textile waste

Dear Plastic, started as an oath against disposable plastics. As we researched and matured with our own understanding of our surrounding environment, we decided also to purchase only organic and locally produced foods, to eat in most nights and to stick to a vegetarian diet(except for the once a month chicken soup or taka's treat of bacon and eggs!).

Tonight we popped along to the monthly "green ups" event May fashion with passion, which looked at sustainability of the Fashion and Textile industry. I knew a little about how bad this industry was for the environment but Paula Rogers from Fair Trade, who spoke tonight, opened our eyes to some horrifying truths...the COTTON industry. One of the worst, over 50% of the world's pesticides are accounted to cotton production, most being classified as "Highly hazardous" by the WHO. The quantities of water needed for irrigation eg. 29,000 litres of water used per kg of cotton in Sudan and the oil for machinery and fuel for aerial spraying. Not only is this a huge environmental impact, but the farmers exposed to this and then the people who wear the garment etc etc.

It made me think of all the effort a garment takes...from the design process, manufacturing, weaving of the fabric, spinning of the yarn, the production of yarn and all the transportation from each process.

Then to think how disposable our minds are set with our own agenda of our needs and wants.

I am a victim caught in a cycle of textile waste!

We heard about the incident with H&M in New York early this year. You can read it here.

To summarise, a University student walked past bags of discarded clothes found in the trash outside of H&M. As she went through them she noticed all items were purposely damaged, so they could not be used again. After contacting H&M headquarters, she got no response.

She "tweeted" about this and after thousands of responses and facebook msgs, H&M responded.

It makes me realise how we can create change...now i am just working out how I will stop my cycle of textile waste.

(Maybe we need to think smart like Marge Simpson from the episode where she created lots of different looks/ pieces from that one Chanel suit?! (season7 ep14!)