“Belly Full of Trash,” copyright Marie Cullis, 2025.
About
This is my third plastic trash art project, and this one differs from my previous creations. First, it’s the largest, measuring almost 59 inches wide and 39 inches between the tips of each “fin.” It’s also the heaviest. Finally, rather than depicting a scene, this piece depicts a large fish, showing a cross-section of its stomach and revealing that it is filled with plastic waste. Given the high number of marine animals that perish due to plastic ingestion, I felt it was crucial to illustrate this issue.
When marine animals accidentally ingest plastic, they are often unable to regurgitate it or pass it through their digestive systems. As plastic accumulates, it can block digestion, causing the animal to feel full and reducing its urge to eat, which eventually leads to starvation. Sharp fragments can also injure internal organs, causing infections and internal bleeding. In 2021, Earth.org estimated that the number of marine animals affected each year exceeds 100,000. “We find about 100,000 marine animals killed by ocean plastic ingestion or entanglement each year, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are likely far more lying at the bottom of the ocean, who, once decomposed, will release the plastic for other animals to encounter. Approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic annually.”1 The actual number is likely much higher as plastic production increases every year.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
Location
I collected trash and plastic debris from Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, during the week of Memorial Day in 2024. When I collect beach trash, the type I find can vary because of the time of year or location. For instance, in the more remote parts of the Outer Banks, I found lots of microplastics, rather than whole items like cups and bottles. But on this trip, I found very few microplastics and mostly large items, including cups, water bottles, toys, and food packaging. This was likely because I was in a populated area of Hilton Head, and it was a holiday weekend.
Collected Beach Trash
Memorial Day weekend at any beach is extremely busy, and Hilton Head was no exception. Beachgoers left behind all manner of items, mostly plastic, and much of it seemed careless.
Example 1: Food Packaging and Juice pouches:
These CapriSun and Kool-Aid juice pouches became the fins of my giant fish.
Of course, everyone gets hungry on the beach, and that’s okay! But we can all be responsible and properly dispose of our food waste and packaging. Bring a small trash bag, or simply place the trash inside your cooler or food bag, and put it in the trash later. It’s not an inconvenience; it’s easy, and it’s the right thing to do.
Example 2: Beverage Containers
Water bottles, plastic or Styrofoam cups, and plastic straws were everywhere! These are items we are all capable of managing and disposing of properly.
The source of several of these items was an outdoor hotel bar at Coligny Beach Park in Hilton Head, which served drinks in clear plastic cups with brown plastic straws. Even with ample trash receptacles, everyone is ultimately responsible for their own waste. But the hotel bar could also stop serving in plastic.
Crushed Coca-Cola can. Note that when these rust, they become very sharp and cause injuries, since many people walk barefoot on the beach and swim in the surf without shoes.
The brown straws on the left came from the outdoor hotel bar – I accidentally verified this when I bought a drink there.
Example 3: Beach Toys
While I’m not perfect, I always account for all of our beach toys at the end of the day. We keep our beach toy bag intentionally minimal, with only about 8 items, so we can enjoy the beach and easily keep track of them. Please do the same!
I found more lost or abandoned beach toys than I could use in this art project:
A group of snap-on handles from toy beach buckets, which have obviously become detached. This is a very common problem, and I find these on every beach.
The plastic netting that companies often package beach toys in. You can avoid these if you buy certain brands or buy beach toys secondhand.
I was unable to find a place to donate beach toys while on the island. There are “borrow” beach toy bins in some areas of Florida and Galveston, Texas, and beach libraries exist in the UK!
But I’ve since discovered there’s at least one on Hilton Head Island, though I’m not sure if it was there in 2024:
I didn’t use most of the whole, intact beach toys in this art project, and many are too large for my other projects. So, I may donate them or use them in another project. I definitely won’t put them in a landfill!
All Other Items:
Metal bottlecaps
Plastic bottlecaps
So many bottlecaps
Variety of small plastic items…
…including fake plastic fingernails! Yuck!
Plastic utensils, a Circle K lighter, SunBum lip balm, cotton swabs, cigarette buts, aluminum can tabs, a cork, stakes, travel-sized Neutrogena sunscreen, etc.
Band-Aid, cotton swabs, and cigarette butts
Orange plastic Circle K lighter, SunBum lip balm, and a white plastic spoon stem
Sunglasses, goggles, and goggles packaging
Plastic lids
Various plastic and paper labels or tags
Examples of wipes and packing foam
Zip ties, dental picks, hair ties, a bracelet, and various other string-type items, all made of plastics
Various strings but all made from nylon or polyester (plastic fabrics)
Ribbon-type items
Pieces of clear plastic wrappers and bags
Pieces of black plastic
Various textile items, including a washcloth, a sock, and a shoe insert
Various items, including a clothing hanger, a flip flop, a child’s water shoe, vape cartridges, a plastic test tube shot container, a piece of wood fence, and a random piece of plastic
Empty Purple Urkle THCA vape cartridges
The Board
I took a solo beach walk one evening that week and found this board. Damaged and very dirty, it had washed up on the beach, with no one nearby. I held it up and waved it around to see if anyone claimed it, but no one did. I left it by the outdoor shower area of our rental for a couple of days, but no one picked it up.
I initially believed it was a wakeboard, used with a boat, and washed ashore. However, after researching online, I discovered it’s a ZAP skimboard that originally had raised traction pieces.2 (I removed the largest pieces before remembering to take photos, so I only have images of me removing the smaller ones.) While I could have possibly sold or donated it, the condition was questionable. The edges were chipped, the traction pieces were damaged, and the entire board had a thick layer of sticky sand that I had to scrape off with a razor blade.
Did I take someone’s skimboard? I don’t think so. I believe it was lost or abandoned, considering its condition. My alternative was to leave it for the sea to claim at high tide, or perhaps for a lifeguard to pick it up the next morning if it remained on the beach, and ultimately end up in the garbage. So I decided to use it as the background for my art project!
The Process
Washing the trash
I usually rinse everything before bringing it home. But this trip, I didn’t have time. I also had so much trash that my spouse insisted I limit it to one bag only (and in all fairness, we have a small car and it was already mostly full for the trip). So, once I got home, I decided to wash it all right away – rather than letting it sit – to avoid bad smells and keep yucky trash out of my home. I had to do it in batches over a couple of days.
First, I separated a portion of the garbage bag and put it in a metal bucket to rinse off the sand. I recommend doing this to keep as much sand as possible out of your plumbing. I dumped the water on my grass; no harm done.
