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Unravelling the mystery of dressing green

There's no magic solution to fashioning a new eco-friendly wardrobe. We have to completely rethink the way we shop, wear and treat our clothes 

Sarah Kincaid avoids synthetics. You might think the ski racer would be a fan of polyester, polypropylene, Gore-Tex and all the other chemical-based fabrics that resist water and wick away sweat.

Instead, she's keen on garments made from natural fibres -- organic cotton, soy, hemp and bamboo. Even her outdoor gear is mostly hemp, which she says is also water-resistant and wicks perspiration.

"I can't go save the world," she explains, "but I can make smarter purchases."

Kincaid is the owner of Karma Wear, a chic Byward Market "ecoboutique" that caters to men and women who don't want their clothing to harm the planet. In business for a year, she recently opened a second location in Kingston.

Kincaid knows she's on the latest fashion bandwagon -- wearing and selling clothing made from plants, preferably grown without pesticides or insecticides, and garments made of sustainable animal products such as wool, preferably organic. In fact, she figures she has helped build that wagon by providing shoppers with stylish, eco-friendly labels like Ecoganik, also sold at upscale Holt Renfrew.

"We're all pushing to get away from a hemp T-shirt with a big pot leaf on it," she says. "We won't carry anything with a pot leaf ... We tell our customers, 'It's a beautiful dress. And, by the way, it's made of bamboo.'"

But what goes into the clothes we wear is only one piece of the very large, very complicated puzzle of dressing green, says Julian Allward, an engineering professor at the University of Cambridge and leader of a groundbreaking study that is focusing world attention on how our clothing choices affect the environment.

It's not enough, says Allward, to wear organic cotton and shun anything made with polyester. In fact, in the long run, polyester clothing could be easier on the environment than natural fibres. And clothing's biggest contributions to the Earth's degradation don't happen during its construction, but in how we take care of it and what we do with it when its useful life is over.

"The major impact," says Allward, "is how many clothes you buy and how often you wash and dry them."

He and his Cambridge colleagues undertook a massive three-year study to examine the impact of what people wear in the U.K.

It was supposed to be a small study to enhance separate research Allward was doing into ways to remove ink from paper so it could be reused more than twice, not merely recycled or printed on its blank side.

As part of that, he wanted to look at a complete manufacturing sector and how it impacted the environment, and decided on clothing because "it occurred to me that retailers would drive the issue rather than manufacturers because they face the consumers."

Allward himself has little interest in clothes, so he was astonished by the press reaction when his report, Well Dressed?, was picked up in January by The New York Times after a quiet release last year by Cambridge. "I have had calls from hundreds of people all around the world," he says in an interview from Italy, where he is on sabbatical. "I didn't anticipate how much emotion is built into clothing compared to other products."

And it may well be that emotional relationship that will make it hard for consumers to learn to dress green.

Any woman who spends long minutes every morning agonizing over what to wear knows how important clothing is to our sense of well-being. Dressed right, we can conquer the world. Dressed wrong, we want to hide -- or at the very least drive home (wasting precious fuel and spewing carbons along the way) and change into something else.

Having a large wardrobe creates the illusion that we have more chances to get it right, as does constantly adding new items to freshen or update our "look." And the current focus on "fast fashion" doesn't help. With stores updating their stock every eight weeks, the choices are vast, prices are low and the pressure strong to have the newest and latest. The result is we are building up clothing in our closets faster than we can wear it out.

Allward's study found that, in the U.K., the number of new clothes bought in 2004 was more than one-third higher than in 2000. At the same time, clothing and textiles equal to about 75 per cent of the weight of those new clothes went into the garbage every year. In Canada, the Cerebral Palsy Association (CPA), which collects used clothing, says that if all the textiles Canadians throw away in one year were compressed together, "they could fill a solid structure as wide and tall as the SkyDome three times over."

It's a far cry from 100 years ago, says Allward, when most people owned just two outfits -- one for everyday, one for "good" occasions -- that they wore their entire lives. That clothing was made from quality materials that were meant to last, and would be mended and remended many times during its lifetime. Some extraordinary pieces such as heavy wool coats might even be passed on to a son or daughter. Of course, the clothing was seldom washed, so it smelled, but it was often free of surface dirt, which could be sponged off (though stains were a different story).

No one expects people to go back to the days of the stinky two-ensemble wardrobe. But there are other things we must do if we're to reduce our impact on the planet, says Allward:

- Action: Buy fewer clothes of better quality that will last longer. The more fast fashion we make, the more clothing we ultimately have to dispose of.

Requires: Consumers will have to pay more for clothing because the materials will be better. Also, fashion designers will have to focus more on creating clothing in classic styles and less on setting new, short-lived trends. There is some evidence this is already happening. For this fall, designs in New York, Milan and Paris showed clothing that was chic, understated and made of quality, sustainable materials.

- Action: Buy second-hand clothing from consignment and used clothing stores. The longer something is worn -- by however many people -- the longer it stays out of the landfill (where, depending on its fabric, it will take anywhere from months to hundreds of years to decay). In the U.K., only about 15 per cent of discarded clothing is reused or recycled, says Allward. (The CPA estimates the Canadian figure at 20 per cent.) The rest goes into the garbage.

