TEHRAN - On 20 September 2025, people around the world unite for World Cleanup Day – a global movement that goes beyond picking up trash to confront the waste crisis head-on. This year's focus is on textile and fashion waste, one of the most visible and fast-growing environmental challenges.

Every second, a garbage truck full of clothes is dumped in a landfill or burned. The fashion industry generates 92 million tons of textile waste each year, overwhelming waste systems, polluting waterways, and fuelling the climate crisis.

World Cleanup Day 2025 highlights the urgent need to raise awareness and shift habits toward responsible consumption, strengthen local and global waste management systems, and advance policies and partnerships that build urban resilience.

Textile waste fuels the triple planetary crisis: it clogs drains and worsens urban floods, pollutes rivers and oceans, harms biodiversity, and releases greenhouse gases that drive climate change.
By tackling textile waste, World Cleanup Day moves cities closer to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.

Background

On 8 December 2023, the United Nations General Assembly, in its seventy-eighth session, unanimously adopted resolution 78/122 “World Cleanup Day”, which proclaims 20 September as World Cleanup Day. The resolution invites all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system, other international and regional organizations, and other relevant stakeholders – including civil society, the private sector, and academia – to observe World Cleanup Day through activities aimed at raising awareness of the role clean-up efforts play in sustainable development. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) facilitates the observance of the Day.

Over the years, many national, regional and local governments and communities have been undertaking clean-up activities globally. World Cleanup Day represents the reflection on their achievements. The clean-ups serve as a reminder of the collective responsibility we share in preserving and maintaining a clean and healthy environment as well as sustainable waste and resources management.