The environmental impact of fast fashion is, quite literally, piling up. To be exact, around 300,000 tons of clothing was sent to landfill sites by Britons last year. reGAIN is an app which aims to change shoppers’ attitudes about unwanted clothes. Instead of consumers chucking their used items into the trash once they’re done with them, it offers rewards of coupons and discounts with retailers for recycling their clothes.
Decades ago, “repair, re-use, recycle” was an ingrained idea. That’s no longer the case. The average number of times a garment is worn before it stops being used now has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s A New Textiles Economy report.