Ethical Shopping: Are We Really On Board?

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Author: Guy Chiswick | Published: October 23, 2017

Questions around ethics in the fast fashion industry have been high on the agenda ever since the tragedy of the 2012 fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Dhaka. This horrific incident urgently brought to our attention the human cost of fast fashion, highlighting serious health and safety concerns and paving necessary steps for safer worker conditions.

 

Documentaries such as The True Cost and the BBC’s Blood, Sweat and T-shirts have also shown us the stark reality of where fast fashion comes from – and joined the dots between our insatiable appetite for new clothes and the production processes behind it.

 

According to the 2016 Ethical Consumer Markets Report, the value of all ethical spending in the UK grew to £38billion in 2015. This trend was also mirrored in the Organic Market 2017 report, which revealed sales of organic food and drink have grown by 7.1% year-on-year, whilst non-organic food continues to show decline.

 

So what are the reasons behind this shift, and which brands are already leading by example?

Why are we shopping more ethically?

One reason we’re thinking about shopping more ethically is because of increased awareness of the impact our shopping habits have on the environment. According to Greenmatch and multiple sources including Eileen Fisher, fast fashion is the second largest polluter in the world, after the oil industry. Unilever research revealed a third of consumers (33%) are now choosing to buy from brands they believe are doing social or environmental good, with 53% of shoppers in the UK and 78% in the US saying they feel better when they buy products that are sustainably produced.

However despite this feel-good factor and our moral compass imploring us otherwise, when it comes to consumers choosing between ethical brands and the mass market, the decision can often be made based on the cost factor. Ethical products are generally more expensive to produce because of their production processes, sourcing of ethically-produced raw materials, labour costs, and commitments to environmental conservation.

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An Epic Success Story

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Katie Forrest and Taylor Collins hit it big with their meaty protein bars. Now they’re determined to improve the lives of farm animals and the lands they graze

Author: Kimya Kavehkar | Published: October 10, 2017

One July morning, blessedly before the excruciating heat of summer descends, I’m hiking the Barton Creek Greenbelt with a couple of fit thirtysomethings and Lakota, their 8-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever. A thin haze drapes the sun, and the bone-dry creek bed we cross—in more verdant times a spot where people wade through rushing waters with beer cans in hand—is mostly dust.

Katie Forrest, a mountain biker and Ironman triathlete, and Taylor Collins, also a triathlete and a marathon runner, gracefully navigate slippery rocks and fallen branches along the trail with impressive speed. My short legs and not-at-all-athletic frame make it a struggle to keep up, as I try not to pant too heavily, even though I’m asking a lot of questions. The only other sounds are the jangling of Lakota’s collar, as she leads our pack confidently, and the crunching of the forest detritus beneath our feet.

The conversation turns to Forrest and Collins’ infant daughter, Scout.

“I think about the way she eats versus the way that I was raised to eat, and it’s so fundamentally different,” Forrest says, a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. “Last night she had a grass-fed ribeye. She was just sucking the fatty part. I think her first solid food was pastured egg yolk, and the second was bone marrow. My first food was rice cereal and then mashed peas.”

Maybe Scout’s next solid meal will be the bison-bacon-cranberry bars her parents sell through their line of gourmet, grain-free, soy-free, dairy-free, gluten-free jerky products, Epic Provisions.

A few hours later I’m at Epic’s South Congress Avenue headquarters. Forrest and Collins had invited me to a lunchtime potluck during which they’re showing their staff a PowerPoint presentation about regenerative farming. The design of their offices can best be described as Anthropologie-meets-your-uncle’s-ranch-cabin. I head to the basement where about 20 employees are filling their plates in the kitchen and cracking open icy Topo Chicos before settling into their seats. I notice that one person is barefoot.

Forrest, 31, and Collins, 34, are at the front of the room fidgeting with the projector remote and a stack of notes in nearly the same outfits that they’d gone hiking in that morning; Collins has switched out his tennis shoes for flip-flops.

