food for thought

What is the point of polluting our drinking water and earth for material objects? In the video of Dirty Laundry, China has thousand of factories near rivers that pollute their drinking water, seriously affecting the local people.  China, and others, needs to have better standards in order to keep a closed cycle involved in production of harmful materials.  Brands need to work together in order to clean up their supply chain and to not pollute the earth.

  “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,” quoted from the Waste Equals Food chapter.  Once an organic material has been combined with synthetic fibers or harmful dyes, it can no longer be biodegradable and needs to be upcycled.  Therefore, I propose that we research and find a way to take apart, disassemble the fibers, and remove harmful dyes from the material to either keep the harmful chemicals in a closed cycle and with the organic materials that are disassembled; we can use them to give back to the earth as food for another.  With the upcycled materials and dyes, they can then be furthered used into its next lifecycle as another material or use. 

In the Waste Equals Food article, shoes were once biodegradable because they were made out of vegetable tanning instead of harmful dyes that polluted the earth.  Vegetable tanning has been replaced with chromium tanning, which is faster and cheaper but chromium produce toxins that are harmful to the earth.  We need to go back to making shoes that are not harmful on the earth and can become food for something else because as we walk in our shoes, it leaves harmful residue that cannot be consumed by the earth or ourselves.  Today’s shoes are being developed in countries such as China where there are few, if any, precautions taken to protect the people and ecosystems from chromium exposure.  The chromium chemicals are either being dumped in the water or incinerated which is against regulations but are done during the night when most would not expect, per the video of Dirty Laundry.  When developing our shoe soles, we need to look into soles that can degrade to enrich the environment instead of pollute it, our shoes as we walk, need to become food for something else.

In Textile Futures, one of Goldsworthy’s uses of inspiration in the Cradle to Cradle theory by McDonough and Braungart which is to design with the intention that products can be recycled through multiple life-cycles.  With technology advancing, it provides alternative answers and systems in the field of recycling.  With this technology, it will allow us to separate combined combinations of organic and synthetic fibers in order to keep that material in its rightful cycle like I proposed earlier in this blog.