Next, I washed everything with dish soap in my kitchen sink. I recommend using a laundry room sink if you have one; otherwise, the kitchen sink works fine. After washing, I laid everything out on towels to dry completely.
After everything was completely dry, I stored it in a clear, homemade trash bag until I had time to work on the project.
And yes, I reused the original white trash bag for actual trash at home!
Sorting
In the Spring of 2025, I sorted the trash pieces on two folding tables in my garage.
Creating
The idea of a fish or a whale came to me because of the shape of the board. Using Aleene’s Tacky glue and Sugru, I attached plastic pieces to the board. I used round flat pieces (one is a paper seal from a Pringles canister) to make the eye; synthetic fabrics to make a mouth; broken toy shovels as tail fins; juice pouches as fins; and water bottles, bottle caps, and other clear plastics became scales. I created the stomach outline from toy bucket straps, and the colorful and identifiable pieces went into the cross-sectional view of the stomach, as if you were viewing the fish’s stomach contents.
“Belly Full of Trash,” copyright Marie Cullis, 2025.
Close up of the stomach. Copyright Marie Cullis.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
Fin made from juice pouches. Copyright Marie Cullis.
Tail fins made from pink and green toy beach shovels. Copyright Marie Cullis.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
Copyright Marie Cullis.
I could have created anything with these materials, but as I mentioned earlier, raising awareness about marine life ingesting plastic was too important an issue to ignore. Through this piece, I wanted to show not only the environmental damage caused by plastic pollution but also the impact it has on marine life that suffers because of human actions. In the end, I hope it inspires others both to help combat plastic pollution and to express themselves through art. And maybe even inspire change!
Thanks for reading, and please share and subscribe!
Footnotes:
Article, “How Many Marine Animals Die From Plastic Each Year?” Earth.org, November 19, 2021. ↩︎
Page, “The Hellcat V2,” zapskimboards.com, March 7, 2023. ↩︎
Many people now understand that Black Friday is mostly a hoax. It used to be a shopping day when people could get decent deals on gifts, but not anymore. Most Black Friday sales are not good deals, have limitations, or are outright scams.
Still, every year, we break records for Black Friday sales. In 2024, consumers spent a record $10.8 billion, which was 10% more than in 2023. That’s also just over double what consumers spent in 2017.1
Worse, inflation over the last few years has not kept pace with wage and salary increases. And things have only worsened with the introduction of new tariffs. Our buying power has decreased. Most people feel the pinch and don’t want to live in debt.
At the same time, extreme wealth is on the rise for those extremely privileged few at the financial top. According to Forbes, there are now more than 3,000 billionaires worldwide, worth $16.1 trillion combined. “But the distribution of this extreme affluence is far from equal. Just three nations account for more than 50% of all billionaires.”2
I think it’s time we reject the billionaires. Or at least stop supporting them.
Further, many of the cheap items we buy don’t last very long, contribute to pollution, have toxic ingredients, or all of those.
Maybe we need longer-lasting, less polluting, and less toxic gift items in our lives.
Photo by sarah b on Unsplash.
What if we could reject the billionaires, protect the environment, save money, and still have a wonderful holiday season?
We can do all of those at once!
Here’s how.
Buy Nothing
If it’s possible for you and your loved ones, opt out of gifting this year. That’s like getting 100% off!
However, it’s unrealistic for many people, myself included. I’m not going to not give gifts this year. I just plan to be smarter and more conscientious about it. You can too, read on!
Photo by Mathieu Turle on Unsplash.
Limit Spending on Gifts
First, you don’t need to break the bank. Create a small or moderate gift budget and stick to it. In general, we can give one gift to someone that they will enjoy. We don’t need to shower people with multiple gifts.
People are generally happy just to see their loved ones. Time together is a gift.
Other options: Your family can draw names, Secret Santa style, and buy only for that one person. Or, your family can choose only to give gifts to the children. Or, some families go on a fabulous vacation together, and that is the gift from the parents or grandparents.
Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash.
Buy local
Buying local simply means buying from a local store (not a chain store) or vendor. These are often referred to as small businesses or Mom & Pop stores. But they can be anything from local craftspeople at farmers’ markets to food trucks to storefronts. Think about the locally owned bookstore, the local comic book or game shop, or the locally owned coffee shop in your area. Is there a local cheese shop, bakery, winery, soap shop, chocolatier, or ethnic food store near you? Maybe you can buy a beautiful houseplant at the local garden store. You might have to search a little, but I bet you can find several choices in your area.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.
Buy second-hand
Of course, if you’ve read any of my other articles, you’ll know that I’m a huge advocate of buying most items second-hand. Second-hand items cost less, have already off-gassed most toxins, and reduce the need for new production of goods (hence less pollution). You can find great gifts at quality thrift stores, consignment shops, flea markets, antique stores, and second-hand book or record stores. In our area, we even have a couple of second-hand outdoor gear stores. You never know what you’ll find, but you’ll likely find something nice for your loved one.
Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash.
Buy gifts from non-profits
You can buy an array of gifts from non-profit organizations, which is awesome, because you can support your favorite orgs while gift-giving! Always check Charity Watch or Charity Navigator to verify nonprofits you aren’t sure about.
If you’re crafty or can sew, then there are so many options!
But you don’t have to be super crafty for this category. You can make simple but lovely items using online tutorials.
Or, you can cook or bake something and give it as a gift. Do you have a breadmaker (maybe that was gifted to you, and you never use) that you can make a loaf of rosemary sourdough in for someone? Maybe you have great cake decorating skills (unlike me). Cookies, doughnuts, muffins, scones – the possibilities are endless!
If you are not crafty and don’t cook or bake, perhaps you can put together a coffee basket using locally roasted coffee beans, a mug (from the thrift store!), and a chocolate-covered spoon. Or you could put together a basket of just locally made items! Think outside of the box (um, basket?) on this one and I bet you’ll come up with something fantastic.
Photo by Marina Ermakova on Unsplash.
Experiences
You can gift experiences in the form of a digital gift card or certificate, or by purchasing tickets to an event or place for someone. Maybe Grandma has been wanting to go to the art museum? Buy her tickets and a digital gift card to the adjacent restaurant. Or, maybe you have a friend who wants to go to a concert to see their favorite performer. How about a digital gift card for the movie theater? Think of something the person you are gifting has been wanting to do or go see.
Photo by Sean Lee on Unsplash.
Give and Donate
This is the exception to rejecting billionaires and large chain stores. Our family always participates in food drives, Toys for Tots, Salvation Army’s Angel Tree, and Forgotten Child Fund’s Coats for Kids drive. All of those require new items only, and most items they need are only available at large chain stores. But when we give to those who are less fortunate, it’s ok to make those exceptions.
