Innovations in online shopping have made it easier than ever to buy a new dress for your best friend’s wedding or grab a crisp white t-shirt the second your current one starts to fade. With the click of a button, people with means can have new clothes immediately — all without ever stepping foot inside of a brick-and-mortar store. The result makes sense: Because shopping has never been easier, people are shopping more — even if their needs remain the same.
But Oxfam, an international group working to end poverty, wants you and your fellow consumers to (deep breath!) curb your shopping habit for the month of September. The group launched Second-Hand September, an initiative that encourages people to not buy any brand new products for 30 days.
Your bank account won’t be the only thing thanking you — the planet will, too. Especially if you tend to partake in fast fashion.
Believe it or not, the fashion industry is one of the leading contributors to the growing climate crisis. As a polluter, it’s the second most egregious next to oil, Forbes reported. The industry emits 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas annually, creates nearly 20% of the world’s wastewater and America alone sends over 10 million tons of textiles to landfills each year. That’s in large part due to fast fashion, the trend of making clothes cheaply and readily available as the market changes. The trend isn’t only bad for the environment — it is bad for labor, too. Perhaps because of fast fashion’s emphasis on speed at a bargain, labor conditions for workers often aren’t safe. On top of that, many factory workers are working long hours and at unlivable wages.
And it’s a trend that’s growing. According to The University of Queensland, the world consumes 80 billion new clothing pieces ever year, which has skyrocketed 400% in the last 20 years.
“The damage of fast fashion is far-reaching – from extensive use of water in production to poor pay and conditions for workers,” Fee Gilfeather, head of audience and strategic planning at Oxfam, told Retail Gazette.
So skip the brand-new, low-quality clothing and opt-in for thrift store looks. Vintage and thrift stores are home to affordable, quality clothing. Plus, it’s a great way to support local businesses.
If you don’t have access to thrift stores, try shopping resale online at stores like Etsy, eBay or Poshmark. There are also organizations out there ready to change the industry. If you have a toddler or baby, UpChoose is a place to start. Since children grow so fast, a lot of their clothing is only used for a short amount of time. UpChoose allows you to buy clothing and exchange them later for bigger sizes as your child grows.
And if you’re itching for something new, look at sustainable retailers like Everlane, ADAY or AmourVert, which sell quality, ethical and sustainable clothing that will last.
It’s not easy to shift your mindset and actions, but as we look for ways to combat our climate crisis, a simple change, like where you buy your clothing, adds up.
Second-Hand September has a nice alliterative ring to it, but that doesn’t mean the challenge has to last just this month. Since we’re nearly halfway through September, challenge yourself for the rest of the year. What if you could do it for all of 2020?
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Tag: sustainable fashion
Fashion’s Sustainability Moment, the Ridiculously Cheap Device That Could Save Lives and More
The Future of Fashion Is Mushroom Leather, Bloomberg
When you think about how high-end fashion items are manufactured, you might conjure up images of factory pollution, mistreatment of animals and poor labor conditions (and you’d be right). But François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering — the luxury group behind Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and others — is taking major strides to fix the supply chain. In the last four years, his company has invested in alternatives to leather, embraced the use of recycled textiles, worked to reduce plastic use and even links CEO bonuses to sustainability achievements. “It’s the new moon,” says Pinault. “The new frontier is the sustainability frontier.”
The Paperfuge: A 20-Cent Device That Could Transform Health Care, Wired
A team of Stanford bioengineers has developed a device that costs less than a quarter to make and can help save lives around the world. Dubbed the Paperfuge, it operates like a traditional centrifuge to spin bio samples and help diagnose diseases like malaria, but it requires no electricity and fits inside a doctor’s pocket. The device embodies “frugal science” — the idea that affordable yet powerful tools can transform global medicine.
New Court Aims to Redefine Young Adult Justice in Chicago, Christian Science Monitor
For young people charged with nonviolent crimes, a criminal record can mean diminished job prospects, continued poverty and a seemingly inescapable life of repeat offenses. But a pilot program in Chicago aims to break this cycle by letting perpetrators make amends to those they’ve wronged and contribute positively to their community instead of serving time. Ultimately, if the offender completes the program successfully, his or her record can be wiped clean.
What Should I Wear? The Top 10 Innovations in Sustainable Fashion
Not to get all fashion police on you, but the clothes and accessories we wear everyday might not have been made with the most ethical or sustainable practices.
