Where there’s a will, there’s a way

In the future, we will live in a world where all clothing is biodegradable and becomes food for another source.  We cannot allow our waste to pile up in landfills because that is not how the earth was made to work.  “Waste for one is food for another,” quoted from the video.

                In Waste Equals Food article we learn that we have two types of consumption, biological consumption and technical consumption.  Biological consumption is where things return safely to the air, water, and soil, where it is transformed back into natural consumption. With technical consumption, it has to be recaptured in its own closed cycles because they will not return safely and they can leak chemicals into the earth but we are dependent on these technical materials.

                “If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist,” Waste Equals Food article.  We will learn how to make products, such as shampoo bottles, toothpaste tubes, and cartons that are strong enough for its use and then be able to biodegrade and give back to the earth.  We have too many containers out there that are only used for a week to a month to just throw away and pile up in our landfills.  With what we have created, we will continue to recycle the products into other uses instead of just bury them and with the objects already buried, we will start a program to sort through the landfills and start recycling what we can through there also.

Susan Lyons, in the video of Rhoener Textiles, has worked with the company to make non-harmful materials to the earth and ourselves and to not jeopardize the strength and quality of those that are harmful to the earth.  Once the material have reached the end of its lifecycle, it can then become mulch for the ground and in six months it is compost and gone.  We will use materials such as organic cotton and hemp along with research to find others that will not be harmful, biodegrade, and become food for the soil.

                With our technology we will set up local drop off stations to be picked up and either disposed of properly, reuse them or make something new out of them.  Cars will have to be transformed to use less gas and emit less pollution into the earth and even to not use any gas at all.  A car recall for all older models that do not meet regulations and that put more pollutants out than the standard car will be implemented and enforced.

                If we don’t start living today, what will our future generations look forward to!?

Growing your own clothes locally..

Biomimicry is the examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to take inspiration from in order to solve human problems.  Biomimicry can unlock secrets of evolution, new beginnings to textile design to emerge per Textile Futures chapter 5.  In the eyes of Suzanne Lee’s, to ‘grow your clothes’ is not necessarily using a field full of cotton or the wool off a sheep, but to literally growing bacteria in a bathtub of green tea and sugar to form to a mold.  This material also takes to dyes a lot easier than cotton and other materials, giving this an upper hand but this process is still under works because it is not waterproof, and in today’s world, we need water proof and sweat proof.  We may not use this for the apparel industry, but we could look into growing our furniture and household products so we could use less of cotton, a material that is harmful to the earth more sparingly.  Per the Textile Futures book, chapter 5 says that it can take decades for an article of clothing to decompose and as it does so, it releases deadly chemicals and harmful gases into the soil.  We cannot continue to throw our materials out and let our earth ‘take care of them’ because we are causing damage to it and ourselves.  With the grown materials, after they have reached the end of their lifecycle usage for us, we can dispose of them like our organic food and it will become compost, not causing any harm to our earth.  By growing our own clothing and forming it to what we need, we would build for durability and not overbuild, using materials sparingly. 

Another way to help our earth is to shop locally, by enhancing diversity, celebrating traditions, building your community, creating meaningful employment and respecting your local environmental conditions as stated in the Local and Light chapter.  With producing locally, it can give meaning and a change for distinctiveness and limited editions.  My only problem with shopping locally is seeing everyone else in the same clothing so in order to avoid this, small town producers should only produce one of each item in each size so it would be on a first come first serve basis and this will allow the producer to have free range on creativity.  By producing or growing our own materials locally, we would eliminate the transportation cycles that a textile goes through before even reaching the user.  When producing products, we need to look towards lightweight materials for a lower environmental impact, but we cannot look to do that to everything, because we will need warmth come winter time.  Also by shopping locally, you can buy organic produce and help farmers and gardeners out.  There would also be less shipping of produce and shipped produce is more than likely not grown organically.

To this day I feel that there are many entrepreneurs and fashion designers out there that we should be able to live locally and experience a great life by doing so and this would give more people the opportunity to express individuality.  We need to learn to trust in ourselves and our communities and grow sustainably together by using materials sparingly and shopping locally.

A No Waste Economy

In the How Will We Conduct Business article, we have taken advantage of our earth for many years thinking that it provided us with an endless source of natural resources.  In the United States alone, we generate 12 billion tons of solid waste a year which pollutes our earth harming it and us.  A dollar sign was never put on drilling or mining our resources so we took advantage and what we needed until we found out that the earth does not make more of what we are taking from it.  Our view is for an approach to manufacture over a long term to be properly defined and executed and continually updated and supported to evaluate and minimize impacts to the earth, called industrial ecology, ‘Industrial Ecology: The Concept.’

To this day, a product visits one of two fates at the end of its useful life, it can be either be buried in a landfill or incinerated, or it can be recycled or reused.  ‘The ‘closed-loop’ dream of industrial ecology will not be complete until all products that are sent out into the world are folded back into the system’ (How Will We Conduct Business).  In the apparel industry, for our clothing and fabric products not to pile up in a landfill, it will all have to be biodegradable and fertilize the ground or reusable in many eco-friendly ways.  Hemp is completely biodegradable and is one of the few plants whose byproducts can either be eaten, sat on, written on, and used as medicine, fuel, worn or squirted into a machine.  Not only is hemp well rounded in how we can use it but it also improves water quality because it does not use pesticides or herbicides in order to grow.  Hemp is naturally resistant to mold, bacteria and pests and therefore has no toxic runoff from the fields.  It also adds nutrients to the soil, removes toxins, aerates the soil and prevents soil erosion with its long roots.  Hemp actually leaves the soil in better condition than before it was planted.  Another eco-friendly aspect is hemp’s dense growth helps control and eliminates weeds; it also is a high-yield crop that matures on an average of 120 days and is able to be grown on the same land every two to three years, Hemp: Historic Fiber Remains Controversial.  

For the food and car industry, plastics can be derived from plant cellulose, and since hemp is the greatest cellulose producer on Earth it only makes sense to make non-toxic, biodegradable plastic from hemp and other organics, instead of letting our dumps fill up with waste.  These composites are less expensive than dangerous fiberglass counterparts which give hemp the upper hand.  It could also replace carbon and glass fibers, which have environmental and weight problems on the earth, Hemphasis. http://www.hemphasis.net/Building/plasticmettle.htm

All of these wonderful facts about hemp make hemp the best choice all around for us to have a sustainable world in the future.  People do like the feel of cotton, but if we can intertwine hemp to feel and look the same, we will have overcome the harsh ways cotton is on our world, and make a better future.  When we are not using a biodegradable material, we need to use materials sparingly, to build for durability and to not overbuild, How Will We Conduct Business.  When you think of a bee, they build what they only need with a minimum number of materials and success to survive.  As we continue to live on the earth, we need to learn that minimum is okay and will be enough for us to survive as we continue to learn and grow.