You can also donate money to those types of organizations.
What About Buy Nothing Day?
This movement falls on Black Friday. I’m all for this movement; however, critics have pointed out that buying nothing for one day a year does not help curb rampant consumerism. We need to buy less permanently.
Reduce
Remember, there are no rules when it comes to gifting. But we all need to save money. We all need to limit waste and reduce our impact on the environment. Every time you don’t buy something new or from across the world, you’re reducing your impact. And we need to stop supporting mega corporations and billionaires because their greed is the opposite of what we’re trying to do during the holidays!
Also, don’t worry about doing everything perfectly. I certainly will still buy a few new things for my son and others, simply because I can’t find them second-hand. You want to limit and reduce your impact, but don’t stress if a few items are brand new from Amazon. It happens.
Happy Holidays! Let me know in the comments if you have ideas about holiday shopping. Thank you for reading. Please share and subscribe!
Footnotes:
Article, “Most Black Friday shoppers bagged their deals online this year, with record spending,” by Emma Bowman, NPR, December 1, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “The Countries With The Most Billionaires 2025,’ Forbes.com, updated July 15, 2015. ↩︎
Photo courtesy of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
Happy Earth Day!
I know things may not feel happy regarding the environment.
Here’s how things may feel to you right now: like an actual dumpster fire.
Photo by Toms River Fire Dept on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Or this might describe how everything feels:
Photo by fikry anshor on Unsplash.
But I’m asking you not to give up hope.
We have to keep trying.
“You dodge despair by not taking the deluge of problems full-bore. You focus on what can work, what can help, or what you can do, and you seize it, and then – you don’t let go…That’s what hope is: the belief that things can get better. The world belongs to people who don’t give up.” -Carl Safina, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur
What can you do?
You can do any of the following at any time. You don’t need a special day to do them!
Love.
Back in my 2019 Earth Day article, I wrote: “Love the Earth. Then help spread that love.” Let’s spread love to every person and creature on Earth, too. We need it now more than ever!
Digital art by Gianluca from Pixabay.
Plant a tree.
Arbor Day is Friday, April 25, 2025. And if you can’t plant one on Arbor Day, go plant a tree any day!
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.” -Proverb
Photo by Eyoel Kahssay on Unsplash.
Clean up trash.
Go to a trash clean-up event. If there isn’t one, pick an area where you like to hike or walk, and bring a trash bag with you. Bring some friends!
Photo by OCG Saving The Ocean on Unsplash.
Gather.
Get together with like-minded people. We all must come together and understand the big, important challenges when it comes to the environment.
“To be on the same page, you must first read from the same book.” —Joshua Fields Millburn
Photo by bradford zak on Unsplash.
Get out in nature.
Go for a walk or a hike. Bring your dog! Travel to the closest waterfall or lake and take in its beauty. Jog in the park, play on a playground, or ride a bike. It doesn’t matter where or how. Just get outside. Take in nature, breathe fresh air.
“I really believe that nature is everybody’s mother – and I think our disconnection from it is the reason for so many of the problems we have now. We haven’t experienced nature, neither its beauty nor its nourishment.” Alice Waters, Coming To My Senses
Photo by Etienne Swanepoel on Unsplash.
Learn.
We are the only species that intentionally harms their own habitat. We need to change that. We need to understand that pollution only destroys our health; that plastic production is growing exponentially while recycling is a lie; that biodiversity is essential for the health of our planet; that the climate crisis is here and present and has never been a hoax. There are so many solutions out there, but we cannot wait for governments and corporations to do the right thing, because they won’t. That’s why we all need to learn more about these topics.
Donate.
Giving feels good. Whether you’re donating money to your favorite cause or place of worship, donating used towels to the local pet shelter, donating time to a soup kitchen, planting trees with a local college, giving blood at a blood drive, or building houses with Habitat for Humanity, it all feels good!
“The surest path to contentment is generosity. Giving forces us to recognize all we possess and all we have to offer. It allows us to find fulfillment and purpose in helping others.” -Joshua Becker
Advocate.
Advocate for the environment. Tell lawmakers and corporations that you want change. The best way to inform them is to affect their bottom line and stop rampant consumerism. For example, if we all stopped buying plastic straws tomorrow and stopped patronizing restaurants that serve them, the production of plastic straws would drop dramatically. The same with fast fashion (aka cheap clothing), new cars, and cheap plastic toys.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead
Use less plastic.
Avoid buying plastic items or items with excessive plastic packaging. There are so. many. alternatives!
Photo by Onno Blaauw on Unsplash.
“Each and every one of us holds the power to create change through the everyday choices that we make: what we choose to eat, what we purchase, how we get to work, who we vote for, which businesses we support. We all have a role to play. But, we all must begin to act and act now.” -Geoff Blackwell and Ruth Hobday, Human Nature: Planet Earth In Our Time, Twelve Photographers Address the Future of the Environment
Small things matter.
Sometimes we can spread love through food. I’m baking Earth Day cookies and bringing them to work to share with my coworkers tomorrow. Of course, I’ll save some for my son, too!
Leave me a comment below to let me know how you celebrated Earth Day! Thanks for reading, please share and subscribe!
If you’ve been reading articles from my series about the clothing industry, then you probably want to know more about what you can do about fashion waste. The short answer is that first, you can take good care of the clothes you have by laundering them well and repairing them. Second, stop buying too much clothing – even when it’s a great deal! Try to buy only the pieces you really love and that fit well. Don’t just buy something because you found it on the clearance rack.
Globally, we have to stop the overproduction of clothing and fast fashion.
As Elizabeth L. Cline noted, in America, we spend more money on restaurants than we do on clothes. We don’t see any reason to spend more on fashion because of the availability of cheap clothes. “As any economist will tell you, cheaper prices stimulate consumption. And the current low rate of fashion has spurred a shopping free-for-all, where we are buying and hoarding roughly 20 billion garments per year as a nation…If we could only give up our clothing deals and steals, we might just see that there are far more fortifying, not to mention more flattering, ways of getting dressed.”1
“The most sustainable clothes are the ones already in your closet.” -Katrina Rodabaugh, Make Thrift Mend2
Photo by rawpixel.com form PxHere.
Wash Your Clothes Less
Washing our clothes less makes them last much longer. It also reduces the number of microfibers, that is, microscopic pieces of plastic from synthetic clothing, that enter our water systems. You can wear some articles several times before you launder them unless you sweat or spill something on them. You can freshen your clothes without washing them, by hanging them in the bathroom during a shower or hanging them outside. Read “Make Your Clothes Last Longer with Good Laundry Habits” for laundry tips.
