Building Sustainable Cities
Why 90% of this social entrepreneur’s wardrobe is pre-owned
She’s tackling fashion overconsumption and waste by making it easier for you to swop and recycle your unwanted clothes
From left: Cloop founders Tan Yin Ling and Jasmine Tuan organise clothing swops, where shoppers can exchange and buy pre-owned clothes.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TAN YIN LING
Rachel Chia, Content STudio
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Tops. Dresses. Pants. Skirts. She didn’t work in fashion, but in her early twenties, Ms Tan Yin Ling, 28, would cart out well over a hundred pieces of clothing a year from online shops.
Ironic, perhaps, given her pursuit of a master’s in conservation biology – but the wildlife lover was blind to the impact of her shopping habit on the environment. The floor of her dormitory at the University of Exeter in England was stacked high with brand-new buys.
“Ignorance was bliss,” she says. “The clothes were cheap, and I felt empowered to be able to purchase so many.”
“I had an extra room just to keep all the extra clothes I was not wearing,” she adds. “Every time I looked at them, they would kind of bear down on me.”
When she graduated in 2019 and moved back to Singapore, it was impossible to bring it all home, so Ms Tan got rid of her stash by offering it up for free on social media.
Little did she know that this experience would lead to an unexpected career in tackling waste.
Closing the fashion loop
Ms Tan’s eyes were opened to the environmental costs of making and discarding clothing soon after she began her job hunt.
Looking to boost her resume to secure a role in sustainability, she signed up for a two-month ‘zero-waste boot camp’ programme in 2019, and was grouped with three women who wanted to do a team documentary on fashion waste. The programme was conducted by local social enterprise Secondsguru, which promotes environmental education and awareness.
Through the project, she was shocked to discover just how environmentally damaging apparel production could be. About 23 kilograms of greenhouse gases are generated for each kilogram of fabric, revealed a 2022 report by non-profit organisation Singapore Fashion Council – formerly known as the Textile and Fashion Federation Singapore.
It’s also an enormous drain on natural resources. Around 7,500 litres of water is needed to make one pair of jeans – enough to sustain the average person for about seven years, according to estimates by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
“It struck me when I was educating myself about fashion and the environment,” says Ms Tan. “If I, as a more eco-friendly person, did not even think about these issues, what about the people around me?”
At present, there is no effective method to recycle clothes. For one, it is difficult to break them down into component fibres, explained NTU School of Materials Science and Engineering’s Professor Hu Xiao in an interview with The Straits Times last August. Reuse is one of the key ways to curb textile waste, experts say.
To address this, Ms Tan’s team also ran clothes swops as part of their project, to encourage women like themselves – whose wardrobes were bursting with clothes in great condition that they had no inclination to wear – to trade items with each other, instead of buying new outfits.
Increasingly passionate about the cause, Ms Tan continued to run these swops on weekends, even after the boot camp ended and she had landed a research role with a US environmental education start-up in October 2020.
It was at one of these events in 2020 that she met another former shopaholic: brand consultant Jasmine Tuan, 44. Sharing the same desire to tackle textile waste in Singapore, the pair decided to launch a circular fashion enterprise in October that year, which they named Closing the Fashion Loop, or Cloop.
In a circular fashion system, clothes and textiles are continually reused, repurposed and recycled in a loop to minimise waste.
Under Cloop, they organised clothes swops, partnered charity organisations to donate clothes, and conducted workshops and talks on sustainable fashion to earn revenue.
That project was meant to be a side gig. But to focus their efforts on transforming Singapore’s relationship with garments, the duo quit their jobs and dived in full time last July, running Cloop with the help of volunteers.
Making better choices
Consumers value the importance of sustainability when they shop, says UOB’s Asean Consumer Sentiment Study 2022.
Conducted between June and August last year, UOB surveyed 1,013 consumers in Singapore to gather insights on their considerations before making a purchase. Here are some key findings.
- 51%
of Singapore consumers are motivated to choose sustainable products as it becomes increasingly available
- 39%
of Singapore consumers support brands that they believe have more sustainable practices
- Nearly 4 in 10
Singapore consumers substituted their usual choices with more sustainable alternatives in 2022, particularly Gen Zs (aged 18 to 23) and young professionals
The yellow bins arrive
Within the last year, Cloop has already saved over 1.3 million kilograms of clothing from the trash.
This is thanks to its clothes swops, and some 335 yellow recycling bins it installed since last July in neighbourhoods across Singapore, where people can drop off unwanted clothes, textiles, shoes, and accessories.
Through its yellow recycling bins, Cloop collects about 30 tonnes of textiles per week.
PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO
These items are collected by Cloop’s Malaysian recycling partner, Life Line Clothing, and shipped to a facility in Selangor. There, they are sorted into over 500 categories, ranging from evening gowns to ‘sexy shorts’.
The items are then sold in second-hand markets around the world, based on categories relevant to each market.
For example, sexy shorts are not sent to conservative countries, nor are winter jackets to tropical nations.
Citing documentaries that capture mountains of unwanted clothing polluting less-developed nations, Ms Tan says Cloop chose its recycling partner based on their extensive sorting categories to “make sure the clothes go somewhere where people would actually buy them”.
The journey does not end there. Items that cannot be sold will have their recyclable components extracted by the recycling partner. For example, the soles of unwearable shoes can be used for playground flooring, or larger pieces of fabric cut into rags for the car and oil industry.
The final leftover items are sent to be burned – not in the incinerator, but together with coal at waste-to-energy plants in Malaysia to produce electricity.
With its bin system in place, Cloop’s immediate mission is to double the Republic’s textile and leather recycling rate to 4 per cent, up from a measly 2 per cent in 2022, according to the National Environment Agency’s latest figures.
Throwaway textiles
- 254,000 tonnes
Amount of textile and leather waste generated by Singapore in 2022
- > 1.3 million kg
Clothing rehomed by Cloop, via fashion swops and its textile recycling bins over the last year
- 335
Textile recycling bins installed by Cloop across Singapore
Driving the change is Ms Tan, who is a changed woman from her university days, having ceased buying clothes for four years now. “About 90 per cent of items in my wardrobe are from swops,” she says.
More Singaporeans are following in her footsteps, with Cloop’s pop-up fashion swops often at full capacity. The crowd grew through word of mouth, with returning customers bringing friends and family, says the co-founder.
“People have a lot going on in their lives and feel like it's an extra burden to have environmental issues to deal with,” she adds. “So we provide options that make it easy for them to change their lifestyles for the better.”
Building Sustainable Cities is a series sharing insights on how individuals and businesses can take action to forge a cleaner, greener tomorrow.
This is the fourth of a five-part series in partnership with
