Reverse Course: Fighting the flood of ultra-fast fashion

Here & Now Anytime

WBUR

News

4.6 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fashion trends die quickly, but old clothes can live for years. After it's left your wardrobe, nearly every garment eventually winds up burned for fuel or tossed in a dump, polluting the environment. Here & Now's Chris Bentley reports on efforts to recycle and reuse textiles. And, President Trump has fired more than 12 inspectors general who keep an eye out for corruption, waste, fraud and abuse of power at federal agencies. George Washington University's Kathryn Newcomer details the implications. Then, China's startup app DeepSeek is upending the tech industry. Ina Fried of Axios explains how the global tech industry lost more than a trillion dollars when the free AI chatbot launched.

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.
0:13.8	Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:16.5	A lot of people think clothing is recycled, but the reality is less than 1% of textiles are recycled back into new textiles.
0:23.7	And the rest of it?
0:25.1	Well, most old clothes become trash.
0:28.8	But there are some ways people are trying to slow the flood of fast fashion into landfills.
0:35.0	It's Tuesday, January 28th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and
0:39.9	WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Later on the show, how a Chinese startup upended the AI industry and
0:50.9	embarrassed a lot of American tech bros.
0:59.5	Also, inspectors general keep an eye out for corruption at federal agencies.
1:02.7	So why is President Trump firing them?
1:07.3	From what I understand, the emails were cut off for these IGs. In other words, this one beyond, you know, asking for your resignation as of, you know, such and such a date.
1:13.7	It was like, get out now. But first, if you're thinking about refreshing your wardrobe, what are you going to do with your old clothes?
1:22.1	The truth is most clothing is eventually burned for fuel or tossed in a dump where it sheds microplastics and
1:30.4	oozes planet-warming greenhouse gases. And the problem is getting worse. The EPA says in
1:36.7	2018, Americans threw away more than 11 million tons of textiles, nearly twice as much as they
1:43.5	did in 2000. Turns out your old genes have a
1:47.7	complicated afterlife, and there is a growing effort to fend off the tsunami of ultra-fast fashion
1:54.7	currently flowing into landfills, whether it's by repurposing them into rags or melting down modern fabric blends into new fibers.
2:04.2	But the first stop for most used clothing is a donation bin, where it enters the global supply chain for
2:11.3	secondhand goods.
	...

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