Carbon Emissions - The Use Phase

I have struggled to write recently due to starting a new job, which I am excited to say subscribe to Ecotextile. Score.

This is a quick post to share a quote from an article I have read (Issue 44, page 66) about carbon emitted as a result of the global consumption of clothing:

'The report, International Carbon Flows - Clothing, says that the global consumption of clothing results is around 330MtCO2 of emissions, with emissions from the use phase resulting in an additional 550MTCO2 per year, primarily from washing and drying but including ironing and dry cleaning, - equivalent to around 2% of total global CO2 emissions.' (Ecotextile, 2011)

Isn't the use phase just insane!? Almost double that of production, shipping and retail.

This pinpoints yet again that designers and innovators really need to explore methods to reduce the impact during the use phase.

EJFs Pop-up DIY Party with Neil’s Yard

Yesterday I visited the Ethical Justice Foundation’s (EJF) latest pop-up shop on Earlham Street that focused on encouraging people to be active and creative through do it yourself projects. I have volunteered for EJF a few times so understood the format of the shop: to essentially promote and sell ethical/organic clothing, inform customers about their campaigns while also fundraising through the selling of the brilliant EJF organic tees designed by the fashion industries leading designers. The last time I volunteered in one of EJF’s shops there was a bag making session which engaged with customers incredibly effectively that people stayed for over an hour perfecting their creations. EJF know how to combine a shop format with activities that capture people’s imagination. They did it again with Neil’s Yard yesterday.



I dragged two friends to the shop yesterday just in time to see a ‘make your own lip balm’ demonstration by Neil’s Yard. It was unusual to see a camp stove and beakers in a shop and immediately caught people’s attention. The demonstration appeared incredibly simple; heating and combining coconut butter, beeswax with essential oils (don’t hold me to this..!). Once combined the mixture was poured into little containers and cooled within minutes: up to ten containers must have been filled. We were each handed one out as souvenirs. I was incredibly satisfied as I desperately needed a new lip balm and I also have an obsession with peppermint, which the balm contained making my lips tingle when applied. I was delighted to hear my friend utter, ‘its amazing it was made right in front of us’ (or something along those lines) as the demonstration had connected with her highlighting that products, be it cosmetics or clothing down just appear on the shop shelf, someone has to make them.





Neil’s Yard were essentially promoting their Bee lovely and help save the bees campaign. We were given information booklets and some cream samples.

I was aware of the decline in bee numbers within the UK and understand it to affect pollination therefore decreasing our food production. The booklet beautifully illustrated the problems which I have tried to sum up with the following quotes:

• Bees and wild pollinators are responsible for the pollination of one third of our shopping basket.

• Experts have warned that honeybees could disappear entirely from Britain by 2018.

• Pesticides are poisoning bees, while loss of habitat and wild flowers is starving them to death.

• ..mono-crops have converted our countryside into an arable desert.

• Paris declared itself pesticide-free ten years ago – today Paris bees provide more honey than their rural cousins.

• Neonicotinoids (pesticide) are 7,000 times more toxic than DDT, which was banned in Britain in 1984.

• Modern beekeeping practices put the emphasis on honey production. This coupled with toxic industrial agriculture, has resulted in stressed bees that are vulnerable to diseases and parasites.

Pesticides are a huge problem not just to bees, they affect all wildlife and even enter us! They leak into the water table, therefore into the water system which we drink and are sprayed all over food that we eat and cotton which we wear next to our skin. An incredibly scary thought which should drive us all towards organic, but financially can we all afford organic?

At the end of the booklet was a petition type card to sign and post to Caroline Spelman MP, Secretary of State for Environmental Food and Rural Affairs to ban the use of neonicotinoids. People are lazy; they may not fill it in especially as you have to pay the postage. This would be real shame, but to show my support I have filled in the card and attached my stamp. It really is a cause for paying 42p for (is that the price of a 1st class stamp now?).



For more info visit Neal Yard’s facebook group.

