Every single second, a garbage truck’s worth of clothing is dumped into landfill somewhere on Earth. So if we want to avoid trashing our planet, we have to start figuring out how to re-use the stuff we already have.

That’s why the Garbage T Shirt started with a very simple idea. What if garbage isn’t garbage? What if it’s simply pre-assembled raw materials that we can use to make new things.

Designed to help rethink the role that garbage will play in Earth’s future, the Garbage T Shirt takes two waste streams that were destined to spend the next few centuries on a rubbish pile – old clothes and plastic bottles – and transforms them into a soft, speckled t shirt. Lots of the materials that we’ve shredded and re-used were dyed in their previous lives, and it’s these leftover fragments of dye that show up as hundreds of tiny coloured dots.