A lot can happen to a simple item of clothing before it gets hung on a rack, from violations in labor laws, to animal cruelty and also environmental pollution.
However, these following companies prove that fashion can have a heart.
In a massive global study called Sustainia100, researchers narrowed down the top 10 most sustainable fashion projects in the world. EcoWatch reports that the research team took in considerations such as materials used to the amount of water and energy needed to create their products.
MORE: The Top 5 Ways to Fight Global Warming
And if “eco-friendly” fashion immediately conjures images of potato sack pants and open-toed sandals, you’ll be happy to find that music-and-fashion trendsetter Pharrell Williams backs one of the chosen brands.
Here are some of the top brands (in no particular order):
Levi Strauss & Co.
The All-American jean brand has a Water<Less line that uses up to 96 percent less water in the finishing process for some products. So far, Levi’s has made 13 million of these products, saving over 172 million liters of water.
Bionic Yarn
Finally, a use for those pesky water bottles. We previously reported that this company creates yarn for clothing from recycled plastic found in ocean debris. As EcoWatch puts it, Bionic Yarn, “[is] so cool, even Pharrell Williams is on board.”
I:Collect (I:CO)
This international textile recycling company sorts through castoffs to determine if they’re rewearable, reusable, or recyclable. We’ve mentioned that San Franciscans are already tossing everything from dirty socks to never-worn impulse buys to hundreds of I:CO collection bins scattered around the city. These unwanted items are then used to make insulation material, flooring, packaging or even Teddy bear-stuffing.
Atlantic Leather
This Icelandic tannery takes the unwanted skins from perch, salmon, wolffish and cod from fishing industries and turns them into gorgeous leather goods. The resulting shoes, handbags and clothes are so uniquely colorful and textured, you won’t even notice you’re wearing dead fish.
Click here to see which other planet-friendly fashion brands rounded out the top 10.
And if fashion’s not your thing, Sustainia also ranked the top 10 planet-friendly innovations around the world in buildings, cities, food, health, technology, education, resources, transportation and energy.
DON’T MISS: Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)
This Commonplace Item Went From Trash to Fashion
Did you know that recycled water bottles can be made into a beanie? Or a T-shirt? Or a winter coat? Repreve, an eco-conscious brand of yarn maker Unifi, turns used plastic water bottles and post-industrial waste into everyday clothing and accessories. According to its website, Repreve reclaimed more than 410 million bottles in the U.S. in 2012. Companies such as The North Face, Polartec and Ford use the brand. Who knew that used plastic bottles could be so fashionable?
Repreve recently returned as the official recycling sponsor of this year’s X Games Aspen, and will try to reduce the games’ environmental impact by turning more than 100,000 recycled plastic bottles into signs. The company shot a commercial (see above) with professional snowboarder Elena Hight and is inviting anyone to tweet, Facebook, Instagram or Vine with the hashtag #TurnItGreen about how you recycle or reuse materials and live more sustainably.
MORE: Old Clothes Are Getting Kicked to the Curb in This City (But It’s a Good Thing)
What If You Could Make Custom Clothes With the Click of a Button?
For fashionistas, on-demand apparel sounds too good to be true. But a new startup called Electroloom is developing a 3D printer that would be able to create basic clothes, like t-shirts and sweaters, with a push of a button. The product, created by entrepreneur Aaron Rowley, is not fully developed yet, but it recently won a grant from Alternative Apparel, an Atlanta-based apparel company that is dedicated to social responsibility and eco-conscious design, due to the product’s focus on sustainability. “Something we are compelled by is embodied energy [which is] essentially the amount of energy that was used to take a raw material to a finished good,” Rowley told Fast Company. “So a goal of this project is to reduce the amount of embodied energy in an article of clothing.”
So far, the Electroloom has managed to print sheets and tubes of polymer fabrics. With support from the Alternative Grant, the team will try more complicated patterns and fibers that more closely resemble cotton. (Natural fibers like cotton are easily destroyed during printing.) Eventually, Rowley envisions the Electroloom brand as an open-source concept, including an online database of workable designs crowdsourced by users. The Electroloom should be ready for an end-of-2014 launch, just in time for the stylish set to print some clothes for fashion week.
MORE: These College Students Couldn’t Afford a 3D Printer. So They Built One.