“Americans in particular overwash their clothing and rely on machine washing instead of steaming or airing out their clothes, which shortens the life span of what we wear.” -Elizabeth L. Cline, The Concious Closet3
Photo by Alex Baber on Unsplash.
Mending
“When you take the time and effort to repair or improve a garment, you will value it and, more importantly, enjoy wearing it.” -Zoe Edwards, Mend It, Wear It, Love It!4
Mending can extend the life of your clothing and keep them out of the landfill. Learning basic sewing and embroidery is worth the effort because you can save money and protect the environment.
In her book, The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth L. Cline offered an entire chapter on how to perform basic repairs and instructions on several types of stitches without sewing skills or a sewing machine. A few common repairs include missing buttons, seam splits, loose stitching, applying patches, and darning socks. You can find tutorials for all of these in her book. Often you can find tutorials online for free, as well.
Cline also recommended using a fabric shaver to remove pills,5 which are the little bobbles of loose fibers that build up on your clothes. Sophie Benson, author of Sustainable Wardrobe, wrote that you can also reuse an old razor to remove pills. Just avoid pulling them off with your fingers because that can cause damage to the fabric.6
This is the fabric shaver I use and I’ve been happy with the results. This is not a paid promotion or affiliate product.
Tip: You can even find sewing materials and notions – and even sewing machines – at thrift stores and second-hand shops. You don’t necessarily have to pay retail for those things.
“Wear visibly mended clothes proudly. Visible mending is a great conversation starter, and a visibly mended garment is the perfect uniform for the reluctant activist because it does the heavy lifting for you. Whenever you wear something visibly mended and chat with someone about it, you’re raising awareness that mending is possible, it can be creative and colourful, and caring for our clothes is an important thing to do.” -Erin Lewis-Fitzgerald, Modern Mending7
Photo by Barbara Krysztofiak on Unsplash.
“In repairing our clothes, we send a message. With each stitch we declare, ‘I value the people who made this, I value the natural resources that went into making it and I value the version of myself that chose it.’ ” -Sophie Benson, Sustainable Wardrobe8
Hire A Tailor
If you don’t want to learn basic sewing or don’t have the time, you can take your items to a tailor. This costs more but still extends the life of the clothing you already own. Sophie Benson wrote, “Both alterations and repairs should very much be seen as part and parcel of the maintenance of our clothes. Any action that keeps your clothes in wearable condition is classed as maintenance, and this includes things like lowering hems, taking in or letting out waistbands, altering silhouettes and replacing linings. You might be surprised what a tailor can do.”9
“Through mending we slow down consumption, extend the life of our garments, and increase resilience and technical skill…As we mend our textiles we work on an individual scale to mend overconsumption, fast fashion, and the unethical treatment of people and the planet.” -Katrina Rodabaugh, Make Thrift Mend10
Reuse Old Clothes
You can reuse clothes for repair projects and even refashion them. You can also just find a way to reuse them around the house. “This is the way humans ‘recycled’ worn clothes for ages. Scrap denim is ideal for mending and patching…Cotton t-shirts make great cleaning cloths and rags. And worn or stained items and scuffed-up shoes are great to wear for yard work or other outdoor activities.”11
You can cut off the sleeves of a long-sleeved shirt and make a tank top, or make jeans into shorts. This is especially true for children’s clothing! Other clothes can be repurposed into bags, dog toys, or pillows. Use your imagination! The internet abounds with inspirational ideas!
“Slow fashion is…saving up to buy fewer pieces of higher quality and keeping them for longer (or forever!); it’s shopping secondhand; it’s repairing instead of throwing away; it’s brands making to order to reduce waste; it’s local or small batch production; it’s personal style not trends; it’s releases once or twice per year instead of every week. It’s our way out of this mess.” -Sophie Benson, Sustainable Wardrobe12
Wear Clothes Longer
This is the goal: To wear your existing clothing longer.
If you take good care of your clothes through good laundering and simple mending, your clothes will last a lot longer. This will save you money and time, and it is better for the environment. “According to Greenpeace, wearing your clothes for at least two years will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 24 percent.”13 We can all make a big impact when it comes to clothing.
“Mending, repairing, and caring for our clothes is the essence of sustainable fashion.” -Elizabeth L. Cline, The Conscious Closet14
I hope this helps! Feel free to leave me a comment about your ideas for caring for or repairing clothing. Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe!
Additional Resources:
Website of Erin Lewis-Fitzgerald, author of Modern Mending.
Reuse shop, FabScrap, “FABSCRAP diverts thousands of pounds of commercial textile waste from landfills every week. These pre-consumer materials are often in perfect condition.”
Are synthetic or natural fabrics better for the environment? Natural fabrics fare better, but the overproduction of both types of fabrics is the problem. The way we carelessly disregard and dispose of our clothing is a problem too, as was emphasized in Part 2 of this article series. Elizabeth L. Cline, an expert on fast fashion and sustainability in the apparel industry, says that asking which fabric is greenest is actually the wrong question. “We need to improve the sustainability of all the materials we wear.”1
Though we all need to reduce everything we consume, understanding the differences between synthetics and natural fabrics will benefit us as consumers. If we know where something came from, how it was sourced, and how it was created and turned into fashion, we can make better choices and value our clothing more.
Natural fabrics refer to those made from natural fibers sourced from plants or animals. Let’s start by taking a look at the natural fabrics that come from plant-based sources.
“We need to improve the sustainability of all the materials we wear.” -Elizabeth L. Cline
Photo by Megan Lee on Unsplash.
Cotton
Cotton is grown all over the world, and its production provides income for more than 250 million people. There are about 35 million hectares of cotton under cultivation in the world. But it requires a lot of water, pesticides, and fertilizers.
Water
Cotton production uses 3 percent of the entire world’s agricultural water supply.5 Some experts argue that cotton is the largest water user of all agricultural production combined.9
“As much as 2,168 gallons of water is required to grow the cotton in a single T-shirt…While water is plentiful in some cotton-growing areas, almost 60 percent of all cotton is grown in regions affected by water scarcity…And while cotton could be a major source of poverty alleviation in rural and poor areas, in many places it is exploitive instead.”10
In some areas, surface and ground waters are diverted to irrigate cotton fields. This leads to freshwater depletion for entire regions, including Pakistan’s Indus River Delta and Central Asia’s Aral Sea. About 97% of the water from the Indus River goes to crop production, including cotton.11 Worse, the Indus River, upon which millions of people rely, is badly polluted with chemicals and plastic.
