Clothes & Fashion

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Fashion is a very personal thing and I am about the worst person in the world to comment on it. However, it doesn’t really matter to the planet what you look like, but it does matter how your clothes have been made.

Many clothes are made out of either cotton or synthetic fibres. The synthetic fibres are made from crude oil (generally), which has inherent and fairly obvious problems about sustainability. Cotton is a plant and should therefore be more sustainable. However, it’s very greedy on fertiliser, pesticide and water; it also has to be processed, bleached and soaked in the blood of virgins (only joking), which all takes lots of energy and creates waste. In fact, normal cotton is terrible: it uses 25% of the world’s pesticides, causes massive pollution, decimates biodiversity and is associated with appalling work conditions in poor countries.  Organic cotton is a lot better as it uses much less of everything (including cruelty), but is still a bit greedy. Luckily, there are other options available.

Really rather comfy and hard-wearing clothing can be made from hemp, bamboo and wood. Hemp is an excellent thing as there is no waste from the plant itself: the bits that don’t get used for clothing get turned into fuel, cosmetics, animal feed and lots more besides. It also does not need to be bleached, needs little in the way of fertiliser or pesticide and is fairly light on water. Purely for interest, hemp is related to hops (which make beer) and has no narcotic properties – it won’t get you high, so don’t smoke it!

Bamboo is a grass that grows unfeasibly fast, often in very poor parts of the world, and needs little in the way of water or nutrients.  Bamboo can be used for almost anything (scaffolding, cooking pots, diggery-doos) and is an all-round good ’un. The fabric is hypoallergenic, absorbent, fast-drying and antibacterial.

Wood fibres can also be surprisingly soft, are hard-wearing and come from trees: we like trees! They grow with little encouragement, but take a while. Good for biodiversity, too. The fabric is very new to the market, so there is little information, but I think it is similar to bamboo.

Don’t forget linen – it’s a bit like cotton environmentally, but the more traditional stuff is better and the un-bleached stuff is better still. Wool is also good, but with all the same production and sourcing considerations as linen. Animal rearing is fairly greedy on resources, so try and go for recycled or fairly traded wool to compensate. Silk is lovely, but farmed stuff involves boiling grubs alive, so it might be better to go for the wild stuff: the cocoons are gathered after the inhabitants have left. It also makes better silk.

When buying clothes or accessories, try to think about the whole process: the place of manufacture, their likely work conditions, environmental integrity, bleaching, dying and transport distance. If it’s very cheap, it’s likely to have got all the above horribly wrong. Also, think about buying recycled or used goods, as this often helps the world’s poorest as well as saving resources. Once you have finished with your clothes, give them to charity. Even if they are old and horribly unfashionable, they are still useful. Some can be given to people with no clothes at all, whilst even the very worst can be sold to factories etc. as cleaning rags. Very useful.

There are lots of good clothes in the Shop, so it is a good place to start looking for ethical cloths that you might actually want to wear.

DEFRA have plenty of research, stats and information about clothing due to their Product Roadmap initiative.

There are quite a few shoes available that are made from organic or recycled materials. There are some in the Shop, but other options include Komodo trainers (sustainable and fair trade), the Worn Again trainer range from Terre Plana (recycled) and a hiking boot from Jade Planet. 

What to do

The order of things to buy, I reckon, from best to worst are:

• Secondhand or recycled
• Bamboo, hemp, wood, silk (preferably wild), linen (preferably organic or Irish) and organic cotton
• Wool, leather and other animal products
• Normal cotton
• Synthetic materials from mineral oil

Try and buy clothes that are unbleached and dyed with natural, water-based pigments. If possible, locally manufactured or fair trade is a good idea. Never throw clothes in the bin but give them away for reuse.

The Shop area has a pretty good range of clothes and accessories that are both eco-friendly and ethical, but there are bound to be others on offer in the Community.

Find out more and discuss in the Forum.

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