Also on offer was a Behind the Label booklet in collaboration with The Ecologist which I picked up and read this morning. It details the ingredients found in many high street groceries that the brands never tell you about for example the leading cereal bar containing little nutrients but plenty of bulk ingredients, fluoride in leading toothpaste brands having the ability to poison its customers or the leading cosmetics brand using numerous parabens that trigger cancerous cells along with synthetic fragrances that irritate skin and cause breathing problems. I thought brands care about us! For more info, names to the above and alternatives visit The Ecologist Behind the Brand.

The Superficial Face of Fashion

Source www.guardian.co.uk

An article by Lucy Siegle in today’s Observer Why fast fashion is slow death for the planet explores the problems of fast fashion: overflowing wardrobes, reduced league times, overworked and underpaid factory workers, stellar fiscal achievements and the fashion consumers lust for more fore less and disregard. I make a point of mentioning this article as there was a particular reference I had not come across before:

Perhaps that mindset explains why a fashion industry commentator watched in horror as she saw one satisfied customer emerge from Primark's flagship Oxford Circus store with six or seven brown paper bags full of clothes. It was raining heavily, and as the young woman proceeded down Oxford Street one of them broke around the handles and folded cotton flopped on to the pavement. Naturally the journalist expected the girl to bend down and collect the clothes, but no. She just walked on. Fashion was apparently so expendable it had turned into litter.


Source www.dedicatedfolloweroffashion.com

On my many trips via Oxford Circus to university or even through Coventry city town centre (my home town with the largest Primark store in the UK when it was built in around 2008) I see a countless number of women, both young and old, carrying at least two large brown paper bags. My reaction is always the same: being overcome with shivers. I feel the same when entering a Primark store, yet combined with a glazed sense of attending a farm or cattle market; clothes strewn across their displays taking the form of a laundry pile, miserable staff shuffling about not even attempting to clean up, escalators that herd you around the store in order to get up or down and customers trailblazing around grabbing, dropping and eventually chucking in those oversized baskets that resemble buckets. On top of this the queues are horrendous, almost robotic and airport like. I repeat the same question to myself when leaving; ‘Do people enjoy this?’ Perhaps this experience is ultimately part of the fashion procedure for many, likened to the frustrating process of separating egg whites in order to produce the ultimate meringue.


Source themorganmclearyblog.wordpress.com

After reading the above paragraph that shiver again possessed my body, however much deeper: I felt sad. A newly brought fashion piece means so little to its owner they are willing to dispose of it before even consuming it. It begs the question: ‘has fashion or clothing in general become superficial?’

Lets not kid ourselves, the fashion industry has always been a little shallow quick to snipe an others in out of date wears, but it always seem to connect to us emotionally. Perhaps with reference to the girl mentioned above we no longer desire or need this emotional connection.

Many sustainable fashion writers and designers discuss the need to maintain and encourage this emotional connection. But are we missing the point before us, perhaps people want fashion that they can consume without a care? Perhaps designers and writers should explore sustainable methods of creating clothing to allow for this change in the consumer.

What are you views? Are both areas of research viable?

Fashion to Die for?

Dialogue between Fashion and Death: a chapter in the book of the same name by poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi I found to be a fascinating text that draws upon the similarities between Fashion and Death, here personified as two sisters. The passage is a short, humorous conversation where Fashion convinces Death that they fall from the same tree, so to speak:

Fashion: …you and I together keep undoing and changing things down here on earth…

Fashion: I’m saying that it is our nature and our custom to keep renovating the world. But right from the start you threw yourself on people and on blood, whereas I’m generally satisfied with beards, hair, clothes, furnishings, buildings, and the like.

cause pain:

Fashion: I persuade and force all genteel men to endure daily a thousand hardships and a thousand discomforts and often pain and torment and I even get some of them to die gloriously for love of me.

Fashion: …doing everything my way, no matter how much it hurts them…

move at a different pace:

Fashion: …for whereas you run, I can go faster than a gallop, and whereas you faint by standing still in one place, I waste away.

Fashion ultimately concludes that she is one with Death:

Fashion: …some of my doings that are of great assistance to you.