The depletion of the Aral Sea is one major loss. A Soviet Union project that began in the 1960s diverted the feeding rivers away from the Aral Sea in an attempt to grow cotton and other crops in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This has almost drained the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world. That has caused the soil to become drier and saltier, and the dry soil creates dust storms. That dust is full of leftover pesticides and fertilizers, and people in those areas have significant reproductive issues, including miscarriages and malformations at birth. In addition, “Livelihoods, wildlife habitats, and fish populations have been decimated.”12
The Aral Sea in 1989 (left) vs. 2014 (right). Image by NASA and collage by Producercunningham on Wikimedia.
Chemicals
“Conventionally grown cotton requires the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers.”13
Cotton production requires about 220,000 tons of pesticides and 8.8 million tons of fertilizer yearly. “One-fifth of insecticides – and more than 10 percent of all pesticides – are devoted to the protection of conventional cotton.”14 Those pesticides are highly toxic to human workers and animals, and they pollute the environment. Industrial and agricultural chemical poisoning are among the top five leading causes of death worldwide.15 The World Health Organization classified 8 out of 10 of the US’s cotton pesticides as ‘hazardous.’16
Fertilizers that end up in waterways create nutrient pollution, meaning those excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) allow toxic algal blooms. Those deplete entire zones of oxygen, creating dead zones, which harm aquatic species and disrupt entire ecosystems. Fertilizers also contribute to greenhouse gases.17
Approximately 16% of all pesticides are used on cotton.18 Additionally, genetically modified crops, including cotton, have made crops toxic to common pests. This has reduced the use of pesticides but has not eliminated the need for them. “A large number of farmers have adopted genetically modified cotton seeds that include a gene protecting it from the herbicide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup). That way, the fields can be sprayed with the herbicide when the plant is young, easily eliminating competition from weeds.”19 However, this has made farmers dependent on those specific seeds, which are made by the same company that makes the pesticides and herbicides.
Forced Labor
Uzbekistan, once one of the largest producers of cotton, used forced labor for cotton production until 2021.20 Today, China and India are the largest producers of cotton. Parts of China use forced labor and parts of India use child labor for cotton production. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the following countries also use child labor, forced labor, or both:21
Argentina
Azerbaijan
Benin
Brazil
Burkina Faso
Egypt
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyz Republic
Mali
Pakistan
Tajikistan
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Zambia
Soil Degradation
Cotton production severely degrades soil quality,22 because of the overuse of nitrogen-based mineral fertilizers. Cotton also causes soil erosion because of the large amounts of water it requires to grow.
Organic Cotton & Other Options
We can produce cotton organically, that is without pesticides and fertilizers, and therefore more sustainably. There are two leading organic certifications: Global Organic Textile Exchange (GOTS) and Organic Cotton Standard (OCS). Organic cotton only comprises around 0.33% of all cotton grown. Those chemicals never end up in runoff or the environment. However, organic cotton still requires large amounts of water. And, unfortunately, organic often means more expensive.
Initiatives such as “Better Cotton and Fairtrade Cotton focus on better land use, water practices, and labor standards but don’t have any proven environmental benefits.”23 Better Cotton is difficult to enforce and farmers who adopt it are not subsidized. Also, it allows for genetically modified organisms (GMO) seeds.24 So this is not the best initiative out there.
Cotton Made in Africa has more than 30 brand members, which supports small growers and environmentally friendly growing practices in sub-Saharan Africa.25
Recycled or reclaimed cotton sounds promising as well, but it does have drawbacks. According to cottonworks.com, “the majority of recycled cotton is claimed through mechanical recycling. First, fabrics and materials are sorted by color. After sorting, the fabrics are run through a machine that shreds the fabric into yarn and further into raw fiber. This process is harsh and puts a great deal of strain on the fiber. It is not uncommon for fibers to break and entangle during shredding. The raw fiber is then spun back into yarns for reuse in other products. The quality of recycled fiber will never have quality values equal to the original fiber. Specifically, fiber length and length uniformity will be impacted, which will limit the end-use application.”26
“Current cotton production methods are environmentally unsustainable.” -World Wildlife Fund27
Photo by Karl Wiggers on Unsplash.
Denim
Denim is mainly made from cotton. It takes between 2,000 and 2,900 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans, mainly because of dying and finishing treatments. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hip fashion people decided that denim shouldn’t look like denim anymore, and they came up with stone washing and acid washing.” These processes use pumice (stones) and sometimes bleach or other acidic chemicals. The water used for dying and finishing is not reused or recycled, which means it ends up in the environment.28
“To achieve a faux-worn effect, jeans are sandblasted, hand-sanded, or sprayed with chemicals by individuals who inhale the fumes each day.”29
We must also consider the cost of transport for something such as a pair of jeans. There is “a big cost in getting the cotton from (for example) Texas, where it’s grown, to Indonesia to be spun into fibers, to Bangladesh to be made into denim, and sent back to the U.S. to be sold.”30
Some programs aim to reduce water in production, such as Levi’s Water<Less campaign. Their process reduces up to 96% of the water normally used in denim finishing, which is the final stage in making a pair of jeans. Levi’s claims to have saved more than 3 billion liters of water and recycled more than 1.5 billion liters of water.31 Always look at these programs critically, but if they are legit, try buying sustainable clothing.
Last, there is a recycling program for denim. The Blue Jeans Go Green program collects cotton-based denim and recycles it back to its original fiber state and transforms it into something new. The program claims to have kept more than 4.5 million pieces of old denim out of landfills.32 Denim is also a sustainable type of home and building insulation.
Photo by Rebecca Landis on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Bast-Plant Fibers
Bast-plant fibers include fabrics like linen, jute, hemp, and ramie. Linen is a textured fiber made from the flax plant. It is naturally hypoallergenic and is very breathable, making it a great textile for warm-weather clothes. Jute is a coarse natural plant fiber from the jute plant that is used to weave fabrics like burlap cloth. It is a popular textile to make rugs and burlap sacks. Hemp is durable, versatile, and moisture-resistant. Ramie creates strong fabrics that look similar to linen.
These fibers are biodegradable, renewable, and sustainable. Bast fibers are collected from the outer third of the stem of a plant between the woody core and the thin outer layer. These make strong, durable, and breathable cloth.
These plants support regenerative farming, which improves the environment. “Plants used in bast fibre production are often great cover crops working in rotation with other crops, keeping the soil covered to minimize erosion and incorporating organic matter to improve soil fertility. A greater diversity of crops within a farming system not only improves soil quality, but minimizes plant diseases, further reducing the need for chemical applications.”33 They use less water, fertilizers, pesticides, and energy.
