Making Good

Bamboo Fabrics: Buyer Beware

I was glad to see this from the Federal Trade Commission:

Have You Been Bamboozled by Bamboo Fabrics?

Looking to be a more environmentally conscious shopper? You’ve probably heard about bamboo. Bamboo stands out for its ability to grow quickly with little or no need for pesticides, and it is used in a variety of products, from flooring to furniture. But when it comes to soft bamboo textiles, like shirts or sheets, there’s a catch: they’re actually rayon.

The Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s consumer protection agency, wants you to know that the soft “bamboo” fabrics on the market today are rayon. They are made using toxic chemicals in a process that releases pollutants into the air. Extracting bamboo fibers is expensive and time-consuming, and textiles made just from bamboo fiber don’t feel silky smooth.

There’s also no evidence that rayon made from bamboo retains the antimicrobial properties of the bamboo plant, as some sellers and manufacturers claim. Even when bamboo is the “plant source” used to create rayon, no traits of the original plant are left in the finished product.

Companies that claim a product is “bamboo” should have reliable evidence, like scientific tests and analyses, to show that it’s made of actual bamboo fiber.

There is so much work to be done toward a sustainable textile and fashion industry. We can't afford greenwashed claims that discredit the industry. Bamboo is indeed a highly renewable resource, but that doesn't justify hyperbolic claims about fabric made from bamboo. Bamboo may be part of the solution in many fiber applications, but the industry should be sure they're making transparent and legitimate claims.

Going Green? Required Reading from Fashion-Incubator

Fashion Incubator is required reading for anyone starting an entrepreneurial textile or clothing company. Kathleen Fasanella is a wealth of experience and information. I want to call attention to two of her posts that address naming and promoting your "eco-friendliness" or sustainable values. Kathleen pulls no punches, and part of her great value is that you get a very educated and clear opinion - she tells her truth and tells it directly, and she's got depth and breadth of experience to back it up, along with a real commitment to sustainability. Bravo. If you've started a company called "eco-mommy creations" and your feelings are easily hurt, brace yourself before reading. But by all means, read! You may disagree, but at least you'll do so having heard a very good argument about some things that rarely get said out loud about sustainable fashion and textiles. 

• Is your strategy patently obvious, pathetic or parasitic? Here's a quote from the pathetic section: "This usually falls in the vein of “I’m a good person, I recycle, I’m not a sweat shop, I give a[n undefined portion of the proceeds] to charity (assuming there’s something to give) and I’m uber cool, so buy my incredibly overpriced tee shirts." With a pitch like this, you haven’t sold anyone on the value of your product. How have you conveyed the value of it? If we want to support a charity, more of the money will go to the charity with direct checks rather than filtering it through you. These days you can’t be heard amid the clamor and din of everyone else who’s also making these claims. And even if this argument were convincing, it’ll take more than your propensity for buying organic fruit (in this particular case) to convince us of your social commitments."
• Naming a product line pt. 69 This post critiques product line names and company names that focus on the green: "Everybody’s putting eco this and green that in their label names. I know that ten years from now, those label names will be very dated. Not that the impetus toward sustainability will be less (who knows) but it’ll just look dumb. Look at it this way, assuming everyone’s on the bandwagon then and sustainability is de rigeur, it’ll be too obvious." Not to mention that there's nothing original about it anymore. Fasanella then takes on women who start businesses that identify themselves through that woman's particular stage or status of motherhood, as if that's going to qualify them as better. She rightly points out that it will alienate as many people as it attracts. 
  
  

Organic Cotton Jersey Grown and Made in the U.S.

Alabama Chanin, the homegrown enterprise of the inspiring Natalie Chanin, now sells organic cotton jersey in 25 colors, available online. Their description: "60" wide, certified fiber is grown in Texas, spun in Tennessee, knit in South Carolina, dyed in Mississippi and shipped from Alabama." The colors are beautiful. And it makes me wonder -- will this economy encourage America to revive its textile industry, and make it sustainable? Will knowing how to sew become a valued skill?  

A Plea for Slow Fashion: Take a Holiday From Clothes Shopping

Stan Cox, scientist at the Land Institute, sent out this plea for a saner approach to our wardrobe, distributed through the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle.

