Tag Archive for: Care What You Wear

Are Your Favorite Jeans Part of the Climate Problem?

Clothing companies might be ignoring as much as 90 percent of the climate pollution they generate.

Author: Hannah Lownsbrough | Published: December 7, 2017

As the fashion industry prepares for the holiday season, many high-profile brands will pump out new trends and products faster than ever before. All too often, however, that business helps drive severe damage to our global climate due to the fashion industry’s extraordinarily high levels of pollution. As 2017 draws to close, the fashion industry must step up to the challenge and redeem their terrible track record by reducing carbon emissions. The first step is simple: companies must open their record books and allow for more accurate calculations on the environmental impact of their production methods and subsequent climate impact.

Sadly, instead of increased transparency and commitments, fashion CEOs are hiding behind greenwashed PR campaigns, like the disappointing announcement made by Levi’s, Gap, Guess, Wrangler, and Lee at a New York climate week event this past autumn. CEOs of the world’s famous denim brands said they would announce climate targets in two years, a deadline far longer than necessary to complete a basic step. While these CEOs continue to delay the climate commitment process, denim supply chains are continuing to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without recourse.

Denim and clothing companies will do all that they can to fudge the link between their brands and the realities of greenhouse gas emissions. According to reports from the Carbon Disclosure Project, companies within the fashion sector might be ignoring as much as 90 percent of the climate pollution they generate. Like too many industries before them, the fashion industry is attempting to solve the problem of its own emissions by outsourcing production to contractors in countries with less strict emissions regulations, namely China or Bangladesh. But despite the ostensible attractiveness of these short-term solutions, the long-term consequences could be catastrophic. These businesses can no longer afford to look away from the climate legacy they will leave behind.

Right now, the clothing and accessories industry is a huge contributor to global climate change. According to one study, the industry generates about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly equal to the pollution created by putting 163 million new passenger cars on the road. A study by a leading clothing company concluded that one pair of denim jeans produces 44 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to driving a car almost 48 miles or burning over 21 pounds of coal. Manufacturing a single pair of denim jeans produces 44 pounds of CO2, roughly equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from driving a passenger car nearly 50 miles.

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Dirt Shirts and SITO: Promoting Organic Apparel and Eco-Friendly Fashion

Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: December 12, 2017

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLtnyKE5iXE[/embedyt]

When was the last time you considered what your clothes were made of? If you’re like most people, you may not realize how important organic clothing is, or why. In this interview, Marci Zaroff,1 founder of the first organically certified textile mill in the U.S., will help enlighten us about the merits of organic fashion.

Her facility is certified to the most prestigious organic certification, the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), and Marci, known in the fashion industry as an “ecopreneur” and “green fashionista,” has played a major role in promoting ecologically-friendly clothing that is anything but drab. In fact, Marci was the one who coined the term “eco-fashion.”

She’s been working as a consultant for us for several years now, helping us create our own line of GOTS certified organic cotton mattresses, organic bed sheets and towels. The issue of organic clothing was something I neglected for years, but after gaining an understanding of the global implications of how fabrics and dyes are made, I felt compelled to take action.

I am very proud to support the organic cotton farmers by adding a full line of high-quality organic clothing to my online shop. These products are very durable and built to last, while remaining extremely soft to the touch. Organic clothing can vary in quality as some products are quite thin and can wear out quickly. These products are made to last to stop the destructive cycle of fast fashion.

You can now find everything from socks and underwear to men’s, women’s and kids’ organic, GOTS-certified T-shirts. The Dirt Shirts are made from cotton grown in Texas and manufactured in North Caroline and Virginia. I will be donating profits from these Dirt Shirts to the Organic Consumers Association to develop projects supporting regenerative agriculture, such as regeneratively produced wool and cotton.

I am personally wearing GOTS certified organic clothing whenever possible, and without any unnatural dyes, as described in my interview with Rebecca Burgess. I know this may be a challenge for many, but the simple first step you can take is making sure your underwear is organic GOTS certified and free of chemical dyes, which is why I am so excited to have the opportunity to use this as my primary underwear.

Fast Fashion Versus Eco-Fashion

In a world of “fast fashion,” where garments are increasingly being treated as single-use items and styles change faster than the seasons, Marci’s ideology is to fashion what the slow-food movement is to food.

