KATYA PFENNIGER
TEXTILE WASTE (from the series Textile Waste)
Humans create a vast amount of waste due to their consumer habits. The fashion industry creates about 10% of CO2 emissions, the second largest polluter in the world. A truckload of clothing is going to landfill or gets burned every second.
More than 100 billion garments are produced worldwide each year, 85% end up in landfill or is incinerated. Global Fashion Agenda have predicted that apparel consumption will rise 63% to 102m tonnes by 2030.
The Formary reported that 380,000 tonnes of textile products, fabric and fibre are imported into Aotearoa every year with most of this eventually ending up in landfill.
Clothes given to some charities or placed in clothing bins, can also end up in landfill. These unsold clothes were donated to a charity shop, which can now be purchased for $1 by filling a pillowcase to try to minimise waste.
KATYA PFENNIGER
I enjoy photojournalism, documentary and fine art as a way to capture the beauty and reality of life with its people and happenings. I’m currently focusing more on personal projects, and prefer being a second shooter at weddings and events, or helping out behind the scenes.
For me photography is a creative medium to look at the world we live in differently. It’s a way to document our world as it is, capture moments, and to see the beauty of life as well as the state of what exists.
The current work for this project is based on looking at what we’re doing to our planet, with ourselves and to one another with the topical issue of the textile waste that we’re creating, and hopefully start more discussions to find solutions and change our ways, and minimise leaving behind a mess for someone else to clean up.
Images in this gallery made while second-shooting with Amanda Wignell Photography