Epic looks, feels, and acts every bit an Austin born-and-bred company. The lack of pretention of its husband-and-wife founders is matched by their quiet determination to succeed and devotion to their mission to build much more than merely a thriving business.

Ever since Epic was purchased by packaged food titan General Mills in January 2016, Forrest and Collins have been able to step away from the day-to-day slog of running a profitable company and put themselves in the position of thought leaders hell-bent on altering the prevailing relationship between farm animals and grazing lands. Terms of the General Mills deal were not disclosed, but with Epic boasting annual revenue of about $20 million, one source told financial news site TheStreet that the purchase price was about $100 million.

That’s why they’ve gathered their staff here, to view slides depicting grasslands in various states of growth and to learn what words like “ruminants” mean. (The term refers to animals like goats and cows that must regurgitate their partially digested food to be chewed more than once.) “Once people start to learn about regenerative agriculture, it starts to change everything for them,” Collins says.

Long before they became evangelists for rotational grazing, they were students who first crossed paths in an Austin High School hallway in 2001. “It was the most intense emotional experience of my life, like earth-shaking,” Collins remembers of seeing Forrest for the first time. She felt much the same, but because they were a few years apart in age they had few opportunities to interact during that single year they overlapped at AHS.

They didn’t reconnect until three years later as students at Texas State University. They kept seeing each other when they walked through the same park every day to get to class. Then Forrest, a women’s studies major, called Collins, a physical therapy student, and asked if they could carpool. For their first date, they went to a modern dance performance as extra credit for one of her classes and grabbed a bite afterward at Magnolia Cafe. After dating for just three months, they moved in together, much to the chagrin of her parents.

Among the things that bonded them was their competitive spirits and shared pleasure in pushing their bodies to their physical limits. They didn’t fit the lazy college kid stereotype. For fun they’d take 10-hour bike rides together and participated in marathons and triathlons.

“Anything that gives us a little resistance that we can push into that helps us work towards accomplishing something is very, very rewarding in our lives,” Collins says.

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Role of the Fashion Industry in UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

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Author: Karen Newman and Cara Smyth | Published: October 23, 2017

Fashion is not a sector that exists in a vacuum. In fact, the fashion industry is not unlike any other key economic drivers; it is a key component of a global economy and certainly an important sector to consider when thinking about the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Most remarkably, a new exhibit in New York at Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) explores just this. Curated by Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher, Items: Is Fashion Modern? examines the impact that items of clothing and accessories have had on the world today, including what were considered revolutionary items including, the “Little black dress” and Levi’s 501 jeans.

But beyond the exploration of how such mainstream items like the sari and white t-shirt have shaped culture and influenced consumers, the exhibit features another important offering: providing a large-scale illustration depicting Glasgow Caledonian’s Fair Fashion Center and a process called the Quantum Redesign of Fashion.

The art form which takes up three large walls in the Museum may very well be the first of its kind to link to the work of the United Nations; in this case using the momentum of the new 2030 Agenda, to demonstrate the larger context of the complex apparel industry and how it informs the global marketplace.

The 2030 Agenda was adopted two years by more than 193 member states at the United Nations and were painstakingly negotiated to be universally applicable and integrate economic, social and environmental dimensions as part of 17 goals and 169 targets, which are also known as the Global Goals or SDGs.

Why Fashion?

So, what do the goals mean for an industry like fashion? If you consider that the fashion industry is one of the largest employers in the world, especially of women, with some estimates that women make up roughly 80% of the supply chain, it makes sense that fashion and apparel are involved in not only sustainability discussion– but development- where the sector is a powerful driver of job creation.

And not for nothing, fashion is a $2.5 trillion-dollar industry and considered a top user of natural resources and polluter of the communities in which it operates. It’s not surprising then that fashion as an industry is now having a moment, especially in the sustainability dialogue.