“[F]ast fashion has … proliferated to the point where 20 percent of the world’s fresh water pollution is coming from the fashion industry. The fashion industry is actually the second largest polluter in the world …

While people think ‘cheaper, faster, more’ is a good thing, where there’s 52 seasons a year and lots of choice, at what expense does that come? Well, serious human and environmental impacts come from that. Ten percent of the world’s carbon impact and 3 trillion gallons of fresh water are being used each year for fashion. Then there are the social ramifications,” Marci says.

Marci has been in this business since the 1990s. With a background in food and beauty, she was able to connect the dots and translate everything she’d learned about food and beauty to fashion, textiles and fiber.

“I saw fashion as a very significant vehicle for transformation, because people love fashion. It’s a powerful vehicle … I started a brand in 1995 called Under the Canopy, which was the first organic fashion and home lifestyle brand.

We went direct to consumer for eight years while I was raising my kids, and then launched as the category captain for Whole Foods markets, a 2,000-square foot Under the Canopy store-in-store, and grew that significantly through the years, [to] where we launched the first organic textiles for Target, Macy’s and a number of other retailers.”

But Marci’s vision kept growing. Ultimately, she realized she wanted to be a solution provider and create a way to make sustainable and organic fashion easy for other brands and retailers. She envisioned creating a platform others could confidently use. And that’s what she has created — a fully transparent and traceable supply chain for organic cotton apparel, accessories and home textiles.

From Degeneration to Regeneration

In the video, you’ll see both Marci and I are wearing our “Dirt Shirts,” made from 100 percent organically grown cotton. Notice this is not just 100 percent cotton, a virtually meaningless label. It’s 100 percent ORGANIC cotton. These T-shirts are made from organic cotton grown in Texas by an incredible organic cotton farmer co-op, and all of the manufacturing takes place in the U.S. If you’ve never had the opportunity to wear one, I can tell you it’s the softest material imaginable, almost like cashmere.

Best of all, it’s sustainable, and contributes to the regeneration rather than the degeneration of our environment. These shirts are now available for purchase, and all Dirt Shirt proceeds will be donated to an educational project to expand awareness of the benefits of organic cotton.

“It’s amazing to be a part of the solution. Conventional agriculture has gotten out of control. Cotton farmers, domestically and abroad, are really struggling in the cotton industry from the overuse of chemicals in their farming methods and how expensive those methods have become,” Marci says.

“Ultimately, it’s very hard for those farmers to sustain their livelihoods, not to mention the fact that cotton represents less than 3 percent of the world’s agriculture but uses somewhere around 20 percent of the most harmful insecticides, and up to 10 percent of the most toxic pesticides. Over 90 percent of cotton is currently genetically modified.

When you look at organic T-shirts and organic clothing, to me it has always been about no compromise, breaking the stigma that you have to give up style, quality, fit, color, comfort — which you don’t. On the contrary, when you feel how pure this is and how soft it is, it’s because chemicals haven’t broken down the fibers. Secondly, you can be really smart in how you source …

A typical garment in a supply chain can change hands seven to 10 times. When I started my first company in organic clothing, I went straight to the farmers. There was no supply chain. I had to build [that] up, which meant I could be more efficient, I could cut out a lot of those markups and middlemen, and add value to the product and ultimately offer a product that is not less, it’s more.”

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A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future

Published: November 28, 2017

Fashion is a vibrant industry that employs hundreds of millions, generates significant revenues, and touches almost everyone, everywhere. Since the 20th century, clothing has increasingly been considered as disposable, and the industry has become highly globalised, with garments often designed in one country, manufactured in another and sold worldwide at an ever-increasing pace. This trend has been further accentuated over the past 15 years by rising demand from a growing middle class across the globe with higher disposable income, and the emergence of the ‘fast fashion’ phenomenon, leading to a doubling in production over the same period. 

The time has come to transition to a textile system that delivers better economic, societal, and environmental outcomes. The report A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future outlines a vision and sets out ambitions and actions – based on the principles of a circular economy – to design out negative impacts and capture a USD 500 billion economic opportunity by truly transforming the way clothes are designed, sold, and used.

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Gear News: The North Face Launches New Carbon-Offsetting Beanie

Author: Hayley Helms | Published: November 13, 2017

The North Face has come up with a unique way of offsetting the carbon effects that are associated with modern farming by implementing new practices at the ranch that produces the wool for their “climate beneficial” Cali Wool beanie ($45).

