INDUSTRY OPINION: The Surplus Strikes Back! People in fashion like to talk about waste in terms that can be seen
If the industry is serious about confronting waste, it must learn to see beyond the visible piles.
The real challenge is not how to handle what we throw away, but how to stop embedding loss into the system at the very moment of production. Until that shift is made, the gap between what the industry claims and what the planet endures will only widen, and the invisible landfill will become its most enduring footprint.
Shivam Gusain - Founder at Decypher
Guest Article courtesy of Shivam Gusain - Founder at Decypher
People in fashion like to talk about waste in terms that can be seen. The story is familiar by now: the industry generates around 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year, a number that has been repeated so often it is treated as fact, though experts like Lutz Walter have shown that the methodology behind it is shaky at best.
The number is then brought to life through visual metaphors such as Eiffel Towers buried in garments, Olympic swimming pools filled to the brim with old clothes, and city bridges disappearing under piles of polyester. These comparisons make for striking headlines. They are also deeply misleading, because the waste you can photograph is only a fraction of the real story.
The largest landfill in fashion is not at the end of the supply chain. It is upstream, hidden in spinning mills, dyehouses, cutting rooms, and shipping yards. It is the energy burned, the water consumed, the chemicals applied, and the labor spent on garments that should never have been produced in the first place.
The scale of overproduction is difficult to pin down with precision because brands rarely disclose unsold inventory and official data is sparse, but even conservative estimates point to something staggering.
Globally, the textile system consumes between 120 and 130 million tonnes of raw materials each year. If we take fashion and apparel to account for roughly half of that, then even a modest assumption of 20 percent overproduction translates into 12 million tonnes of raw material wasted at inception. That figure is not just about unwanted clothes sitting in warehouses. It is about the cotton fields irrigated for fiber that no one needed, the oil refined into polyester that no one would wear, the forests cleared for cellulosics that never reached a consumer.
And once the fiber exists, the waste multiplies.
Every kilogram of material passes through resource intensive processing stages: spinning, knitting or weaving, pretreatment, dyeing, washing, finishing, cutting, sewing, packaging, and transport. Each step consumes electricity, heat, chemicals, and water. When one fifth of output is surplus, one fifth of all these resource flows are wasted as well. The Apparel Impact Institute estimates fashion and apparel generate around 944 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. Apply the 20 percent surplus logic and nearly 189 million tonnes of emissions emerge as unnecessary, emissions that did not need to exist but now linger in the atmosphere for centuries. Even under best practices, wet processing alone consumes billions of liters of water every year. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of auxiliary chemicals are mixed, applied, and discharged. If 20 percent of production is surplus, then 20 percent of that water and chemistry is wasted by definition.
This is where the discussion about waste becomes much bigger than piles of garments.
Waste is not just what ends up in a landfill. It is the invisible carbon shadow of emissions, the evaporation of finite freshwater into overheated dyehouses, the dispersal of fossil derived chemistry into wastewater streams, the kilometers driven by trucks carrying products that were destined for markdowns or destruction. It is waste that cannot be photographed but leaves a permanent mark on the biosphere.
And the effects do not stop within the factory gates.
Fashion’s emissions account for around 1.78 percent of the global total. If a fifth of that is tied to overproduction, then 0.356 percent of global emissions are avoidable surplus. That fraction may sound small until you translate it into real consequences. Climate change converts emissions into systemic losses such as crops with reduced yields from heat stress, forests degraded by fires and pests, aquifers depleted and polluted, and glaciers retreating while mountain snowpack vanishes. These are not abstract scenarios, they are material losses measured in billions of tonnes. My own ongoing work, still in progress, suggests that when these losses are weighted by fashion’s share of emissions, the implied waste of resources from overproduction approaches 3.5 billion tonnes annually. The exact figure will shift as the analysis matures, but even a rough estimate shows that the invisible waste is orders of magnitude larger than the visible one.
This raises uncomfortable questions about the way the industry frames its own progress.
Waste is still too often treated as a matter of what happens at the end of the value chain, as though the real problem begins only once a garment is unsold or discarded. In reality, the damage is already baked in much earlier. If one fifth of production volume is destined never to reach a consumer, then one fifth of all the energy, water, chemistry, and labor that went into that production is squandered the moment the order is placed.
The first act of responsibility is not to manage surplus more elegantly, but to avoid creating it in the first place. The second is to reduce the intensity of what is legitimately produced, so that every unit carries the lightest possible burden on resources and emissions. Everything else, whether resale, repurposing, or alternative uses, can only ever address what slips through after these two steps. Without that sequencing, the industry risks mistaking activity for progress, adding layers of management to symptoms while leaving the underlying design of overproduction untouched.
The true scale of waste is not captured only in discarded garments, but also in the planetary boundaries eroded long before those garments ever touched a store shelf.
It is the tonnes of carbon pushing the climate system closer to its limits, the billions of liters of freshwater withdrawn in already stressed regions, the chemicals and fuels that accelerate ecological breakdown. This is the landfill we cannot see, a diffuse and systemic depletion of planetary stability driven by products that never should have existed.
If the industry is serious about confronting waste, it must learn to see beyond the visible piles. The real challenge is not how to handle what we throw away, but how to stop embedding loss into the system at the very moment of production. Until that shift is made, the gap between what the industry claims and what the planet endures will only widen, and the invisible landfill will become its most enduring footprint.
About the Authors:
Shivam Gusain - Founder at Decypher - I help organizations reduce risk and move with clarity in complex sustainability and innovation landscapes. My work focuses on cutting through noise, identifying blockers, and building the right capabilities to drive impact. If you’re navigating uncertainty or making decisions with long-term consequences, I can help you move forward with confidenceI help organizations reduce risk and move with clarity in complex sustainability and innovation landscapes. My work focuses on cutting through noise, identifying blockers, and building the right capabilities to drive impact. If you’re navigating uncertainty or making decisions with long-term consequences, I can help you move forward with confidence.