Take a holiday from clothes shopping

By Stan Cox

Prairie Writers Circle

A deep recession — or worse — is in the holiday forecast, but belt-tightening doesn’t have to ruin the festive mood. Here’s one painless way to cut expenses while giving the planet a much-needed break: Resolve not to buy any new clothes — not even a tight new belt! — for anyone for a whole year, starting now
 
Don’t worry about disappointing family or friends. Christmas after Christmas, polls show that clothing, the most popular present among givers, is also ranked as the “most disappointing gift” by those on the receiving end.

We’ve already stockpiled enough clothes to last us for years. The average annual shopping haul swelled from $1,550 per household in 2002 to $1,760 last year. That spending spree was prompted in part by what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says was a 30 percent drop in real apparel prices over the past decade. With cheap imports allowing a dollar to buy more, the physical bulk of garb purchased by the average household has risen 18 percent in just five years.

In America, even in hard times, anyone can be a power shopper. Our national cheap-clothing policy means you can fill your closets to bursting, even if you’re not a major-party nominee on a $150,000 budget.

And with a constant need to free up closet space for new purchases, the average American discards 68 pounds of clothing and other textiles each year, the Environmental Protection Agency says.

 Although 10 million tons of unwanted duds per year puts pressure on U.S. landfills, it's the origin of the clothes that does the greatest harm. Production of synthetic fabric consumes petroleum, blows out greenhouse gases and spews wastewater bearing organic solvents, heavy metals and poisonous dyes and fiber treatments.

Conventional cotton clothing also comes at great cost. Grown on less than 2 percent of U.S. farmland, the cotton crop accounts for one of every four pounds of pesticides sprayed, Agriculture Department figures show. Things are worse in the global south, where cotton accounts for half of pesticide use.

To curb the soil erosion for which cotton land is infamous, no-till methods have been introduced on a large scale. But they require heavier spraying of herbicides.

The United States brings in more clothes than the next highest nine importers combined. And by allowing our spinning, weaving and sewing jobs to go to Asia and Latin America, we’ve exported a big pollution problem as well.

Dye effluents often carry toxic metals, among them copper, cobalt, chromium, nickel, zinc, lead, antimony, silver, cadmium and mercury. Bleaching the cloth for a single shirt generates as much as 15 gallons of chlorine-polluted wastewater.

Chemicals used in the industry, including anti-wrinkle compounds, can be carcinogenic. In 2002, Italian and American researchers found that risks of nasal, bladder and gastrointestinal cancers among spinners, weavers and dyers were elevated 28 to 126 percent.

“Green” apparel makers are riding to the rescue but getting lost in a stampede. According to the nonprofit trade association Organic Exchange, the global market for organic cotton clothes grew by $1.4 billion—700 percent—from 2001 to 2007. But in the same period Americans alone increased spending on conventional clothes by $29 billion. Like it or not, virtuous-clothing companies are adding to the bulk jamming the nation's collective closet, not replacing it.

Yes, I know. If Americans started buying just enough new clothes to fit our basic needs, we might deliver a coup de grace to the already crippled retail economy (and thrift-store racks would be stripped bare). But wouldn’t it be great to emerge at the other end of the coming hard times with a new, more rational economy, one that isn’t addicted to selling mountains of stuff that people don’t need or even want?

To paraphrase a retail giant’s slogan, we could save money, live better and spend less time on the consumption treadmill simply by not buying so many clothes. That would make for a real holiday bargain.


Stan Cox is lead scientist for the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.” He wrote this comment for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. Write to him at t.stan@cox.net.

What do you think? Comments are welcome.

Sustainable Can Be Subtle

Los Angeles Times blogger Monica Corcoran, aka The Rage, has a post on "The Green Scene at L.A. Fashion Week" worth reading. Like most people, she's a responsible environmental citizen but not, in her words, a super-eco-activist. I love this comment, and I think it says volumes about why many people with buying power aren't thrilled about their sustainable apparel choices:

OK. Just because the method and fabrics used to make the clothing are green doesn’t literally mean the clothes need to be the color green or there needs to be pictures of flowers and trees on them or an animal needs to be riding your back to show that you like animals. Love them by leaving them in their home.

