Lifestyle Choices

Every season the shops fill up with new clothes. Winter coats, short and swinging last year, are long and dragging along the pavements this year. Wedges and platform soles are so last year — this year’s shoes are flat and bright. As the trends change, last season’s must-have items look so unappealing and dowdy. The magazines are full of the latest, hottest, most up-to-date fashions and consumers feel obliged to keep up if at all possible.

The insatiable appetite for clothes puts pressure on the textile industry to supply enough material to cater for the demand. The clothing industry’s response has been to encourage the use of new synthetic materials as well as mass producing natural materials such as cotton. It has also taken advantage of skills available in the developing world to produce clothes cheaply. Prices have fallen dramatically over the past ten years and as a result clothes are now disposable. Shoppers buy cheap clothes, frequently and in greater quantities, get bored with them before they wear out, and dump them.

However, a growing number of clothing and textile retailers sell fashionable, green, ecofriendly clothes. And a growing number of concerned shoppers are buying them. Green consumers are also repairing, reusing, and recycling as a way of reducing the amount of clothing that has to be produced. Buying this way can help reduce the negative impact on the environment currently being created by the global clothing industry.

The only real answer to being greener when it comes to clothes is to buy fewer, better-quality items, use them for longer, repair and recycle them, and make sure that what you do buy comes from as naturally produced materials as possible — like organic cotton — grown without the use of pesticides and other chemicals which often contaminate water supplies in cotton growing areas.

The basic principles of green living as applied to clothes are reuse, repair, and recycle. Don’t throw anything out before you’ve got every ounce of wear out of it by repairing and reusing. When you can no longer do that think about whether it’s still fit for someone else to wear so that it can be recycled. By repairing, reusing, and recycling you’re doing the most important thing, which is reducing the amount of clothing you’re buying in the first place, which in turn reduces the amount that has to be produced.

If you simply can’t use the item any longer and there’s no life left in it, but the material was organically produced and the fabric wasn’t dyed or treated with chemicals, you may be able to put it on the compost heap and help to recycle some nutrients back into the soil.

One of the most effective methods of reducing the demand for clothes is to keep all the items currently in people’s wardrobes in circulation for much longer than they usually are. Whether it be by handing them on to other people or charities, trading them over the Internet, or keeping them for yourself, you can ensure that these clothes can continue wearing on to reduce the demand for new supplies.

Last but not least, think about regifting. We’ve all been given those jumpers we wouldn’t be seen in under any circumstances but there may be someone you know who’d like the items you don’t. Regifting is green because it cuts down the amount you buy and the amount being produced. Give an unwanted clothing item as a present instead of buying another one.

The four main green issues to consider when it comes to choosing clothes are:

• Impact on workers: Buying clothes produced by people on low wages who have no union representation and benefits isn’t green. The workers are being exploited and aren’t making enough to feed their families and are banned from an organisation that can help them fight for the same rights as the people who can afford to wear their products.
• Impact on local economy: Losing local textile companies that relocate overseas can be devastating to the UK economy.
• Impact of production methods: Commercial cotton is often farmed using unsustainable, intensive farming practices and synthetic fabrics use chemicals. Persistent environmental pollutants are used in some clothing (such as fabrics with Teflon coating) and in some imported clothes. Check the labels as far as possible and if you’re unsure go for the green option — such as organically produced cotton and wool or silk.
• Impact of materials: You have to count the environmental, social, and economic impact of using skins and other animal by-products from declining animal populations. Other materials like rayon and viscose are man-made from wood pulp treated with chemicals. If you want to avoid the chemicals go for greener natural and organically produced materials.

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