If fashion sales maintain the modern-day throwaway-culture momentum, estimates anticipate that the global fashion industry will create 148 million tons of textile waste each year by 2030, according to academic publisher Taylor & Francis.
That projection is up 60 percent compared to the textile waste generated in 2015. The crisis is about to be featured in the popular PBS show “Human Footprint,” returning to explore the global impact of Earth’s most ingenious, destructive and adaptable species: humans.
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“We try to meet audiences where they’re at with what they’re understanding and then you sort of pull back the veneer a little bit. You’re like, ‘OK, actually, that’s not what this is.’ It flips it on its head,” Nathan Dappen, producer and director of “Human Footprint,” told Sourcing Journal.
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“Personally, filming with someone like Frederick Anderson — an artist who puts everything he has into something really special for everyone involved — and then juxtaposing that with this place where people don’t give a damn, it’s just replicas thrown away in the desert — to me, that’s powerful. I think it makes both [sides] feel more impactful because you can see how we’ve been manipulated to participate and be complicit in this problem.”
Hosted by Princeton University professor and American evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, the Emmy-nominated docuseries is part science, part travel and entirely introspective.
“This human obsession, transforming nature into clothing and accessories, has helped us thrive in every habitat. But we don’t just dress for the weather. Our desires — to fit in, to stand out and to express ourselves — are woven into our DNA,” Staton says at the top of the episode. “As humans conquered the globe, fashion created the fabric of our civilization. But what’s the cost of eight billion people looking so fly?”
The cost, it turns out, is complicated.
“If you allow for these kinds of labor abuses, if you create loopholes in waste management, people are simply going to want to participate. They want to have that thing the rich person has, or what their friend has, and I don’t think they’re a bad person for wanting that,” Dappen said. “I’m not an economist, but I do know that the world would be a better place if we were not allowed to buy five $10 T-shirts.”
The second season’s ninth episode, “Dressed to Kill,” begins in Wyoming’s Rocky Mountains. Ryan Jordan, a material scientist, discussed the performance of wool in extreme conditions, highlighting the fiber’s natural properties.
“We can’t replicate wool,” said Jordan, a gear-tester as well as founder and publisher of Backpacking Light. “We have not cracked that code.”
That code considers the fiber’s structure: an elastic core, a textured surface and a waxy coating called lanolin.
“And so, what you end up with is this fiber that interacts with water and heat in a way that keeps you warm if it’s cool and cool when it’s warm,” Jordan said. “This is what gives wool its technological edge in terms of comfort when you’re pushing it to the limits in an outdoor environment.”
What sets humans apart isn’t just the ability to turn nature into clothing, per Jordan, but the inability to stop tinkering.
“Wool is a biotechnology that we’ve developed over hundreds of years,” he said. “I always think there’s performance increases to be had. We’re always pushing those limits.”
The team then travels to Edinburgh to explore the historical significance of wool in Scotland — because “there’s no better place to witness our obsession with wool than the Golden Shears World Sheep Shearing Championships,” Staton said. The competitors can hawk about a sheep a minute, though the shearing competition is just one aspect of the Royal Highland Show, Scotland’s biggest agricultural event.
“I think looking to the past and how people made clothes in the past, the relationship with the raw material can tell you so much about the past society,” said Sally Tuckett, fashion historian and professor at the University of Glasgow.
But there’s also a social element to clothing: status.
“Sometimes you just want to strut,” said Orlando Palacio, master craftsman and proprietor behind Manhattan’s Worth & Worth — one of the last remaining custom hat makers in the U.S. “And there’s nothing wrong with strutting, right? I mean, a peacock is a peacock.”
And those struts have tribes, fashion designer and philanthropist Frederick Anderson said on camera, noting that tribalism is a basic human function. But what happens when those tribes start to travel at the speed of social media?
For the FGI’s 2022 Rising Star Award for Womenswear recipient, it’s fast fashion: what ultimately boils down to “how quickly can we get it in your hand and how quickly can you throw it away so you can buy something else.”
“I think people put a label on fashion itself as being wasteful; high-end is not wasteful. We actually can’t afford to be wasteful,” Anderson said. “These are complex conversations. There’s not a turnkey idea of ‘this is bad, this is good.’ Not everyone is everything; there are different stories to be told.”
After the “very real arms race” of World War II, Staton said, another began — this time in middle-class America, by way of synthetic textiles. An abundance of inexpensive fabrics that brought fashion to the masses ultimately led to the documentary’s next stop: Iquique, Chile.
“You’re not just seeing a current problem. You’re seeing a future problem,” John Bartlett said. “And people know they’re not supposed to do this, which is why they’ve been burning the clothes — getting rid of the evidence.”
Bartlett, a Chilean cricketer and journalist, captured those consequences for National Geographic in April 2023, exploring where clothing goes to die: the Atacama Desert. With no import tax or duties for American businesses, the region became a dumping ground for the U.S. to ship unwanted clothes. While every country has its own “sort of receptacle country where a lot of this clothing ends up,” per Bartlett, it’s usually “the poorer and developing countries” who foot the bill.
“The fact that [clothing] is such a basic need makes it inherently manipulable,” Bartlett said. “Corporations have taken full advantage; you can make people dress basically in any way you want with all of the tools that marketing people have nowadays.”
The episode closes in San Diego, where Staton pondered how one can reconcile the human desire to express oneself with clothing with the cost accrued, including the millions of metric tons of plastic entering marine environments annually. Estimates suggest that 92 percent of the 5.25 trillion plastic particles on the ocean surface are microplastics, according to a 2020 case study published by Science Direct.
“Buried in Style: Dressed to Kill” premieres Wednesday on PBS.