Do we have enough clothes for the next six generations?
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Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. This is the show which looks up the numbers in the news and in life and armed tim hAlfred.

The global clothing industry produces a lot of clothes, and that might not be surprising, but the problem is that while some of these clothes are high quality garments that last a lifetime, others are cheap, disposable governments. I discarded IT or fall apart after a few outs. Ings, that's not even including the stuff that doesn't get sold.

Some of these unwanted clothes find new owners through vintage and charity shops, but many make their way through sorting stations to arrive, bailed up, like draw in textile markets in places such as chilly or ghana, the Better governments will be snapped up that many will be dumped illegally in vast, often flame able, piles. All this is bad, but he won more or less. We like to know how bad.

Is there some way of quantifying the needless extravagances campaigns against waste in fashion? Certainly have an eye catching claim. We have enough clothing on the planet right now to close the next six generations of the human race.

This claim has been repeated many times over the past few years, but is IT true? Have enough clothes or already been produced that you could stop making anymore, and still have enough for the next sixth generations of humanity. Beth ash, me let them has been looking into this one.

Tell a beth so I should warn our .

listeners that you have been working on this story for months and IT turns out to be a pretty tRicky claim to get anywhere near to pinning down.

Yeah, i'm afraid. Says him. When I started pulling on this thread, the whole things just seem to fall apart in my hands.

OK, that is 第一， one. And only fabric rejected metaphor allowed death. So look, a few listeners have got in touch to ask us about this claim and it's popped up in social media posts and it's been used by some fashion industry types.

Hasn't yes, it's a popular claim that there's no easily accessible sprecher you might check to figure out if I was true. One organisation, fashion revolution, campaigns for greater transparency around the data that fashion companies release regarding the quantities of the clothing they produce.

That sounds very adorable.

IT hasn't stopped them repeating the claim though.

But how could they know the claim was true, while also complaining that the data was available?

I, but they give me the south for the claim. Excl ent, they heard IT from A U industry body called the british fashion council.

And how did the british fashion council figure out out?

Will they heard someone famous say it's at a conference?

Rock solid source, right?

But IT turns out that this famous person probably is the original source, his patric and a successful designer and tailor himself, and a judge on the Taylor's based reality TV show, the great british showing. B he may have said a conference, but he also said IT on T, V, in twenty twenty, in that clip we heard earlier.

Okay, we are getting there. So how did Patrick ground figure out, claim his oldest.

that a research of at a university in london works its out for him, but he couldn't remember their name and neither we nor the university could track them down.

really. Let's get Better and Better now.

Patrick did tell me over email the basic method for working out whether his claim is right. First, figure out how many closed there are in the world. He suggested that might be everything made over the last thirty years, but why he thinks that is not entirely clear.

Then you decide how many items each person needs in their life. So you divide the number of garment's made by the number of governments needed to see how many people you can close. Then look at population predictions to see how long I will take to get through that number of clothes.

right? I mean, I can see the basic maths you need, but you do also need the numbers to plug into those equations that like the garment's per person, the total number of garments that have been produced and and haven't been thrown away, the total world population projected over a quite a long time period.

he do. And he did suggest one of those numbers in the email saying that there were a hundred billion garments produced in twenty two. He helpfully suggested that you could either get the data for all the other years or use that figure and the annual growth rates to figure out a reasonable extrapolation.

Well, I suppose IT is at least a number. Is the number right?

Well, look, the dates on how many government's up to each year is, I have learned incredibly opake. Here's to be a love note from notta university.

I wish that we had this data, but we just done fashion revolution, for example, has this transparency index in there twenty twenty three transparency index? They said eighty eight percent of two hundred and fifty of the world's largest brands don't disclose their annual product volume. There are some brands publish this data.

Adidas, for examples, start to publish production volumes in its annual report. In the twenty twenty two report, I think they said they produce one billion eighteen million garments across foot, are a parl gear and accessories. But there some confusion around that number as well because IT doesn't specify whether that includes kind of .

license sea products. okay. So we don't know exactly, but surely there must be .

there are indeed, I found estimates ranging from eighty billion garments made each year globally to one hundred and fifty billion garments made each year. But it's pretty unclear how these estimates are calculated and often sighted number comes from management consultancy group mckinsey, which released the reports in twenty sixteen, saying production had doubled from the year two thousand to hit one hundred billion governments a year by twenty fourteen. I asked to dinner about this.

If you look at that report, that statistics, not footnoted. So it's hard to work out where IT came from. And I think it's really hard to verify for a few reasons. Obviously, main reason is that the big brands and retailers, they tend not to publish this information about how many items of garments and foot where they produce every year.

Another of the estimates suggested IT was partially derived from the world bank data. Now the world bank does publish imports and export data. And you can imagine him. I thought i'd struck gold on my search. This would be a straight ford way to at least get close to a number to start from.

Well, maybe, but I think that nothing about this quest has been straight .

forward so far. The first issue that I faced was that this world bank import export data is not listed in numbers of items, but in monitoring weight. Ms, but to work out if the claim is right, you have to convert that into the number of items of clothing.

And I have no idea how many baby socks or men's genes are included in a ton of garments or in one million dollars worth, and neither did the world bank when I asked them. The other problem is that import and export data is only loosely connected to production. Some clothes might be imported and exported several times as parts of the global supply chain where production is spread across different factories, and other clothes might not be exported at all. A sabena explains the .

problem with import. Export data is, first of all, that is not always accurate, but also bites very nature. IT admits domestic production. So if you think of like a big expert market like china exporting billions of dollars of garments, but probably also making billions of dollars in terms of domestic production.

okay. But maybe we can tell something from the demand side from how many clothes .

are being brought. We yes, there is sale data in some markets, but has been a suggest caution here too.

Some countries like the U. K, actually publish sales volume. So we know in the U.

K. That we bought something like seventy five million pounds of clothing last year. But again, what we don't know from that is the government quantity.

And we don't know if the kind of trends that we see in places like the U. K. Where the volume of retail sales is increasing every year. We don't if that kind of trend holds true in places where this kind of data is just unavailable.

Spina says that the U. K. Figures do appear to show that the volume of clothing where buying has gone up over the last decade while the Price per item has gone down. But we just don't have the data to say whether this trend is being mirrored all over the world.

Hauser, and we've not even got to the very first number that we need. It's pretty clear that we don't have the data that we need to say how many items are clothing I made every year. And if we don't have that, then the whole claims meaningless.

I agree him, as IT happens, it's also incredibly hard, say, what the minimum viable number of garments someone might need in a lifetime might be. There are a great many of variables when you start thinking about IT. Like the environment and culture, the person lives in what they do for a work, how long they live, what kind of clothing you include, a socks included, are the close people are currently wearing included, and so on.

Now you might be able to work out from the U. N. Projections, how many people are expected to live in a certain number of generations, but that's far from easy. And given how much uncertainty y there is over every other part of this claim, i'm not sure I can face the efforts. But as soon as we have any Better numbers to, I will be back to tell you all about them.

I'm sure you will. Thank you both. And thanks also to a leverage from not to a university. And if you've seen a number you would like us to take a look at, please send an email to more or S A BBC dot C O D, U, K. We will be back next week, until then, goodbye.