Requires: More collection depots and stores to sell second-hand clothes.

- Action: Rent clothing you'll only wear once or a few times -- tuxedos, wedding gowns, ball gowns, children's party clothes, Halloween costumes, etc.

Requires: More stores that rent clothing.

- Action: Wash clothing at colder temperatures, hang them to dry and don't iron. This seems like a no-brainer, but Allward says he is astonished by the number of people who look puzzled when he suggests they line-dry their clothes. "They're in too much of a hurry," he says. "They want them dry now. They don't realize that one of the biggest causes of global warming is the fact that we overheat our houses, and that hanging up washing would make the air in our homes more moist and we wouldn't feel so cold."

Most laundry soaps are made to work at 40C, and to get bacteria out of cotton, you need to use hot water, which consumes energy.

Requires: Many laundry soaps are being reconfigured to work at 30C, and increasingly people are washing at colder temperatures and switching to nontoxic soaps. Still, we wash our clothes way too often, says Allward -- often after just one wearing -- which consumes power to run the washer and loads up the water treatment system.

Part of the problem, he says, is that we use the same technology -- laundry soap and water -- to remove odours as we do stains. "What we need is for someone to come up with a way to remove odours from clothes without having to wash them."

- Action: Repair clothing when it's damaged. Too often damaged clothing gets consigned to the trash bin, says Allward. Part of the problem is that tailors and dressmakers are expensive. It can cost more to have something fixed than to replace it with something new.

Requires: Allward would like to see garments designed to be repaired or altered or that come with spare parts like car kits (for example, short sleeves to switch with long ones, or spare cuffs and collars to replace ones that wear out). New business could also offer services that might change the coating on a fabric or do other "fashion upgrades."

- Action: Recycle clothing into its component fibres after it has outlived its usefulness or it can no longer be repaired. New technology can extract polyester fibres from clothing and reuse them in new clothing. Since polyester doesn't biodegrade, in theory these fibres could be used and reused for hundreds of years. So even though they're made from oil, a finite resource, recycling them would greatly reduce the demand for new petroleum polymer fibres. Cotton can also be recycled, but Allward notes, the 200-year-old "carding" method used to comb out the fibres also damages them.

Requires: Governments need to set up systems to make it as easy for people to recycle their clothes as it does their glass, paper and plastic. "Most people in the U.K. believe that recycling is good for the environment and will generally sort out glass or paper for recycling carefully, without recognizing that it takes 10 times more energy to make a tonne of textiles than a tonne of glass," notes Well Dressed?

As well, new technology is needed to extract cotton and similar natural fibres without damaging them.

- Action: Buy new clothing made from fabrics that are manufactured with the smallest toxic emissions and energy consumption. This is the trickiest solution of all. Organic cotton is grown without pesticides, so leaves no toxic footprint, but it uses a lot of water and needs energy to be made into yarn and to be washed, dried and ironed. According to Allward's report, a T-shirt made of organic cotton consumes 1.7 kilograms of fossil fuel and emits four kilograms of carbon dioxide (during the yarn-making, bleaching, dyeing and manufacturing processes, plus the 50 or so times it is washed, machine-dried and ironed). Washing it will also send 125 grams of detergent to be processed as waste water. Ultimately, when its useful life is over, it will contribute 450 grams of waste to a landfill site (13 grams of ash -- three for the incinerated T-shirt and 10 for the fossil fuel to burn it -- and 437 grams of mining waste to extract the fossil fuel). (Of course, you can reduce this footprint by purchasing an unbleached, undyed shirt, washing it in cold water with phosphate-free detergent, hang-drying and never ironing it, and recycling it when you're done with it.)

Other "natural" fibres such as bamboo and soy grow quickly and are sustainable but require harsh chemicals to turn them into pulp and then into fabric. Some newer fibres like Ingeo (made of corn) and Tencel (made from wood fibres), as well as hemp, are good choices because the chemicals that turn them into pulp are nontoxic. Fabrics made from petrochemical polymers (polyester, polypropylene, acrylic, nylon) use up non-renewable resources and require chemicals to create them, but their fibres can be used over and over again to make new clothing -- ultimately, becoming self-sustaining.

New materials -- organic cow's milk, chicken feathers, seashells, coconuts -- are being used to create fabric. But no matter how natural the original source (and even petroleum is "natural"), almost all fabrics eventually go through a chemical process, even if only to dye them.

Requires: Eco-labelling would help sort out the more environmentally friendly fabrics from the posers, but so far there is no international standard that is reliably enforced. More land would have to be turned to sustainable production. Organic cotton, for example, currently comprises just one measly per cent of the world's cotton production -- not enough to meet growing demand.

In the end, says Allward, it's consumers who will determine how deep a shade of green the clothing industry will become.

"Governments are slow to respond (to consumer pressure), but companies are fast," he says. "But ultimately, they are going to both do what the consumer wants them to do. "It's the beginning of a virtuous cycle."

Wendy Warburton is the deputy editor of Style Weekly.

SOURCE: http://www.canada.com

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