FASHION REDEFINED.
Sustainable clothing with a charitable purpose.
FASHION & SUSTAINABILITY
In the following, we want to shed light on problems in the fashion industry with regard to our environment and social justice as well as PER FINES solutions.
PROBLEMS
FASHION & ENVIRONMENT
CO2 emissions & climate change
The role of the fashion industry
The fashion industry produces 10% of man-made CO2 emissions.
As a result, the fashion industry emits more CO2 into the atmosphere than all air traffic and shipping (excluding cruise ships) combined.
Cotton & polyester production
Pollution from textile production
Although cotton is grown on only 3% of the world's available agricultural land, 24% of all insecticides and 11% of all pesticides are sprayed on cotton fields. No other crop uses so many plant toxins. The artificial irrigation of cotton fields leads to salinization of the soil, a decline in long-term yields and a lowering of the water table, which can result in a shortage of drinking water for the local population.
Polyester is the most common textile fiber and is found in 52% of all clothing. The production of polyester emits 2-3 times more CO2 than cotton; at the same time, polyester decomposes much more slowly or not at all. Textiles are responsible for 35% of global microplastic pollution. Washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the oceans every year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.
Textile waste
Pollution after fashion sales
Textile waste has increased by more than 400% in the last 5 years. Every second a truck full of textile waste is dumped into a landfill.
We got used to throwing away things that we no longer like, that are old or slightly damaged.
Almost a quarter (24.3%) of all textile waste is burned in a CO2-intensive manner, and more than half of the clothing waste (57.1%) ultimately ends up in the particularly environmentally harmful landfills.
Up to 95% of the textiles that land in landfills each year could be recycled or reused.
So far, only 10% of all textile waste is used on the market as used clothing and 8% is returned to the production cycle through recycling.
FASHION & SOCIAL JUSTICE
Working conditions in developing countries
Since the building of a textile factory in a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, collapsed on April 24, 2013, the conditions under which our garments are produced have become known worldwide. More than 5,000 workers were in the textile workshops at the time of the collapse. 1,136 of them died as a result of the devastating accident and over 2,000 were injured. The workers had mainly produced clothing for export, including for European fashion companies such as Primark, Benetton, Mango, C&A and also German companies such as KiK or Adler and their suppliers.
Although this accident was not the first in a textile mill for international mass production, the circumstances and the scale of the accident drew the attention of many consumers to the production of their clothes and sparked a widespread debate about the abuses in the global textile industry: below average wages, excessive wages Working days and hardly any free time, unprotected handling of chemicals and a lack of fire protection regulations are just some of the problems in the industry.
solutions
FASHION & ENVIRONMENT
Recycling, upcycling, reuse
By recycling fabrics, we reduce CO2 emissions, textile waste and water consumption. The average German buys 60 new items of clothing every year, a total of around 14 kilograms.
Recycle and reuse extend the life of a garment. On average, a fast fashion item is only worn a maximum of 10 times. Shortening the lifespan of a T-shirt from 1 year (worn 50 times) to one month increases CO2 emissions by 550% per item per year. If the average lifespan of a garment is extended by 9 months, CO2, water and waste pollution can be reduced by 20-30%.
PER FINES purchases second-hand clothing and enhances it - creatively, innovative and visionary. We encourage our customers to buy less & better and more sustainably - to buy products that are fair and ecologically sustainable - to buy products that you can and want to wear for a long time.
Minimizing textile waste
We save textiles from the landfill.
Far too many items of clothing are thrown away even though they are as good as new and could be worn for a long time.
Second-hand does not mean that the clothes are old, used or bad. Second-hand clothing can be of high quality and as good as new.
PER FINES wants to consciously change the no longer up-to-date image of second-hand clothing.
Waste prevention
We are a low-waste label, which means that at every production step we think about how we can keep our waste production as low as possible.
We achieve this, for example, by having our labels printed on so-called seed paper, so that a few weeks later the customer has a small flowerbed on the windowsill instead of rubbish. We do not attach these labels to clothing with plastic, but with safety pins that can be reused by customers.