Fashion Impact and Ethics Thread

[Todd Shelton]

I got this email over the weekend from what seems to be a denim industry guy in Bangladesh, I'm going to reach out to him. I bolded the part some of you may be interested in.

Hi Todd,

10-15 years ago in my late teens early twenties I used to where exclusively 100% cotton denim, with a strong preference for the selvedge pieces (Prps, Levi's, DSquared etc.,). you were right... at that time stretch denim was for girls.

I've always had thin legs though and liked to be well dressed so i rode the fast fashion wave of skinny jeans for most of the last decade.

I've been working on a recycling project in Bangladesh for the fashion industry for the past few years, and I can say with confidence that 100% cotton is much much more environmentally friendly than the stretch.

The crux of the point is that when the denim is being produced there is waste fabric leftover from the cutting. The waste from 100% cotton denim is easily recycled back in to cotton fiber and can be respun into fresh yarns to make more products with lower environmental impact. The stretchy leftovers of skinny jeans is much more difficult to recycle and is traditionally burned instead (yikes!). Same theory applies to end of use for the full garments.

Needless to say i pulled out decades old 100% cotton denim from the back of the closet and they have maintained very well.

let me know if you're interested in the technical stuff.

Thanks,
-------

 

[Todd Shelton]

Read an article today about Allbirds self-imposing a carbon tax, with the proceeds going to "energy, air, and land conservation". Allbirds thinks that $0.10 per pair of shoes will help offset the carbon they produce to make the shoes.

The programs those funds ("taxes" collected) goes to:
- Wind farm in Oklahoma
- Project to burn methane gas generated from a landfill in Florida into carbon (they claim methane is worse than carbon, so the basically set up a torch that burns the methane)
- Preservation of tropical rainforests

1 year in: Allbirds details the results of its self-imposed carbon tax

As the fashion industry begins to reconcile its impact on the global climate crisis, some brands are putting their money where their mouth is. In April 2019, Allbirds declared it was self-imposing a carbon tax, as an example of how companies can confront climate change outside of government...

www.glossy.co

 

[Felime]

There isn't much 'claim' about it. It's quite well established that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2 in the short term. Over the first 20 years it has 84 times the global warming potential, and over 100 years it is 28 times as potent.

While theoretically co2 can persist indefinitely if no net carbon is being sunk, the break even point is more than a thousand years away.

On jeans: I've generally sworn off buying any jeans with stretch. Anecdotally I just haven't found they hold up the same, and instead of developing small easily darned blowouts/ holes, they get big rips and thin more quickly which I haven't found to be worth fixing

 

[Todd Shelton]

Short and new information (to me) in this article.

- At one time, there was a good market in Ghana for "dead white men's clothes" - now it's mostly throw away clothes. A organization has started called "Dead White Men's Clothes" to fight it.
- 100 containers of "charitable" clothing arrive in Accra, Ghana a week. The biggest supplier is the UK.
- "...we have started to redirect our waste in the name of recycling via the second-hand clothes market."
- "Single use t-shirts are one of the most obvious excesses of our throw away culture." I guess single use t-shirts are logo t-shirts for running a 5K or a charity walk.

How the UK's fast fashion habits are polluting a country halfway around the world

Standing knee deep in rotting clothes, many from the UK, there was no avoiding the gravity of the environmental consequences of our throw away culture. It was all around me. And as if any more proof were needed, amongst the stinking toxic waste of this 30-foot high textile mountain, I found a...

www.itv.com