One of the brand’s suppliers, Bare Ranch, located in Sunrise Valley at the border of California and Nevada, has implemented methods that, according to Fast Company, “sequester around 4,000 metric tons of CO2, offsetting the emissions from roughly 850 cars” per year.

The process started when Fibershed, an organization that focuses on regional textile production, reached out to Bare Ranch as part of its research; they then worked with The North Face to help develop a “carbon farming” plan.

In all farming, carbon is produced. It’s part of the natural cycle of growing crops. The key in reducing the effects of carbon emissions isn’t to completely get rid of carbon – that’s just not possible. Instead, farms and ranches can redirect that carbon, and make sure that it stays in the soil, not in our atmosphere.

Methods of removing more carbon from the air than produced at Bare Ranch include planting intermittent, short term crops between crops that need to be replanted every few years, avoiding bare soil where carbon can escape, adding complimentary crops to fields that help enhance soil, planting trees that will lock carbon into the soil, and managing where sheep graze all help keep carbon in check.

For The North Face, they determined that the most environmental impact of its products happened in production and manufacturing, which is why they switched to wool, which has a lower impact than other materials.

The North Face plans to add more wool into their 2018 line, but acknowledges scaling the program to produce more, while remaining sustainable, will be a challenge.

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Sustainable Style: Will Gen Z Help the Fashion Industry Clean up Its Act?

Author: Emine Saner | Published: April 25, 2017

This week marks the fourth year since the Rana Plaza disaster, where 1,135 garment workers were killed, and thousands injured, when a building collapsed in Dhaka. Fashion Revolution Week was set up to mark the anniversary, when the myriad issues with fast fashion are much reported: the fossil fuels burned; the chemicals released; the landfill sites brimming with discarded clothes; the human cost of poor working conditions and pitiful wages. You don’t have to be a hardened environmental and social activist to realise this is an unbelievable mess. In a decade or two, we might look back at this period of mass consumption and wonder what on earth we were thinking.

That’s the hope anyway. Unravelling and remaking the entire clothing industry seems a daunting if not impossible task, but there are signs that a younger generation of consumers will demand something different, and a wealth of new brands are offering it. Sustainable clothing is, finally, being seen as a desirable option, with a smattering of cool brands rejuvenating the market. And a sprinkling of young celebrities championing it – perhaps most notably Emma Watson, who recently set up an Instagram account to document her eco-friendly fashion looks.

One brand, Reformation, has been heralded by Vogue, has more than 640,000 Instagram followers and its many fans include Taylor Swift and Alexa ChungYael Aflalo set up the ethical clothing company after a trip to China where she was shocked by the amount of pollution that textile and clothing manufacturing was causing. At the time, she says, people thought “I was crazy – there were basically no options for sustainable clothes that were actually cute.”

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What You Wear May Be Hazardous to the Planet – Apparel as an Environmental Hazard

Author: Joan Michelson | Published: November 14, 2017

Hurricane victims are replacing all their stuff – clothing, shoes, furniture, handbags, dishes, etc. Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands…imagine how much stuff that is… Imagine if they all replaced even 10 percent of it with sustainable options….

The gift-giving season is upon us too, and at a time when the economy overall is doing better overall, it’s tempting to spend generously on new things for our loved ones, friends and coworkers.

But before you whip out your credit card, remember the recent National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 federal agencies (and approved for release by the Trump White House, by the way) says climate change is man-made. That means, our choices matter, so think before you buy.

Experts are predicting there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. Imagine that…and plastic in the fish…

Annie Gullingsrud, Director of Apparel at the Cradle to Cradle Innovation Institute told me on my radio show-podcast Green Connections Radio that 85 percent of the apparel we buy ends up in landfills. So, imagine almost your entire closet in a landfill, times 310,000,000 people (n the U.S.).

What is the environmental impact of that new sweater or designer dress? Or of those beautiful boots or pretty new dishes that could dress up your Thanksgiving table?

For our series on the apparel industry, I recently visited the Textile Exchange Conference and was blown away by the cool things the fashion industry is doing to reduce their massive environmental impact (some sources have said fashion is the second dirtiest industry, next to oil). Many manufacturers and retailers now have sustainability departments and are leveraging their economic influence to incentivize their suppliers to reduce their environmental impact – that is, use less energy and water, and generate less waste.

