Lauren Cowdery is flicking through the rails of the Cancer Research charity shop in Goole, east Yorkshire. “Too bobbly!” she tuts at a ribbed top. “This skirt is big but it would be easy to take in … ” Cowdery appears to be shopping, but she is merely browsing. She is on a mission not to buy any new clothes, even ones that have recently belonged to someone else.
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The food chain is an ordered series of organisms, each dependent on the previous as a source of food. This process has fed the planet from the beginning of time and isn’t changing anytime soon. However, what’s finally ending up on your plate is far different than it was just 70 years ago.
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"Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody's buying far too many clothes." These words, spoken by British fashion icon Vivienne Westwood, are resonating with more and more people these days. As we grow tired of pawing through packed wardrobes and spending money on 'cute' outfits with a less-than-perfect fit and shoddy construction, there is renewed interest in buying better, buying less, and striving for true style over trendiness.
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In not-so-distant times gone by, revealing the dress some had just complimented you on to be a cheap high street find was not only a pretty solid basis for impromptu bonding, but also a prerequisite for proving your #relatable social status. The inference being, ‘yeah don’t worry, I’m skint too’.
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Every year, the average American throws away 70 pounds of clothing, sending massive amounts of textiles to landfills or incinerators and contributing to the emission of hazardous greenhouse gases, which speeds up climate change. There’s no question that the rise of fast fashion and the ever-increasing rate at which consumers are discarding clothes has contributed to fashion’s serious environmental problem.
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When perchloroethylene (PERC) was introduced to the dry cleaning industry in the 1930s, it must have seemed like a miracle solvent. It cleans clothes well and – most importantly – it is nonflammable. This is in contrast to the previous solvents, like Stoddard solvent, gasoline, turpentine, and even benzene. Unfortunately...
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The year is 1992. John Gotti is going to prison, Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton are feuding, Sinead O’Connor is ripping up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live, and everyone is just finding out that cotton is the fabric of their lives.
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In 2013, ecologist Mark Anthony Browne presented the results of some unsettling research to leaders from a handful of major apparel brands, including Nike, Polartec and Patagonia. Browne had published a report that implicated synthetic apparel as a possible source of microplastic pollution. Browne wanted the companies to fund research to evaluate how and why apparel sheds fibers, in order to mitigate the action, perhaps by redesigning textile processing or sourcing different material.
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What’s the dirtiest crop on the planet? You may be wearing it.
At a production rate of 25 million tons a year, cotton is one of the top four GMO crops in the world—and nearly 95 percent of that global cotton production is GMO and/or conventionally grown.
Cotton earned the title “dirtiest crop” because it’s sprayed with some of the worst pesticides, including: Bayer’s aldicarb, which was banned in the U.S. in 2010, but reapproved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2016; Syngenta’s paraquat, a highly toxic pesticide banned in the European Union but not in the U.S.; and Monsanto’s glyphosate, classified by the World Health Organization as a “probable” human carcinogen.
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On Friday, the parliamentary environmental audit committee, led by Mary Creagh, announced it would investigate the social and environmental impact of disposable “fast fashion”. The aim is to remodel the industry and make it sustainable.
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