D alternatively rather than aiding disposal several

items in special Shwop Drop bins in our stores’ (Marks and Spencer, n.d.).
Alternatively, rather than aiding disposal, several companies and labels are taking
back their own products after the customers no longer have use for them. Following
along in the spirit of transparency, the question arises ‘what happens next to these
130 Disposal and reincarnation
returned or take-back garments?’ The question is not often broached during
interviews, and few companies give specifc details other than weights, if that. In its
CSR report: Conscious Actions Highlights 2014, H&M states: ‘We collected more than
7,600 tonnes of garments that were no longer wanted. That’s as much fabric as in
over 38 million T-shirts’ (H&M, 2015). By way of a comparison, haute couture houses
have always taken back garments as part of the client relationship with the house:
providing a remake service for their garment for clients or a relative, enabled by the
wider seam allowances used in couture ateliers, among other practices, as previously
mentioned.
Decomposition; the forensics of disposal
In as much as visiting a landfll site would be confronting, the length of time
garments take to decompose is even more shocking. Archeologically, there are
instances of fabric surviving for many hundreds of years. When one considers that for
centuries, there were no man-made fbres such as the relatively recent invention of
polyester, simply wool, hemp, linen and cottons, fbre content becomes even more
signifcant. In most cases, the longevity of survival is dependent on natural fbres
being undisturbed. There are a variety of elements at work in the average land- fll,
the four main ones being: temperature, moisture, bacteria and light. The length of
time of decomposition varies according to the fabric be it natural or manmade and
their reactions to the amount of exposure to the four elements listed above. William
L. Rathje started the Garbage Project in 1973 at the Uni- versity of Arizona, which
developed into a stream of contemporary archaeology and applied anthropology in
1987. With his team of staf and students, he drilled down into landfll to discover
more about contemporary American culture from what had been discarded. His
discoveries challenged current beliefs regarding landfll decomposition fnding that
natural objects, ‘food and lawn waste, were found mummifed in the airless depths of

sanitary landflls’ (University of Arizona, 2012). Therefore, it would be unwise to
imagine that organic cotton would decay quickly, without the correct conditions for
cotton decomposition. Furthermore, as matter decomposes, it can give of gases
(some hazardous) and heat; consequently, the decomposition of a benign fabric
garment can contribute to air pollution.
The impact of the waste of materials is worrying if plastics are considered. In 2011,
researchers at the Earth Engineering Center, at New York’s Columbia University
calculated that in the US, ‘6.5% of the plastic generated is recycled, 7.7% is
combusted with energy recovery and 85.7% is landflled’; whilst noting that in 2009
‘2.1 million tonnes of plastics were recycled’. Yet they also observed ‘less than 15%