Look at your Labels!

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coiled ropes

 

Look at your labels!

We all know that buying food that is produced locally is better for the environment than food that is flown all over the world. But what do you know about the carbon footprint of your clothes?

Did you know that the fashion industry (clothes, no other textiles) produces between 8 and 10% of all global emissions? This is more than the aviation industry and the shipping industry combined.  The clothes on our back come with a very high hidden price tag, even though you can buy a summer dress for under a tenner.

Out of the 3.1kg of textile waste each Briton produces every year, only 0.3kg are recycled and 0.4 kg are reused. The rest goes into landfill. Textiles are said to be the world’s second biggest polluting industry, responsible for 92 million tonnes of waste annually. Not all textiles are breaking down in the environment and herein lies a problem.

On a very simple level, we can divide textile fibres in ‘natural’ fibres and ‘man-made’ fibres. Examples of natural fibres are cotton, linen, hemp (plant-based) and wool, alpaca fleece, silk and others (animal based). Man-made fibres (viscose, rayon, Tencel, acrylic, polyester) are made in a factory. The raw materials for these fibres are either from the natural world (viscose is made of wood, so is Tencel) or from oil, such as polyester, polyamide, nylon and acrylic. The official name of polyester is PET – the same material plastic bottles are made of. Polyester is cheap, easy to wash, with a good drape, light and strong and this makes it desirable for the fashion industry. Often blended with other materials, it is now so ubiquitous that the proportion of synthetic fibres in our garments has doubled since 2000, rising to 60% in 2019.

The difficulty with clothing ourselves in plastic is not just what happens when the garment is made or discarded. Just by wearing and washing, polyester sheds microfibres in large amounts. Results of research done by Plymouth University indicate that one person could release almost 300 million polyester microfibres per year by washing their clothes, and more than 900 million to the air by simply wearing the garments. Especially from fleecy jackets, popular garments in our Scottish climate. Thirty-five per cent of the microplastics that enter the ocean come via synthetic textiles and as a result, over seventy per cent of fish caught at mid-ocean depths in the Northwest Atlantic have microplastic ingested. These are staggering statistics and don’t include the environmental and social harms done by producing cheap fast fashion.

Often, we think that a problem is too big for individual action. But you can do something:

Buy less: buy better;

Buy second hand;

Dispose of your old clothes responsibly;

Avoid man-made fabrics such as polyester, polyamide and acrylics;

Learn how to take care of your textiles, including mending.

 

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