Sustainability in apparel: Why should we care?

While I initially planned for this sort of post to be on The Lucky Beetle, all of my blogs/musings now live here. Some things are so important they need to be said again, in different ways, and in many places. Our consumption of clothing and apparel is that important.

There are two types of products; the things you use, and the things you use up. There is a drive to push the apparel industry (and likely other industries which are outside the scope of this post) toward the latter so that people buy clothing like they buy food. This shift from consumerism to consumptionism of apparel wrecks havoc on our psyche and the planet.

As a consumer, you don’t have to buy into that.

In 2017, Americans emptied their closets of 12.65 tons of clothing and textiles, 35 Empire-state buildings worth, sending 85% directly or indirectly to landfills. This is costly for cities to deal with, and layering waste in landfills comes with a whole host of environmental issues too complex for this post.

Thinking about where our textile waste ends up is only one part of the environmental burden. All along the path of its creation, a garment’s raw materials must be created or extracted from the earth, made into thread, weaved into fabric, dyed in water, shipped around the world, cut and sewn into a finished product, shipped to a warehouse, wrapped in plastic, and shipped to stores or distribution facilities or to you. That’s a lot of milage (fossil fuels), and a lot of opportunities for waste in the creation process whether its fabric scraps from offcuts or the waste water from dying. Textile dying processes, in addition to the farming of the raw materials, is an Earth-ly nightmare.

(Water pollution, lots of pesticide use, commodification and monopolization of genetically modified seeds..)

Toxic, synthetic fabric dye persists in water supplies, polluting a lot of water. Farming cotton also uses a lot of water to grow the crops, which would be less of an issue if the use of synthetic pesticides didn’t pollute that water. Additionally, large companies own rights to the genetically modified seeds which are dependent on those synthetic pesticides that are also owned/produced/sold by those companies. Local farmers can’t always afford when those large companies increase prices on the seeds, or file huge lawsuits on farmers whose seeds genetically resembles the GM seeds because of cross pollination. All this to “generate more profit for shareholders” – to which some might say, “but, my 401k is doing great!” Suicide rates among male cotton farmers in India skyrocketed after the introduction of Monsanto seeds and is attributed to the commodification and monopolization of seeds.  300,000 Indian cotton farmers took their own lives from 1995-2015 because they could no longer afford to run their farms as slaves to American corporations, to produce more of the fast-fashion we bought, which all generated more “value for shareholders” for the big corporations included in our retirement portfolios.

Unethical capitalism and greed allows for this system to continue, but I have hope in a future where capitalism rooted in ethics and moral responsibility flourishes.  Enter: ethical and sustainable investing (more on this to come)

(A note of hope: In terms of human rights and working conditions, not all garment factories are terrible, and there are now initiatives like the Better Cotton Initiative which advocates for cotton farmers.)