Then there are those that have been ahead of the curve for years, quietly: Lenzing Fibers has been making textiles like Tencel from wood (but feel amazingly silky) for 25 years. Stella McCartney has been making shoes without leather and is now making backpacks and other items from recycled plastic retrieved from the ocean.

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How and Why the Fashion Industry Is Trending Toward Sustainable Clothing

Author: Mantas Malukas | Published: October 26, 2017

Who makes the clothes we wear every day? Where are they being made? And what happens to all the clothes we discard? These are the questions both fashion brands and consumers are starting to ask more than ever. Fashion as we know it, whether we like to hear it or not, is an industry largely built on low-cost labor, horrible working conditions, animal cruelty, and environmental degradation.

In step sustainable fashion, the trending alternative to “fast fashion” that dominates the current clothing marketplace and, unfortunately, tends to emphasize quick manufacturing at low costs at the expense of labor and the environment. Also called eco fashion, sustainable fashion sets out to revolutionize the fashion industry by creating a system of clothing production that is totally renewable and minimizes or completely negates any ecological or social impact.

The substantial rise of sustainable fashion is in large part thanks to a greater societal move toward sustainability and socially-conscious consumerism being led primarily by younger shoppers. In fact, over 79 percent of young consumers say they are much more likely to engage with a brand that can help them make a difference, according to a recent report. On top of this, 44 percent of millennials said they would like to more eco-friendly fabrics used in clothes.

While sustainable fashion is without a doubt heading in the right direction and is very promising, it’s important not to jump too far ahead. Sustainable clothing is still only in its infancy in terms of trendiness. Consumers still overwhelmingly value price in comparison to sustainability.

And, realistically, sustainable fashion has no chance in the greater clothing marketplace if it can’t look as chic and stylish as normal high-street clothing.

But it definitely must be said that sustainable fashion has made huge strides since its early days when it was associated with a non-fashionable look that often tended to be Bohemian and dull, mostly due to hemp, cotton, and canvas being the most eco-friendly and readily available materials at the time.

But with the rise of technology, this has changed drastically. Now fashion brands are pushing bright, colorful, high-fashion worthy eco-friendly and ethical clothing that are so stylish that many consumers can’t even spot the differences.

So in addition to significantly changing consumer behaviors favoring eco and socially conscious buying, the key to sustainable fashion’s recent trendiness essentially comes down to technological innovations helping fashion designers easily create clothes that both look good and still feel comfortable.

And with 66 percent of consumers willing to spend more on a product if it comes from a sustainable brand and when the costs of creating sustainable clothing inevitably come down as tech progresses, we should only expect sustainable fashion to trend faster and higher in the years to come.

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A Native Parisian Spins a Thriving Ethical Clothing Brand From Sustainable Fibers

Author: Susan Price | Published: November 13, 2017

The navy and white stripes may be iconic, but the T-shirts Amour Vert began selling several years ago were something new. The shirts were spun from a fabric so soft it they quickly caught the attention of celebrity stylemakers and major retailers.

That soft fabric also happened to be sustainable and durable, and the T-shirts were made in America in factories paying fair wages. “No one really cared at first that we were an ethical brand,” says co-founder Linda Balti. “They bought our T-shirts because they were so soft and comfortable, though once they knew how they were made they loved our story.”

Amour Vert—the name means green love in French—now has a line of dresses, tops, denim and more it sells online and in an expanding number of its own stores. All Amour Vert’s clothing is made using sustainable fabrics and non-toxic dyes, and the brand is committed to zero-waste manufacturing and fair wages. Amour Vert also partners with American Forests to plant a tree for each T-shirt it sells.

Balti grew up in Paris and trained as an engineer. She worked for a defense company for a time, but found the lab was not for her. Someone suggested she do VIP presentations for the company and at one of those meetings, she met Chirstoph Frehsee. Frehsee had founded MineWolf Systems, a company that cleared landmines, and after he sold it, he and Balti spent a year traveling around the world. While on that trip, Balti read a Newsweek article about ethical fashion that stunned her. “It was the first time I realized the impact fashion has on the environment,” says Balti. “It is the second most polluting industry in the world.”

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Ethical Shopping: Are We Really On Board?

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

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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