Essays

What not to wear – Part 2

If you’re reading my essays in order, you know that over the past two years I’ve been trying to educate myself about sustainable living practices and change my lifestyle accordingly. In other words, I am exploring ways that I can change my habits in order to improve the health and security of other human beings and animals, because it has become clear to me that all of us have an impact, positive or negative, through our everyday choices. So far, I’ve written about household cleaning supplies and personal care products, and the need to generally consume less. Here I’ll write about clothing.

There are several reasons to be concerned about the “fast clothes” phenomenon, in which you buy a cheaply-made garment, wear it a few times, and then throw it away. Pesticides used on cotton poison thousands of agricultural workers every year, and can affect entire communities when they leach into groundwater. (More than half of the most common cotton pesticides are classified by the EPA as known carcinogens.) The enormous amount of energy required to make and transport clothing contributes to CO₂ emissions and other pollution, and depletes our energy resources. Transporting discarded clothes to landfills or incinerators uses still more energy and creates more pollution. And the working conditions of factories where “fast clothes” are made tend to be unsanitary, unsafe, and exploitative. Think about the amount of labor that goes into growing the fibers (or extracting and refining petroleum, for synthetics), making and dyeing the fabric, and sewing the garment. If the price of your clothing is ridiculously low, then someone was not fairly compensated for their work.

I see these socioeconomic and environmental problems as interrelated, and so I’ll address both.

The easiest thing you can do to reduce pesticide use, erosion, soil depletion, air pollution, and other stresses on our planet is to BUY LESS. Take care of what you have, repair before you replace, and opt for durable, long-lasting clothes over the cheap stuff that wears out quickly. Check out thrift stores for used clothes, and wear your purchases until they are no longer serviceable. With this approach, you don’t need to be wealthy to be eco-friendly.

If you’re the sort of person who craves variety and can’t bear to wear the same thing two years in a row, thrift stores are a good resource for you as well because you can return your clothes when you’ve finished with them. Have expensive tastes? You can rent designer apparel from places like Wardrobe and Bag Borrow or Steal. Also consider expressing your creativity by making or modifying clothing yourself. You can get sustainably-produced supplies from Near Sea Naturals.

For those times when you need to buy something new, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by products claiming to be green. (I was all excited about bamboo, for example, until I learned about the toxic solvents required to make fabric from it.) If you’re not willing to do intensive research, I’d recommend sticking with the options I’ve detailed below. It’s important to consider the care your clothing will require (for example, dry-cleaning and ironing can add significantly to the environmental cost of a garment over its lifespan), but take this with a grain of salt as well. I’ve heard polyester touted as an eco-friendly material because it will air-dry faster than cotton and therefore saves energy, but it’s absolutely untrue that cotton clothes have to go in the drier. And with regard to sweatshops, I always assume a company is guilty until proven innocent; and I give preference to those who make specific commitments about where their materials are sourced and how the workers are treated.

ORGANIC COTTON is exactly like regular cotton, but it costs more because farmers get lower yields when they don’t use pesticides. Add in the cost of paying workers a living wage, and many consumers feel that it’s “not worth it” to buy responsibly, even if they can afford it, because we are so accustomed to the artificially low prices of sweatshop clothing. When I find myself wincing at the price of fair trade organics, it helps to reevaluate whether I really need the item, or whether I can find it used, but not to compare it to what I would have bought from Kmart in my days of ignorance. The most affordable online organic cotton I’ve found is from Kasper Organics. If you want higher quality and you’re willing to pay a bit more, I also recommend Lotus Organics; both companies have excellent customer service.

ORGANIC WOOL or ALPACA FLEECE are good choices for coats, blankets, and sweaters. Most wool manufacture includes dipping the animals in insecticide baths, the use of hormones or antibiotics (which can find their way into our water supply), and overgrazing of the land (causing erosion). With certified organic, you can avoid all that. Treatment of animals on organic farms is also generally more humane than in industrial facilities, but if you have concerns about this you can always ask the company for details.

HEMP has tremendous potential to meet our clothing needs sustainably. It’s a sturdy plant that grows quickly and can be used for everything from vitamins to furniture (although despite its relationship to the marijuana plant, you can’t smoke it). The main drawback is that it currently cannot be legally grown in the US, so any hemp product you buy (if you live here) will have to be transported some distance. There is a heated debate about the origin of this policy; you can read about the conspiracy theory here. I honestly don’t know what was the real reason for banning hemp, but today there are campaigns to change the law, and in the meantime you can buy Canadian, Romanian, and Chinese hemp, among others. It’s still important to check that your hemp was grown organically, and processed and dyed in an environmentally responsible manner.

RECYCLED MATERIALS are another option if you are trying to reduce your consumption. My only experience with this type of product is my Patagonia jacket, made from recycled soda bottles. It was expensive, but it’s durable (over a year old and no sign of wear!), lightweight, warm… and you can get details like amount of CO₂ produced, miles traveled, and waste generated for several Patagonia products at their Footprint Chronicles site. We should, of course, demand this kind of information from any company we patronize, but this is only site I know of where it is offered freely. Some other recycled products I’ve heard about are Pachira boots and Simple shoes. If you own them and have any comments about them, please feel free to let me know.

In general, I approach other materials with skepticism; as mentioned above, I was fooled by bamboo clothing and am determined not to make that sort of mistake again. But I did want to add my enthusiastic recommendation of the jute and rubber Eco Yoga Mat, which I bought about eight months ago. I know, it’s not clothing, but it’s the best yoga mat I’ve ever used and it’s way better for the planet than those PVC monstrosities, so I had to share. And I guess I’m making the point that there are often better choices where you might not expect them, so it pays to do the research whenever you need to buy something new. You can read more about it here.

You should now be able to make some positive changes, regardless of your tastes and budget. If we all bought less, bought used, and bought sustainably, we could create a much healthier clothing industry. But what about those people working in the sweatshops? Will they be able to find other jobs if the sweatshops go out of business? While I think it’s important to consider possible consequences of our actions, too often this kind of thinking paralyzes people, and we maintain an unacceptable situation because we are afraid of creating something worse. (Or because we are lazy, and so we convince ourselves that we might create something worse.) Some possible solutions are to donate to organizations that help develop sustainable economies or support debt relief for the developing world. You can read more about this topic here.

Essays

What not to wear – Part 2

References