You’re better off throwing your clothes in the bin.

Congratulations, you’ve just “saved the planet”! Well, at least that is what the fast-fashion industry is making you believe, and you’re falling for it. Here is the ugly truth: the clothes you dump at in-store-recycling bins end up in landfill –

not in someone else’s wardrobe. You are believing the lie they are selling, and it’s helping them hide their mess.

Here’s the catch, only 7% of clothes are actually recycled. As much as they want you to believe that those in-store recycling bins are helping, they aren’t. Most of the time they are just there to make their brand look better. Many clothes, due to the material used, can’t be recycled. Fabrics that are dyed, have buttons or zips that are too expensive to recycle, so they dump them. The fast-fashion industry has you fooled. They make themselves look good at the peril of the planet, hiding what is really going on.

Fast-fashion doesn’t just create clothes – it creates mountains of waste. Publisher, Tegan, mentions that every year around 100 billion garments are pumped into stores, with over 6,000kg of clothes dumped into landfills every 10 minutes. Those recycling programs? They are all cover ups – a clever trick to make you believe you’re helping. Instead, we are helping their hidden scheme. This is not sustainability. It is greenwashing disguised to prey on you. What most don’t know is that behind this cover up, fast fashion feeds water pollution and moulds our landscapes into mountains of trash. The real solution? Putting the brakes hard on overproduction and overconsumption. Fast fashion relies on us buying more. So, until you abandon the “save the environment” recycling scheme and rethink your purchases, this nightmare will never end.

The real villain in this story isn’t just the fashion industry – it’s all of us trapped in the consumption cycle. We’ve been told to believe the lie that recycling programs will fix this mess, encouraging us to shop guilt-free and overbuy.

But truth be told, real change starts when we demand less – less fast-fashion, less trends and less demand. It’s time to stop believing the greenwashing lie and start holding ourselves accountable. If you really want to save the planet, stop feeding this problem. Buy quality over quantity, repair, reuse. Fast fashion isn’t just killing our earth – it’s killing your future, one cheap item at a time.