The Mathematics of Waste
Oath Home recently shared a fact about the UK’s annual fabric waste - just over 206 000 tonnes - which made us the fourth-largest textile waste producer in Europe. This is a staggering statistic, but as a maths teacher, my first instinct was to ask - what does 206 000 tonnes of fabric actually mean? And how much space would it take up?
Comparing the weight isn’t too tricky - for example, since a London double-decker bus weighs 12.65 tonnes, it’s pretty easy to find out that 206 000 tonnes of wasted fabric is equivalent in weight to just over 16 000 buses - without the passengers! Or to compare it to something smaller, the fabric would weigh about the same as half a billion cans of baked beans, which - in case you were wondering - would be enough cans to make a baked-bean-can pyramid that was about 1440 layers tall: over 110 metres wide and 160 metres tall - that’s about 20 metres taller than the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza.
Most standard washing machines can take a load of around 7 kg. So 206 000 tonnes of waste fabric is equivalent to nearly 30 million washing loads, which with most washes taking about an hour to run relates to over 3400 years of continuous washing.
Trying to estimate how much space it would take up is much harder - if you’ve ever sorted out a drawer full of scrunched-up t-shirts, then you’ll know that the amount of space taken up by fabric depends enormously on how neatly it’s arranged, in addition, of course, to how densely it’s packed and what the fabrics actually are. As a rough estimate for how much space some assorted fabric takes up, I have returned to washing machines for guidance.
Using the same standard domestic washing machine load of around 7 kg, which should only half-fill the drum, gives a density for domestic laundry of around 150 kg per cubic metre. It’s a very rough figure, but it at least means that there is a starting point for visualising the quantity. At this density, 206 000 tonnes of fabric would take up 1.4 million cubic metres - that’s enough to fill 550 Olympic swimming pools, or to completely fill the Royal Albert Hall sixteen times over.
Whichever way you choose to visualise it - 206 000 tonnes is a lot of textile waste, and certainly an area ripe for improvement from any initiative to reduce waste by repurposing, recycling or reusing.
