clothing is about 53 percent cheaper.
A price can fall for good reasons: containerisation, automated spinning, tariff liberalisation. A fifty-three percent real decline is not absorbed by logistics alone. It comes out of fibre choice, fabric weight, stitch count and wages, every one of which is a durability input.
Recycled, Conscious, Ecodesign
Recycled polyester reached 9.3 million tonnes in 2024. Its share of all polyester fell from 12.5 percent to 12 percent, because virgin production grew faster.
Here is what the hangtags omit. Textile Exchange reports that recycled polyester made from plastic bottles accounted for 6.9 percent of all fibre produced worldwide, against a total recycled polyester share of roughly 7 percent. Essentially all of it is bottles. Pre- and post-consumer recycled textiles came to less than one percent of the global fibre market. Taking a food-grade PET bottle, which can go back into a bottle repeatedly, and spinning it into a t-shirt that cannot be recycled into anything is a one-way trip out of a working loop.
In December 2025 the Microplastic Research Group at Çukurova University, led by Sedat Gündoğdu, tested fourteen garment types made mostly of recycled polyester against nine of mostly virgin, from Adidas, H&M, Nike, Shein and Zara. The recycled garments shed an average of 12,430 fibres per gram against 8,028, and the particles were about 20 percent smaller.
Regulators have started saying so. On 14 June 2022 the Norwegian Consumer Authority wrote to H&M and Norrøna about the Higg Materials Sustainability Index, concluding under the Marketing Control Act that using Higg MSI data in consumer-facing marketing “easily will be considered misleading.” Using it internally for sourcing was fine. Putting it on a label was not.
On 13 September 2022 the Dutch authority ACM closed its own investigation. Decathlon and H&M had used terms such as “Ecodesign” and “Conscious” without saying what benefit was meant. Both agreed to change or drop the claims, and Decathlon paid €400,000 and H&M €500,000 to sustainability causes.
The American case went the other way. In Lizama v. H&M, in the Eastern District of Missouri, plaintiffs argued the Conscious Choice line was falsely marketed. On 12 May 2023 Judge Rodney W. Sippel dismissed it, reasoning that no reasonable consumer would read H&M’s language to mean the line was inherently sustainable, since the company had described its “most sustainable” products in comparative terms. Careful wording survived where an absolute claim would not have.
Where this argument is weakest
Natural does not mean better. Chapagain, Hoekstra, Savenije and Gautam calculated in Ecological Economics in 2006 that the global average water footprint of cotton is 9,359 cubic metres per tonne of finished textile, about 2,720 litres for one 250-gram t-shirt, and that EU25 consumers were responsible for roughly a fifth of the drying of the Aral Sea. Wool carries enteric methane with it.
Synthetics genuinely outperform for some jobs. Nobody should climb in wet wool when a synthetic shell will keep them alive, and hospital textiles are better for polyester existing.
The lever that works is not material substitution. WRAP estimates that extending the active life of clothing by nine months cuts its carbon, water and waste footprints by up to 20 percent. No fibre swap does that, which is an awkward thing for an industry that sells garments to say.
The EU’s answer was meant to be the Green Claims Directive, which would have required independent verification before any environmental claim. On 20 June 2025, after a letter from the European People’s Party calling it burdensome, the Commission said it intended to withdraw the proposal, and lawyers still disagree on whether it can lawfully do that. Directive (EU) 2024/825, which restricts generic claims like “eco-friendly” made without evidence, applies from 27 September 2026. That is thirteen days from now.
Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
Sources: Textile Exchange, “Materials Market Report 2025,” 2025 — https://textileexchange.org/knowledge-center/reports/materials-market-report-2025/; European Environment Agency, “Textiles” in-depth topic, accessed 2026 — https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/topics/in-depth/textiles; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future,” 2017, incl. endnotes 7, 8 and 10 — https://content.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/m/7f818b40f06e1afd/original/Summary-of-findings-A-New-Textiles-Economy.pdf; Kirsi Laitala and Ingun Grimstad Klepp, SIFO/OsloMet, “Review of clothing disposal reasons,” 2022 — https://clothingresearch.oslomet.no/2022/10/19/review-of-clothing-disposal-reasons/; Koria et al., “The Emperor’s old clothes: a critical review of circular fashion in gray literature,” Frontiers in Sustainability, 2025 — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainability/articles/10.3389/frsus.2025.1499273/full; USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, “The Classification of Cotton,” Agricultural Handbook 566 — https://www.depts.ttu.edu/aaec/icac/archive/pdf/Markets_and_Marketing_optimized/Grading/The_Classification_of_Cotton-Agricultural_Handbook_566.pdf; “Seam Performance of Garments,” IntechOpen, 2019, citing Amirbayat 1994 — https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/67275; Anderson Development, “Polyurethane Elastomer Hydrolytic Stability: A Comprehensive Review” — https://www.andersondevelopment.com/pdf/PU%20Technical%20Papers-added%2003162021/PU%20Hydrolytic%20Stability.pdf; International Fiber Journal, “Recycling Garments With Stretch Fibers” (Jean Hegedus, Emanuel Boschmeier) — https://www.fiberjournal.com/recycling-garments-with-stretch-fibers/; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Apparel data in fashion,” The Economics Daily, 2025 — https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/apparel-data-in-fashion.htm; Changing Markets Foundation and Çukurova University Microplastic Research Group, “Spinning Greenwash,” 10 December 2025 — https://changingmarkets.org/report/spinning-greenwash/; Forbrukertilsynet (Norwegian Consumer Authority), case 22/5262-1, 14 June 2022 — https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/hm-potentially-misleading-environmental-claims-in-marketing-using-higg-msi-data-in-marketing-of-garments.pdf; ACM, “Going forward, Decathlon and H&M will provide better information about sustainability to consumers,” 13 September 2022 — https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/going-forward-decathlon-and-handm-will-provide-better-information-about-sustainability-consumers; The Fashion Law, “H&M Escapes Lawsuit Accusing It of Greenwashing,” 2023, and National Law Review, “Lizama et al. v. H&M,” 22 June 2023 — https://www.thefashionlaw.com/hm-escapes-lawsuit-accusing-it-of-greenwashing-its-fast-fashion-wares/ and https://natlawreview.com/article/lizama-et-al-v-hm-lesson-artful-crafting-green-claims; Latham & Watkins, “European Commission Announces Intention to Withdraw EU Green Claims Directive Proposal,” 2025 — https://www.lw.com/en/insights/european-commission-announces-intention-to-withdraw-eu-green-claims-directive-proposal; A.K. Chapagain, A.Y. Hoekstra, H.H.G. Savenije and R. Gautam, “The water footprint of cotton consumption,” Ecological Economics 60(1), 2006 — https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/Report18.pdf; WRAP, “Extending Product Lifetimes: WRAP’s Work on Clothing Durability” — https://www.wrap.ngo/resources/case-study/extending-product-lifetimes-wraps-work-clothing-durability; Barnardo’s Scotland survey reported in Third Force News, “Once worn, thrice shy,” June 2015 — https://tfn.scot/news/once-worn-thrice-shy-womens-wardrobe-habits-exposed