You can also buy these fabrics recycled or organic certified (see Additional Resources below). Organic means that chemical pesticides and fertilizers weren’t used in the production of the plant or fabric.34
Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash.
Bamboo
While bamboo is a plant, marketers often tout it as “eco-friendly,” but manufacturers make bamboo fabric by chemically pulverizing plants and trees. This makes it unnatural. Since this fabric is full of harsh chemicals, I have chosen to include it in the synthetics part of this series (Part 5).
Read the Labels
Now that you know more about natural fabrics, you may find that reading labels will at least give you the basic information you’re looking for. Is the item you want to purchase made with 100% organic cotton, or a cotton blend? If it’s the latter, what does the blend consist of? Also, where was the item made? Was it made in a country with decent labor laws?
If there’s a fabric you’re not familiar with listed on the tag, look it up. Most people carry a smartphone with them, which offers the opportunity to look it up before making a purchase.
Overproduction
While plant-based fabrics come from the Earth, they are not always the best option because of the pesticides, fertilizers, and chemicals that most producers use to grow them. But they are still better than plastic-based synthetic fabrics derived from fossil fuels.
Remember, the overproduction of all fabrics is the problem. Buy fewer but higher-quality articles when you can. Take good care of the clothing you do have, mend your clothing if you are able, and buy second-hand when you need to replace something.
In my next article, I’ll review types of animal-based fabrics. Thank you for reading. Please share and subscribe!
Additional Resources:
Website, Better Cotton. Their mission is “to help cotton communities survive and thrive, while protecting and restoring the environment.”
Website, Global Textile Standard (GOTS). “GOTS is the worldwide leading textile processing standard for organic fibres, including ecological and social criteria, backed up by independent certification of the entire textile supply chain. GOTS-certified final products may include fibre products, yarns, fabrics, clothes, home textiles, mattresses, personal hygiene products, as well as food contact textiles and more.” According to Elizabeth L. Cline, “GOTS is the most rigorous organic standard, as it covers not just the cultivation of the raw materials but the processing of the textiles as well.”35
Website, Organic Content Standard (OCS). They are “a voluntary global standard that sets the criteria for third-party certification of organic materials and chain of custody.”
Website, Oeko-Tex, “certifies that every component of the product, from the fabric to the thread and accessories, has been rigorously tested against a list of up to 350 toxic chemicals.”
Nickajack Lake on the Tennessee River on the day of the clean-up. Photo by Marie Cullis.
Last year, I read the book, From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers by Chad Pregracke. It was about Living Lands & Waters, the organization established by the author to clean up trash along rivers. His story was super inspiring, especially because I love to clean up trash (and would even do it for a living if I could make that work). This organization, based out of Illinois along the Mississippi River, performs large-scale river clean-ups. Since 1998, they have worked on 25 rivers in 21 states, and have conducted more than 1,100 community clean-ups.
“[Living Lands & Waters] hosts dozens of community river cleanups each year to help watershed conservation efforts with the assistance of thousands of volunteers of all ages who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get dirty – individuals, schools, community organizations, businesses and more!”10
So when I discovered that I could get involved with local clean-ups along the Tennessee River, I was more than excited! I was too late to sign up last fall, but this month, I signed up when an opportunity came up near my area.
This one was hosted by Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful and AFTCO (American Fishing Tackle Company) in partnership with Living Lands & Waters. Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful is a nonprofit that serves as the first Keep America Beautiful affiliate in the nation to focus solely on a river. Their mission is to educate and inspire people to take care of the Tennessee River and show the impact of trash. Their volunteer cleanups are held along the 652-mile Tennessee River and its tributaries, an area spanning seven states!11
The Experience
I took my family with me. My son enjoyed riding in the boats and meeting people. He really fed off of the energy of the crew, who took time out to make him feel included. I’m proud that he understood why we were there and that he gets why it’s important at such a young age.
My son making friends with a crewmember of Living Lands & Waters. She had a dog, and he loves dogs, so it was an easy conversation starter. Photo by Marie Cullis.
He wasn’t afraid to get into the water and clean up trash along the river banks. Photo by Marie Cullis.
My son found a barge line along the shore, tangled in logs. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.
It was a gorgeous day on Nickajack Lake! We picked up so much trash – hundreds of plastic bottles, Styrofoam pieces, tires, broken fishing tackle and line, plastic lighters, plastic bags, food wrappers, glass bottles, and many other pieces of broken plastic items. Even a section of a plastic dock and an entire plastic truck bed liner.
One of the participating kids, Cash Daniels, also known as the Conservation Kid (@theconservationkid), was there with his family. Cash is an avid environmentalist and ocean lover. He has organized many river clean-ups and is also a published author and public speaker. I had read about him before and it was cool to meet him and his family.
The volunteers all worked hard, and the crewmembers were like superheroes!
Their leadership and positivity are what struck me most. Both the executive director of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful and the crewmembers of Living Lands & Waters were super positive, highly enthusiastic, hard-working, and obviously happy to be doing this!
Dan Breidenstein from Living Lands & Waters with trash loaded onto his boat. Photo by Marie Cullis.
Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful with Callie Schaser from Living Lands & Waters, removing a large tire from the water. Photo by Marie Cullis.
Loading one of the boats. The black piece in the foreground is the truck bed liner. Photo by Marie Cullis.
By the end of the afternoon, we had loaded two full flat-bottomed boats with trash and debris from just a few shorelines.
Full boat of trash. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.
Second full boat of trash. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.
In the end, it was an awesome experience. I recommend that if you’re able and interested, you join a local clean-up in your area. We can all make a difference!
“That’s how the change for our river will happen: through local partners and individuals who are eager about taking ownership to protect and improve their beautiful river community.” -Kathleen Gibi, Executive Director of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful15
Our group photo! Photo courtesy of Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.
Photo of the second group, courtesy of Kathleen Gibi of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.
Remember, the most important thing you can do right now is to stop using disposable items. Especially those made from plastic. Even when you think you are properly disposing or recycling something, so much of it inevitably makes its way into our landscapes. We have to turn off the tap when it comes to disposable items.
I hope to meet you on a future clean-up! Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe!
The fashion and clothing industries contribute to climate change, environmental pollution, and human exploitation. Across the world, perpetuated by wealth, and rampant consumerism based on false urgency to keep up with ‘trends,’ the massive overproduction of clothing is killing us and our environment.
