Learning Opportunities to Optimize Skills in Recycled Fashion Applications Towards a Waste Conscious Industry.

WISE Fashion – Learning Opportunities to Optimize Skills in Recycled Fashion Applications Towards a Waste Conscious Industry (Project No. 2024‑2‑RO01‑KA220‑YOU‑000286513) is an Erasmus+ youth partnership designed to tackle the environmental and social consequences of fast fashion. In recent years, textile consumption in the EU increased from around 17 kg per person to about 19 kg per person, yet citizens discard roughly 12 kg of clothing annually. Making a single cotton T‑shirt uses about 2 700 litres of water, while per‑capita textile consumption requires over 300 m² of land, around 12 m³ of water and more than half a tonne of raw materials and generates hundreds of kilograms of CO₂. Globally, an estimated 12 million tonnes of textiles enter the market each year, but roughly 8 million tonnes end up in landfills or incinerators, and about 4–9 % of these garments are never even worn. Shockingly, only about one per cent of used clothes are recycled into new textiles.