Excerpt from Deirdre Imus; "Essential Green You"
Best-selling Author Shares Tips on How to "Green Your Style"
May 5, 2009
Fashion is often the last thing we think about when we decide to start greening our lifestyles. Eating organic food, using toxin-free cleaning products—these are the most obvious changes to make because their impacts on our health and the environment are the most apparent. You feel healthier immediately when you start eating a cleaner diet, and it’s the same with cleaning products. As soon as you switch to nontoxic alternatives, you smell and see the difference. When conventional sprays and solvents smell so unbelievably toxic, you don’t need to be a chemistry professor to figure out that they probably aren’t very good for the earth!
Unfortunately everything happening behind the scenes is taking a major toll on our health and the environment. “The apparel industry has been responsible for some of the worst ecological damage and biggest human rights abuses of all the commercial arts,” says Sass Brown, an assistant professor who studies sustainable fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Consider these facts:
- Every cotton T-shirt you own required a third of a pound of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. (Source: The Sierra Club)
- More than 80 percent of dry cleaners in the United States use perchloroethylene (“perc”) to clean clothes, a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has classified as a possible human carcinogen.
And perhaps most shocking of all: “The average American bought 56.7 new items of clothing and discarded 74 pounds of textiles (including apparel, bedding, and other fabric) in 2005,” says Juliet Schor, PhD, a professor of sociology at Boston College and author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. Whether we’re a label-loving shopaholic, a dedicated bargain hunter, or something in between, the ecological footprint of our closets is much greater than we think.
I’m going to take you through your wardrobe’s entire life cycle, from production, to consumption, to disposal. When you understand the environmental issues that crop up at each stage of a garment’s life, it’s easier for you to make informed decisions about what to buy. As we go along I’ll be giving you ideas for small changes you can make to reduce the eco-footprint of these purchases.
The goal here isn’t to swear off shopping but simply to green the way you buy, wear, and discard your clothes. In doing so, you’ll cut down on the number of non-sustainable, mass-produced garments you buy (without feeling deprived!) and choose clothes you’ll feel good about buying whenever possible. You’ll also help the clothes you love last longer and make sure they go on to be useful to others even when you’ve finished with them. And you don’t need to make every change I’m suggesting all at once. Pick the ones that seem the most fun or the easiest to do and go from there.
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