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Insectageddon: Farming Is More Catastrophic Than Climate Breakdown

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The shocking collapse of insect populations hints at a global ecological meltdown

Author: George Monbiot | Published: October 20, 2017

Which of these would you name as the world’s most pressing environmental issue? Climate breakdown, air pollution, water loss, plastic waste or urban expansion? My answer is none of the above. Almost incredibly, I believe that climate breakdown takes third place, behind two issues that receive only a fraction of the attention.

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.

One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.

And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.

The impact on wildlife of changes in farming practice (and the expansion of the farmed area) is so rapid and severe that it is hard to get your head round the scale of what is happening. A study published this week in the journal Plos One reveals that flying insects surveyed on nature reserves in Germany have declined by 76% in 27 years. The most likely cause of this Insectageddon is that the land surrounding those reserves has become hostile to them: the volume of pesticides and the destruction of habitat have turned farmland into a wildlife desert.

It is remarkable that we need to rely on a study in Germany to see what is likely to have been happening worldwide: long-term surveys of this kind simply do not exist elsewhere. This failure reflects distorted priorities in the funding of science. There is no end of grants for research on how to kill insects, but hardly any money for discovering what the impacts of this killing might be. Instead, the work has been left – as in the German case – to recordings by amateur naturalists.

But anyone of my generation (ie in the second bloom of youth) can see and feel the change. We remember the “moth snowstorm” that filled the headlight beams of our parents’ cars on summer nights (memorialised in Michael McCarthy’s lovely book of that name). Every year I collected dozens of species of caterpillars and watched them grow and pupate and hatch. This year I tried to find some caterpillars for my children to raise. I spent the whole summer looking and, aside from the cabbage whites on our broccoli plants, found nothing in the wild but one garden tiger larva. Yes, one caterpillar in one year. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing – or rather, not seeing.

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Less and Better Meat is Key for a Healthier Planet

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Published: October 2017

Is grass-fed beef good or bad for the climate? That’s the question examined in a major report released this week by the University of Oxford’s Food Climate Research Network (FCRN). While “Grazed and Confused” intended to reduce confusion about the climate merits of pasture-based meat, the report’s narrow focus on the net climate impacts of grass-fed meat has instead muddied the waters.

That’s because one of the report’s main conclusions—”Eating less meat, of all types, is critical for fighting climate change”—fails to account for the many environmental, animal welfare, and health benefits of well-managed, pasture-raised animals. The report’s message also undercuts the urgent need to expand support for pasture-based and mixed crop-livestock systems as vital alternatives to the industrial meat industry’s inhumane and environmentally destructive practices, including reliance on toxic, chemical-intensive GMO monocultures for feed.

The authors base their conclusion on their finding that the carbon sequestration gains of even well-managed grazing systems are eclipsed by these farms’ methane and nitrous oxide emissions. We agree that reducing meat consumption is key to combating climate change. But does that mean we should focus on eating less grass-fed meat or reducing investment and support for farmers that adopt these kinds of production systems?

No. Since more than 95 percent of the beef consumed in the United States comes from animals raised on polluting, inhumane factory farms, we should focus first on slashing consumption—and subsidies for the production of industrial animal products. We also need to significantly increase consumption of and investment in plant-based protein foods. Research shows the world cannot meet greenhouse gas reduction targets without drastically cutting emissions from our meat and dairy-intensive diets. And most of that reduction must come from the global West and North—especially in the U.S., where we eat more meat per person than any other major country in the world.

Grass-fed benefits go beyond climate

Grass-fed beef is not a silver bullet for climate-conscious carnivores. But for those who do eat meat, eating smaller portions of meat that is produced by well-managed, certified grass-fed, and organic farms has other benefits for the well-being of animals, pollinators, public health, biodiversity, our soils, air, and water.