Companies have men, women, and even children, working in dangerous conditions with low or no labor standards. They are kept impoverished by low wages. Companies use toxic chemicals in clothing production, and those chemicals end up in the final products. The clothing industry uses unfathomable amounts of water in production, in a world where there isn’t enough water for everyone. Later, that water is discharged, often into the environment, polluting water and soil. Mass amounts of energy are used to produce both natural and synthetic fabrics. Transporting clothing from developing countries to the west uses astronomical amounts of fossil fuels. Worse, there is so much clothing in the world now that we can’t find uses for all of it.
All this so that we can buy $5 T-shirts that we don’t need. It’s called fast fashion, and it’s detrimental on many levels.
Image by DigestContent from Pixabay.
Fast Fashion
Fast fashion is a design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on quickly producing high volumes of trendy but cheaply-made clothing.16The term was coined by The New York Times in the 1990s “to describe Zara’s mission to take only 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores.”17 By the 2000s, brands were taking ideas from the top fashion designers and reproducing them cheaply and quickly. Other big names in fast fashion include H&M, UNIQLO, GAP,Primark, and TopShop.
At one time, there were four seasons of clothing. Today, there are 50 to 100 microseasons per year. Fast fashion was artificially created. The demand “was carefully cultivated by fashion brands to change consumer behavior and make people want more and more, and quickly.”18 As consumers clamored for cheap fashion, clothing companies resorted to low-quality materials and manufacturers to still profit.19
But this disregard for quality has led to massive amounts of clothing going to landfills. “Constantly changing trends have encouraged consumers to discard clothing that’s no longer ‘in style’ even if it’s still wearable.”20 This is not sustainable.
“[Fast fashion] plays into the idea that outfit repeating is a fashion faux pas and that if you want to stay relevant, you have to sport the latest looks as they happen. It forms a key part of the toxic system of overproduction and consumption that has made fashion one of the world’s largest polluters.”21
Photo by Comunicacioninditex on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Ultra-Fast Fashion
There is an even faster fashion now, referred to as ultra-fast fashion. Brands include SHEIN, Missguided, Forever 21, Zaful, Boohoo, and Fashion Nova. It is a recent phenomenon that is as bad as it sounds.22 “Ultra fast fashion turns fast fashion’s ‘weeks’ into days and ‘dozens of styles’ into hundreds and thousands. The numbers alone sound sinister. Brands like SHEIN and Boohoo are reportedly posting thousands of new styles to their websites on a daily basis. Sometimes, knockoffs of trending celebrity and pop culture styles will appear online in as little as 24 hours.” Social media, influencer culture, and online hauls certainly stoked the fire in the creation of ultra-fast fashion.23
“A generation now views ultra-fast fashion’s historically low price points and disposable culture as the norm, with many young people considering garments worn out after only a few washes. This overproduction and quick disposal has exacerbated fashion’s waste crisis.”24
H&M Store, Times Square in New York City. Photo by Will Buckner on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
Wasteful Overproduction
Companies produce more clothing than can be consumed. Some companies trash or burn the excess. “An estimated 2.2 billion pounds of overstock and unsold clothing are landfilled or incinerated around the world every year, according to a 2018 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation…Two billion pounds of clothes is the equivalent in weight of 5 billion T-shirts, enough leftover stock to dress the adult population of the planet. In 2018, H&M announced that the brand was stuck with 4.3 billion dollars worth of unsold goods.” It’s not just fast fashion companies, either. The same year, the luxury brand Burberry was caught destroying excess clothing and accessories worth around $24 million.25
Photo by Alexander Kovacs on Unsplash.
Environmental Costs
The world produces around 100 billion articles of clothing annually, and “92 million tonnes end up in landfills.”27 Fast fashion causes extensive damage to the planet, exploits workers, and harms animals.28The fashion industry produces 10% of all carbon emissions and it is the second-largest consumer of water.29
Clothing production requires tons of water. For example, it takes 2,000 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans. Worse, “the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution worldwide.”30 Textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water as the wastewater from it is often dumped into bodies of water. “If fashion production maintains its current pace, the demand for water will surpass the world’s supply by 40 percent by 2030.”34
“The way we manufacture new clothes is truly unsustainable, commanding a staggering level of resources, especially water, chemicals, and fossil fuels, that can’t continue. Each year, clothing production requires 24 trillion gallons of water, enough to fill 37 million Olympic-sized pools. And the fashion industry spews more globe-warming carbon dioxide annually than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.” -Elizabeth L. Cline35
Image by Linda Lioe from Pixabay.
Poor Labor Standards and Pitiful Wages
“Only 2 percent of the 40 million garment workers around the world earn a living wage – it effectively amounts to modern-day slavery.”36
Across the world, workers experience unsafe working conditions and low wages that are far below the minimum wage. Companies require garment workers to work long hours through forced overtime, often apply impossible quotas to their daily production, and sometimes even inflict abuse. They also expose workers to many chemicals and pollutants, which jeopardize their health. Unionization attempts and campaigns for improvements in safety, conditions, wages, sick pay, and job security are often barred by the threat of job losses and sometimes violence.37
“Everyone in the industry knows that workers in textile mills and leather tanneries have been known to develop skin lesions and breathing problems.” -Alden Wicker, To Dye For38
The garment, textile, and footwear workers around the world deserve better. “Fashion is a powerful industry, one that can and should lift people out of poverty rather than trap them in it. It is a multitrillion-dollar business, with plenty of wealth to go around. And yet, according to Oxfam, the top fashion CEOs earn in four days what the average garment worker will make in a lifetime.” Increasing wages would require only a 1 to 4 percent increase in retail prices.39
“The difference in what it would cost for people to not to have to make these kinds of choices between paying rent and putting food on the table is less than a dollar per garment. Why in the world would any company choose every day to prioritize their profits and paying the lowest price possible over ending that kind of human suffering? Especially when it’s not complicated or unaffordable to fix it.” -Sarah Adler-Milstein, co-author of Sewing Hope: How One Factory Challenges the Apparel Industry’s Sweatshops40
Photo of the Eastex Garment Co. Ltd factory in Cambodia, one of garment factories that supplies H&M. Photo by U.S. Embassy Phnom Penh on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 2.0).
“Combined with the commute and getting food on the table for their families, female garment workers can only get four or five hours of sleep a night.” -Alden Wicker, To Dye For41
World Exports
Map courtesy of HowMuch.net, a financial literacy website.
Each of the following countries exports billions of dollars of garment products annually:
China:
China is the largest clothing manufacturing country in the world, employing over 15 million people, mostly women. Companies in this country pay the highest wages but that still does not equate to a living wage for all.42
List of companies that source their clothing from China. Screenshot from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.
