Your clothes take a huge amount of resources to create, ship, and sell—being green means doing everything you can to avoid throwing them away.

In the last couple of decades, the amount of clothes we buy has doubled. Over 80 billion garments are made worldwide every year using vast quantities of energy, raw materials, chemicals, labor, and water—it takes 792 gallons (3,000 l) of water to make just one cotton shirt.

Since we definitely don't need all those clothes, many of them get quickly discarded. In the US, about 796 lb (36 kg) of clothing is thrown away per person each year. We don't recycle anywhere near enough—in the UK, 41% of people are unsure of how to recycle clothes. Clothes that aren't recycled end up in landfills or burned, emitting toxic fumes from the chemicals used in their manufacture.

One of the easiest ways to be greener is to value your clothes and make the best possible use of them. That applies both while they're in your wardrobe and after they've left it.

Where clothes are concerned, "recycling" simply means allowing them to carry on being useful after you have finished using them by donating or selling them or sending them off to be made into new items.

Extending the life of your clothes reduces the impact of the energy and resources used to make them, because you avoid replacing them with new items. What's more, it means someone else will wear the clothes rather than buying new.

If your clothes are no longer wearable, it's well worth dropping them off at a clothes bank or other clothes recycling facility. From here, they can be resold as filler for car seats and other lower-grade textile products. Think of clothes as having different life stages—so, rather than a straight line from factory to store, to wardrobe, to trash, they are mended, upcycled, adjusted, passed on, or repurposed.

Of all the clothes we discard worldwide, only 20% are reused or recycled.