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The Seeds of Vandana Shiva

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Meet Precious Phiri who spends her days teaching farmers in Zimbabwe how to mitigate climate change.
Specifically, she instructs them in holistic land management, a method that rejuvenates depleted water and degraded soil while drawing climate-changing C02 out of the atmosphere.
Originally trained by the Savory Institute, the enthusiastic Ms. Phiri explains that a cornerstone of holistic management is that eco-systems without animals create ecological imbalance. Grasslands, for example, deteriorate when the food chain that keeps them alive is disturbed. Deprived of a symbiotic relationship with ruminants, grass dies and then soil dies. And, in the process, climate-disrupting carbon discharges into the atmosphere.
It’s simple but not obvious: Ecosystems need both fauna and flora to thrive. Think of the oceans without whales or Yellowstone National Park without wolves. It’s the great web of life.
The phenomenon, sometimes described as a “trophic cascade,” is a biological process that flows between every part of the food chain.
Here Precious explains it:
Here’s another obvious but often-overlooked fact: Healthy humans come from healthy food that originates in healthy soil. And there is no way to support this synergy between our health and the biosphere in an industrial food system: Big Ag and Big Food disrupts precious water cycles, destroys biodiversity, pummels the biosphere with toxic pesticides, and imprisons innocent animals that should be on the land. This isn’t mere sentiment; it’s actually climate science.
In a regenerative world, it’s OK to eat meat, but if you’re going to do so, it’s imperative to transition to organic, grass-fed and free-range–and not in the quantities Big Ag and Big Food would have you do. Any other way and we are contributing to global warming, impacting our health and, by the way, engaging significantly in animal cruelty. Of course it’s more than OK to be vegan or vegetarian but, ecologically speaking, there is also an argument for conscious meat eating.
Vandana Shiva is vegetarian and also a founding member of Regeneration International, an organization that promotes and researches this stuff. Here’s a clip of her talking about the animals at her Navdanya farm.
And here are some books to read if you’d like to know more:
It’s a whole new world of hope for the environment, the climate and our own health. Perhaps the most hopeful story ever that too few people have heard.
P.S: About progress on our film about Dr. Shiva’s life story: We’ve just completed laying in additional dialogue, now we’re working on music and B-Roll. Onwards we go!
Please contribute to this next phase of our film about Dr. Shiva’s life story here: Every bit helps to get the film completed (and into your hands) sooner rather than later!

Apparel, Textile Industry Giants Unite Around SDGs at Textile Sustainability Conference ’17

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Published: October 11, 2017

Big news has been rolling out of the Textile Exchange 2017 Textile Sustainability Conference near Washington, D.C., providing evidence of the major paradigm shift taking place in the apparel and textile industry. Centered around the theme, “United by Action: Catalyzing the Sustainable Development Goals in Textiles,” this year’s conference sees more than 500 textile and apparel leaders come together to discuss the most important sustainability issues facing the industry and developing a roadmap to 2030.

In addition to announcing its newly-approved associate membership to ISEAL, the global membership association for sustainability standards, Textile Exchange (TE), a global nonprofit focused on reducing the environmental and social impacts of the textile industry, released its largest preferred fibers report ever, with 95 companies reporting. This marks a 14 percent increase in participating companies over 2016’s report and a 76 percent increase over 2015’s.

The report’s findings, which are based on the disclosure of actual consumption data through Textile Exchange’s Preferred Fiber Benchmark, highlighted a shift towards preferred fibers across participating companies. In particular, the findings recognize growth in the usage of recycled polyester (58 percent), lyocell (128 percent) and Preferred down (54 percent), the majority of which is certified to TE’s Responsible Down Standard. Organic and other preferred cottons now represent 47 percent of total cotton usage. The report also noted a shift towards more diverse portfolio mixes of fibers and a ramping up of efforts to mobilize and gear up for circularity.

The report’s impact data also shows that adoption of preferred fibers and materials can advance many of the SDGs, in particular SDG12, which focuses on responsible consumption and production. This is consistent with the report’s findings that nearly 30 percent of reporting companies said they were aligning corporate strategies to the SDGs.

Textile Exchange also shared that the language, content and best practices of its Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) will be used by two key Argentinian organizations as a basis for the outreach to and training of regional farmers. This represents the first time TE and its RWS are being recognized at a national to facilitate the adoption of improved sustainability practices.