Can I get an Amen? Sustainability has to be integrated into the industry -- into design, manufacturing and marketing -- not slapped on via some kind of eco-badge. Being environmentally responsible shouldn't have to mean being free of sophistication or subtlety. 

Allison Arieff, the former Dwell editor whose By Design blog is hosted by the New York Times, has written eloquently about this with regard to product design. Though her focus is on architecture and home design rather than textiles and clothing, her point of view is always interesting and far-reaching.

Maybe it's a good time to mention that Leanne, the latest Project Runway winner, used sustainable fabrics in her winning collection (I'm not sure which fabrics she used -- sustainable is her description, not mine). The garments were lovely -- grown-up styles inspired by waves, but free of obvious imagery. 

New Organic Cotton Twill Print from Harmony Art

It's only good and right that this blog should kick off with a new organic cotton fabric from Harmony Art. Harmony Susalla is a textile designer and entrepreneur who is deeply committed to the organic fiber cause and to true sustainability in the textile industry. Her fabrics are certified to the voluntary Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which means that certified organic fiber is just the beginning; each step of the manufacturing and distribution process is environmentally responsible. Harmony has worked for years to ensure the quality of her fabrics and printing, and has contributed a great deal to the sustainable textile movement. 

Harmony has a terrific blog on her Web site that's worth bookmarking. Here's her latest print, in a 90"-wide twill. To buy wholesale in quantites of 50 yards or more, contact Harmony directly through her site (custom design and printing is available, too). Retailers selling Harmony Art fabric in smaller quantities include Near Sea Naturals.

Introduction

Welcome to Making Good, a blog about organic, sustainable and artisan textiles and clothing. Some of you may have found me through my blog Red Thread Studio: Slow Cloth, New Cloth, Art Cloth. That blog will continue (please keep visiting!), but after nearly a year of writing about textiles there, it became clear that that blog's focus wanted to be more on textile art, craft and culture, while this one will look at textile and clothing enterprises, and the meaning of sustainability in textiles and fashion. There will definitely be some overlap, but Red Thread Studio may often have a more personal focus.

I'm inspired to do this for a few different reasons. I have a lifelong passion for textiles that ranges from the personal (a love of making things for myself and others) to the artistic (textiles as a powerful, tactile, expressive medium) to the global -- a fascination with the roles that textiles and clothing play in cultures all over the world. 

With many years of experience as  an editor, writer, educator and communications strategist in the organic foods and natural living sector (now sometimes referred to as LOHAS, for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), it only makes sense that I would combine that experience with my love of textiles. I began to do that in earnest this past year. I wrote The International Market for Sustainable (Green) Apparel, a comprehensive market study, for market research company Packaged Facts. This study - which wrapped up at about 200 page - is the first study of its kind, I believe, to assess the market for not just organic cotton but all manner of textiles produced with organic or sustainable materials and with attention to fair trade and labor issues, processing and dyeing methods, transportation, packaging and distribution, and an appropriate philosophy of style and design. I've also written on sustainable textiles for Organic Processing magazine and for Stitch, a new special publication of Interweave Press.

I also include in this blog news about companies that are focused on preserving and protecting artisan textile traditions, skills, and communities, as these are an essential part of sustainability -- the part that can't be measured in greenhouse gas emissions or reductions in pesticide use or even in fair prices paid to growers, but matters a great deal nonetheless. 

Some of my most popular posts from Red Thread Studio are on sustainable textiles and fashion. Here are several that carry over to the theme of this blog: 

• Sustainable Textile Resources and Five Things I've Learned
• Organic Knitting Yarns
• Slow Cloth, Fashion Design and Garment Sewing
• 10 Qualities of Slow Cloth

This is just the beginning of what all blogs are -- works in progress. I have many links, resources and ideas to share, and welcome your thoughts on what you'd like to read. This introductory post will stay up top for a while, but please visit often to see what's new. If you'd like to send me a personal e-mail or inquire about writing, speaking, or other requests, write to me here.