Bangladesh:
Bangladesh is the second-largest garment manufacturing country, but they are among the lowest-paid in the world. This is where the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse happened, which killed 1,134 and injured another 2,500 people. While “the disaster brought international attention to the alarming labor conditions in overseas garment factories,” only some improvements in safety issues came from it.43 H&M and the VF Corporations (Vans, North Face, Timberland, etc.) are two of the many companies sourcing from Bangladesh.44
After Rana Plaza’s collapse, no corporations stepped forward after the tragedy to acknowledge that they were manufacturing there. H&M executives responded with this: “‘None of the textile factories located in the building produced for H&M,’ it stated. ‘It is important to remember that this disaster is an infrastructure problem in Bangladesh and not a problem specific to the textile industry.'” The statement continued that it would contribute to solutions going forward.45 But this problem is specific to the textile industry.
“In 2013, [Americans] spent $340 billion on fashion – more than twice what they forked out for new cars. Much of it was produced in Bangladesh, some of it by Rana Plaza workers in the days leading up to the collpase.” -Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis46
India:
India employs millions of people but often under conditions of forced overtime, less than half of a living wage, and even child labor.47 There have been some improvements but many workers, of which the majority are women, experience physical abuse and sexual harassment. Companies sourcing from India include American Eagle Outfitters, H&M, Levi Strauss & Co., and VF Corporation.
Vietnam:
Vietnam has a communist government that forbids labor unions, and wages are 60 percent below a living wage. There are around 6,000 textile factories that employ about 3 million people. Nike employs 450,000 people there.48 “Many of us are familiar with the news about Nike sweatshops, but they’re just one of the many fast fashion brands violating human rights for the sake of fashion. The people who make our clothes are underpaid, underfed, and pushed to their limits because there are few other options.”49 Zara and H&M are two of the major brands that source from there.
Cambodia:
There are about 600,000 garment workers in Cambodia. Women experience a great deal of abuse, sexual harassment, and low wages, which are 50 percent below a living wage. Many companies, including H&M, Gap, Nike, and Puma, source from there.50
“Brands are interested in getting clothing as cheaply and quickly as they can. They have consciously chosen to locate production in countries that do not enforce their labor laws. A factory that scrupulously complied with the labor law, respected the right to organize, paid all required wages, didn’t force people to work overtime: That factory will not be able to meet brands’ price demands. You can’t survive as a supplier unless you operate a sweatshop, because the brands are only willing to pay sweatshop prices.” -Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium51
Photo of garment workers sewing on sewing machines in a a large factory room in Bangladesh. Photo by Musamir Azad on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Fashion Production in the U.S.
“In the 1960s, just 5% of all clothing Americans wore was made overseas. By the 1970s, that figure had reached 25% and today it’s somewhere around 98%.” -Sophie Benson, Sustainable Wardrobe52
The United States produces little clothing domestically today: Less than 3 percent, which is down from 50% in 1990. “And a Made in USA garment is no longer a guarantee of ethical working conditions.” The largest part of the garment business is in Los Angeles, where there are approximately 45,000 garment workers, many of them undocumented immigrants. “A 2016 US Labor Department investigation of LA’s factories found that 85 percent of inspected factories violated labor laws. Workers are being paid as little as 4 dollars an hour sewing clothes for well-known fashion brands, including Forever 21, Fashion Nova, Ross Dress for Less, and T.J.Maxx.”53 Another investigation found that companies paid sewers as little as $2.77 an hour.54
Even sadder, US garment workers are some of the highest-paid in the world.
“The large, middle-market brands who source from these sweatshops herald that their apparel is ‘Made in the USA,’ as if such a statement automatically confers authenticity and integrity, as well as superior quality, to clothes produced offshore. It’s a corporate marketing tactic to pander to consumers’ patriotism while flagrantly breaking US labor laws.” -Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis55
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay.
The Role of Companies
Companies have the power to make real, humane, sustainable changes. “It’s time for more big brands to step up to the plate,” wrote Elizabeth L. Cline. “Big companies are the ones with the huge economies of scale that could bring down the price of sustainable materials and fund the research and development of eco-friendly innovations, from textile recycling and nontoxic dyes to factories powered by clean energy. They can certainly afford to pay higher wages.”56 But we consumers need to hold these companies accountable.
Fast fashion companies sometimes use greenwashing to make consumers feel better about purchasing their items. Greenwashing refers to when companies deceive consumers by claiming that their products are environmentally friendly or “have a greater positive environmental impact than they really do.”57“Fast-fashion companies tell their customers that it’s possible to buy their products and still have a clean conscience. H&M has ramped up its use of organic cotton and sustainably sourced materials; Boohoo sells 40 or so items partially made from recycled textiles.” Aja Barber, a fashion-sustainability consultant, called this greenwashing in an interview with The Atlantic: “It’s like, ‘Oh look, these five items that we made are sustainable, but the rest of the 2,000 items on our website are not .'”58
“[A] higher price reflects things like fair wages, ethical sourcing practices and higher costs for less wasteful production runs. Knowing all that, the real question we should ask is: how is fast fashion so cheap?” -Sophie Benson, Sustainable Wardrobe59
Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels
Our Role
“Fast fashion makes us believe we need to shop more and more to stay on top of trends, creating a constant sense of need and ultimate dissatisfaction.”60
We’ve all supported it at some point, probably mistakenly. We found a great deal on a cute cardigan or funny t-shirt and bought it. Buying new clothes, especially when they’re on sale, brings pleasure to our brains. “This means of instant gratification from the fast fashion complex is a recipe for disaster for our brains, our wallets, supply chains, and the planet.”61 But we have to stop supporting fast fashion now.
Think about the human factor. Every time we purchase from a company that does not follow ethical labor standards or pays poor wages, we are supporting the mistreatment of our fellow human beings. “We are rarely asked to pay the true cost of fashion. The pollution, carbon emissions, waste, and poverty our clothes create aren’t tallied up and included in the prices we enjoy. It does cost a bit more to do things the right way, to operate safer, well-paying factories and farms and to use longer-lasting, sustainable materials and craft more durable products. Ethical and sustainable clothing doesn’t have to be unaffordable, though,” wrote Elizabeth L. Cline.62
We can do better. Follow my upcoming series to learn more about clothing production and learn what you can do differently. Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe!
Photo by Alexander Kovacs on Unsplash.
Additional Resources:
Article, “10 Fast Fashion Brands We Avoid At All Costs,” by Christine Huynh, Good On You, April 30, 2021.
Website, The Magazine of the Sierra Club: Elizabeth L. Cline author page.