The collaboration, which involves ProLana — a state-run national program that aims to help Argentine wool growers to improve quality, presentation and sale conditions — and the Federación Lanera Argentina — the national guild representing the interests of scourers, top makers and exporters — will see Argentina adapt its language and protocols to reflect the wording and intent of the RWS, train potential farmers and put a specific emphasis on shearing practices by 2018.

The government and guild will focus on alignment with RWS criteria and will provide support to facilitate certification to the RWS.

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This Company Wants to Regrow Earth’s Forests With Drones

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Author: Irina Ivanova | Published: October 11, 2017

Along with taking lives and causing millions of dollars in property damage, the wildfires in California this week are scorching the land in another way: Millions of trees are being destroyed. The blazes have charred more than 770,000 acres in the state alone, as fires around the country seemingly grow more destructive by the year. 

Yet even that eye-opening number is a fraction of the devastation happening globally. The planet loses billions of trees every year due to a range of factors, including fire, illegal logging and clearance for agriculture.

“Trees are being lost at the rate of about a football field a second,” said David Skole, professor of forestry at Michigan State University. “If you’re watching the Michigan Wolverines play Michigan State and they go into overtime, every time the clock ticks down, a forest the size of that field disappears.”  

While governments and environmental groups have committed to re-foresting depleted parts of the world, “We aren’t doing the work fast enough,” added Lauren Fletcher.

Fletcher, who spent 20 years as an engineer at NASA and Lockheed Martin (LMT), thinks he has a solution: drones. His company, BioCarbon Engineering, uses drones and data analysis to do large-scale replanting in areas that would otherwise take years to re-plant by hand.

The system works in two steps. First, a surveillance drone surveys an area to collect information about its soil type, climate, existing flora and other attributes to determine which plant species to introduce. “It’s not just trees — a healthy ecosystem has a variety of species that have to be planted,” he said.

Then, a planting drone is loaded with biodegradable “pods” that contain seeds and a nutritional mixture to help them germinate. Flying 10 feet above the ground, the drone fires the pods at the ground with enough force to penetrate the soil.

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The Shocking Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Fabric and Leather Industries

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: October 11, 2017

Inexpensive clothing has become a serious pollution problem in more ways than one. Each year, an estimated 80 billion garments are sold worldwide, and each year, Americans alone throw away 15 million tons of clothing1 — most of it having been worn just a few times. This is a trend that completely disregards the toxic toll each garment takes on environmental and human health throughout the manufacturing and distribution processes involved in its creation.

Organic cotton, which is more sustainable, accounts for a mere 1 percent of the cotton grown across the globe. Sustainable plant dyes account for an even smaller portion of the global garment industry. Great benefits could come from expanding the organic cotton and natural textile dye industries. Natural materials such as leather also have significant downsides. Leather processing has become incredibly chemical intense, poisoning areas where locals are already struggling with widespread poverty and pollution.

The Toxic Side of Leather Tannery

The short video above by Daniel Lanteigne shows the impact the leather processing industry has had in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country that has no regulations on toxic waste management. More than 20,000 people work and live in the Hazaribagh tannery district, where toxic chemicals from 200 tanneries flow freely through the open sewers lining the city streets. The Buriganga River has turned black from the toxins, and mounds of discarded leather scraps line its banks.

Yet people still use the river for clothes washing and bathing on a regular basis. As one would expect, skin ulcers, respiratory problems and chest pains are common health complaints in the area. As noted in the video, “market profitability is causing both the government and the tanners to turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences and health hazards.”

Bangladesh also does not regulate workers’ conditions. Few if any are given any kind of protective gear and are in direct contact with the chemicals on a daily basis. Most tanneries do not even have ventilation or indoor lighting. Child labor is also commonplace and unregulated.

