In the UK people throw away 13 million items of clothing every week. Out of sight and out of mind.

As one Council Officer said, “Waste is seen as a Council problem, because Council only actually asks people to put their bin out on the footpath”. And therein lays an urban planning problem and predicament.

Our ‘waste’, the stuff the bin men take away, we dump on the side of the kerb, or we send to charity shops has been underplayed and trivialized. We’re the first generation that doesn’t have a clear idea of what happens to our waste. It all goes away somewhere. Normally, in someone else’s backyard.

Chile’s Atacama Desert is a place of desolate beauty spanning 1,600 kilometers. It’s the driest nonpolar desert in the world and it’s one of the most barren places on the planet. It’s also where 39,000 tons of rich countries new and second-hand unwanted clothing are dumped each year. When you tire of that $5 shirt, the desert is likely where it will go. Burnt or left to become buried by the sand.

Worldwide, clothing production has doubled, most ‘fast fashion” clothes are worn only 7 times and 30% of people admit to throwing out clothes they’ve worn just once. Only half of all clothes donated to charity make it onto the shop floor, most are shipped abroad. 20 years ago, unwanted textiles would have been handed down, passed on, repaired, repurposed, or used as gardening/car maintenance rags before the last few scraps ended up in the bin.

That doesn’t happen now. How life has changed.

Rampant mindless and unconscious consumerism is becoming a massive issue and astronomical expense for Councils and Governments in wealthy nations around the world.

When waste and recycling group SKM collapsed in August 2019 and an estimated 60,000 tonnes of recyclable waste was abandoned in rented Melbourne warehouses the media and Government called it an ‘environmental disaster’.

In the BBC TV series ‘Blood, Sweat And T-Shirts’ – which took a group of high street fashion victims to live the life of poverty stricken Indian factory workers – one female teenage participate said “If you’ve not seen it, experienced it or been affected by it, it’s almost like it’s not real”. She’s absolutely right.

The Council Officer is also right. We literally just drag our empty wheelie bin back in off the street.

We might have a love affair with landfill, but the landfills are well and truly full.

Perhaps it’s time to confront our comfort? Do you ever wonder whether sustainability can be understood not as a series of sacrifices, but as an exercise in pure pleasure-seeking? Can you imagine bus tours to the local landfill?

As more and more unwanted clothes, home wares, plastics and electricals fill ours bins, kerbs and charity shops, our politicians, policymakers and urban planners are faced with unchartered and unprecedented challenges. Do they continue to let us mindlessly and unconsciously consume and give them (Council) our excessive amounts of waste?

Or do public sector agencies need to develop, deliver and perhaps even enforce large scale behaviour change programs?

I’m thinking we all to do a few things differently before our towns resemble the local tip, so that binning or donating really is the very last resort.