Fashion: …I have caused the neglect and the elimination of the exertion and those exercises which favour physical well-being, and I have introduced innumerable others that weaken the body in a thousand ways and shorten life and have caused them to be valued highly.

Fashion: …I have put in the world such orders and such customs that life itself, both of the body and of the soul, is more dead than alive…

The work is not dated; however it can be assumed that Leopardi wrote it in the early 19th Century. You cannot deny that Fashion’s arguments still seem relevant today. The rich/poor divide must have been considerably wider during the era it was written indicating that fashion played a more important role in determining status or class, therefore sort after. Yet fashion is still incredibly important nowadays perhaps because it is more accessible. Fashion changes much more frequently in order to keep people interested, maybe even to remind us its there.

This increased speed has quite literally sucked the life out of us and the planet:

• The Aral Sea was almost completely drained in order to provide water for the ever increasing demand for cotton for the changing fashion garments.

• Poor working conditions and long hours of those who make fashion garments are struggling to live their lives.

• Chemicals from dying and laundry detergents, along with pesticides build up in our environment. They can cause disfigurements and even death.

• Not only this, but the fashion consumer has become robotic; buying, wearing, throwing, buying, wearing, throwing… Fashion has simply become monotonous and only seems to satisfy for shorter and shorter periods of time. Talk about soul destroying.

With fashion being identified with a close likeness to death, is there any way we can change this?

New Materials for Fashion

I’ve been both a little slow in reading Shaping Sustainable Fashion as well as blogging recently. However, a forty-five minute bus journey recently gave me plenty of time to delve into the text. So far I have not come across anything overly new or innovative, mostly upcycling and fibres, which is another reason why I have not blogged.

A case study that did catch my attention was New Materials for Fashion (page 39), which discussed the potential to explore and develop new materials as possible sustainable solutions for fashion. I know exactly why I was drawn to this text; my MA Final Project was in many ways an exploration of this. Another reason would be that this research is ‘little explored in the fashion industry’. The unknown always fascinates me.

Jennifer Shellard is a textile designer who combines technology with traditional craft skills to create textiles with a colour strip that changes colour. The colour change is ‘slow and measured’ to create an ‘intriguing and meditative’ viewing experience. Her work fits into the new body of research exploring methods of engaging with consumers through transformation. Adaptive clothing has the potential to encourage a relationship or emotional response with the owner, thus reducing the need for the owner to further consume.



Shellard’s work is interesting and appears well thought out; however I feel that consumers need something more than colour change to feel connected to their clothing.

‘A central problem with fashion is that often a garment is disregarded before it ceases to function’. I totally agree. The text continues to promote the need for emotional attachment to sustain interest with the owner as being the ultimate challenge. True, but another method could be explored: to create garments that engage for a short period of time, for example the length of a trend and be safely disposed.

Fashion is and most certainly will always be fuelled by trends. We can either embrace this by searching for methods to sustain it, or turn anti-fashion and focus on maintenance and emotion. To be honest, I believe in both these methods: my own work explores the possibility of safe disposable garments that can be trend led yet there are items in my wardrobe that I have developed an emotional attachment to also. Perhaps the future will hold a happy medium for both. What do you think?

Pecha Kucha Presentation

The presentation on Monday night went really well, I didn’t stumble at all! I did however find the Q&A session after difficult due to the fact I’ve never done it before in front of a lecture hall full of people. One word: daunting, however experience can only make me better.

Unfortunately the presentations were not filmed (although audio may have been recorded), therefore I created a video with my audio commentary so that for the people who couldn’t make it can experience it! Enjoy.

BEWARE: this video contains images of snakes (shock). :)

MA Pecha Kucha TONIGHT!

Eek, the time has come: I will be presenting my project Shed me Clothes tonight at the MA Pecha Kucha session held at the RHS Space at London College of Fashion from 6pm. Another of my peers from MA Fashion and the Environment, Julia Roebuck will also be presenting along with students from MA History and Culture of Fashion, MA Fashion Journalism and MA Fashion Curation.

This type of presentation is timed, therefore no time to stumble. Wish me luck!