Garment Industry Poses Serious Threat to Waterways

A recent article by Heather Pringle and Amorina Kingdon in Hakai Magazine2 highlights how the fashion industry is impacting waterways around the globe. Commenting on the leather industry, Pringle and Kingdon write:

“To transform perishable animal skin into durable leather, factory workers soaked animal hides in a series of toxic baths containing nearly 40 different acids and several heavy metals including chromium, a known carcinogen. The hides absorbed just 20 percent of these chemical brews: the rest was waste.

In all, Dhaka’s tanneries discharged nearly 22,000 cubic liters of toxic effluent daily into the Buriganga River, which ultimately flows into the Bay of Bengal …  

Faced with an environmental disaster along the floodplain of the Buriganga River, the Bangladeshi government forced Dhaka’s leather factories to move to a new industrial park in 2017, and it has promised to install an effluent treatment plant there. But the opening of the plant was delayed, and in February, residents raised fears that the transplanted tanneries were contaminating a second river, the Dhaleshwari.”

Toxic runoff from cotton growers also poses a serious threat to water quality. In Pakistan, the fourth-largest cotton producer in the world, the cotton industry has polluted much of the groundwater, rendering it unsafe to drink. Cotton also gobbles up 20 trillion liters (5.28 trillion gallons) of the Indus River’s precious water each year.

As a result of widespread water mismanagement, the Indus River now faces the same fate as the Aral Sea, situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been nearly drained for irrigation, obliterating the once-thriving fishing economy in the area. Aral Sea fishermen of old used to catch 40 tons of fish per year. Today, the area is littered with fishing vessels lying on dry land, and what used to be a thriving seaport is now nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the water’s edge.

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How A Soap Company is Helping Fix the Broken Food System

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Author: Lisa Elaine Held | Published October 2017

If you ever took the time to read the fine print on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s iconic 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap, you probably barely noticed the one reference to what people put in—not on—their bodies.

“Balanced food for body-mind-soul-spirit is our medicine!”  founder Emmanuel Bronner wrote as part of the “all-one” vision that’s embedded in the company’s DNA.

But while food got a fleeting mention in Bronner’s original peace plan, the skin-care company is now investing a surprising amount of time and capital in projects that affect how people eat—from GMO labeling to promoting regenerative agriculture—putting themselves at the forefront of efforts to build a more sustainable food system.

“Dr. Bronner’s is an unquestioned leader in the organic food movement,” says Max Goldberg, an organic food expert and activist who’s the publisher and founder of Organic Insider and Living Maxwell. “The amount of financial and hands-on support that it provides to the industry is simply mind-blowing.”

From Suds to Sustenance

Mike Bronner is Emmanuel Bronner’s grandson and the current president of the company, alongside his brother, David Bronner, the CEO, and their mother, Trudy Bronner, CF0.

At the same time that Emmanuel Bronner started distributing his soap in San Francisco’s Pershing Square in the 1950s, Mike Bronner says, he was also selling a “mineral seasoning” he made by foraging herbs from the hills outside the city.

“My grandfather was very much about the industrialized cosmetics and chemical industry, and food is all part and parcel,” he says. “In the 1940s, when we was making this natural soap, he was laughed at, not just because the label was so out there, but because the mantra of the time was DuPont’s slogan, which was ‘Better living through chemistry.’ Whether it was plastics…or pesticides, he was like, “no, this is a chemical treadmill we’re on…and we’re not looking at the big picture. I think for him, cosmetics and food were just interrelated. “

Over the years, the company did sell other food products but shifted squarely back to focusing on soap in the late 90s. Then along came coconut oil.

While Dr. Bronner’s products had long been certified organic, they decided their bigger philosophy wouldn’t be totally realized until they could also guarantee workers were treated fairly and paid fair wages at every step along the supply chain.

“We wanted to go fair-trade,” Mike Bronner explains. “25 percent of that liquid soap is coconut oil, so we couldn’t become fair-trade unless we had fair-trade coconut oil. The problem was there was no fair-trade coconut oil.”

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