Food vs. Apparel

                Fashioning Sustainability has compared the clothing industry to the food industry, with lessons to be learned.  The food industry is increasing the demand for healthy food, fair trade, and organic products.  These standards are driving up the performance and supermarkets to be greener and more ethical.  This indicates that the apparel industry and ourselves are guilty of polluting the earth and not being sustainable with the clothing.

                In the clothing industry, Fashioning Sustainability has indicated that cotton needs a lot of water in order for it to grow which has made agricultural practices worse. Cotton is a widely used fiber to make many different pieces of clothing.  In some cases, over 10 tons of water is used to grow enough cotton to make just one pair of jeans. The use of pesticides to help grow cotton can cause serious health problems to cotton workers, soil degradation and biodiversity loss. Some of the issues faced because of this are accessibility to clean drinking water because of the dying houses that pollute it and from the production that involves some of the most toxic agrochemicals.  One solution when washing the clothing is to use liquids that contain less than 5% phosphates or are phosphate free.  In the Ecosystem Millennium Assessment, it indicates that with deforestation, generally leads to decreased rainfall, and since the cotton needs a substantial amount of water, we need to keep our forests and trees alive.  Not only is the growing of cotton hard on the earth, but the transportation to get fabric/clothing where it needs to be is not always a good source.  Sometimes the fabric/clothing has to be transported by plane and the planes are the worst on the carbon footprint.  Clothing is in too high of a demand, and it needs to be slowed down to help preserve the earth.

                Washing, drying, and ironing often accounts for the most significant use of energy in the clothing lifecycle.  Depending on which materials the clothes are made from, a majority of the carbon ‘footprint’ of clothing can be caused in its washing and care, contributing to climate change.  Some of us are guilty for just refreshing our clothes when we wash them instead of actually needing them cleaned.  We must change our habits when it comes to washing our clothing and decide when and what is dirty.  When your clothing is actually dirty, you should do a full load at the lowest temperature.  Instead of drying and ironing your clothing, you should air dry them flat and this could help reduce the impact a piece of clothing has on the climate change.  By making these changes, they not only help the earth, but they also help save you money!  An example provided by Ecosystem Millennium Assessment is the increase of food production.  Food production typically involves an increase use of water and fertilizers or expansion of the area of cultivated land, these same actions often degrade other ecosystem services such as reducing the availability of water for other uses, degrading water quality, reducing biodiversity, and decreasing forest cover; and this all goes for the use of cotton for the clothing industry.

                In the work of Walsh & Brown, they have pointed out that soil erosion, pesticides, water, electricity, and diesel fuels are all parts of the growing phase of a t-shirt.  To help reduce soil erosion, cover crops and compost are two good techniques discussed.  Recent research also indicates that organic farming methods can reduce the amount of soil leaving the ground, and since there is no use of pesticides and less water consumption, organic growing makes a better choice for all because it also cuts back on the cost.  In the article they also stress that the consumer care overwhelms the impacts of the other stages of making and shipping a t-shirt.

More farmers and consumers need to realize that organic growing is in more than one way the better choice.  The next time you buy a t-shirt, you should look at the label for organic cotton and realize how much better that shirt was on the earth; and the next time you have a load of laundry, you should ask yourself if it really is dirty or if you could wear it one more time.  More than likely, you will be the only one who knows if it was not previously washed!