DWARS in Debate: The Climate-Friendly Wardrobe

‘Tomorrow I have to speak at the climate march,’ Elte, Dwars board member, told the editorial meeting. She had only just decided she was going to do this and this last-minute decision was very exciting. ‘What will I say? But more importantly, what should I wear?’ The outfit had to be planned in advance, because she obviously had to pull out her most climate-friendly clothes.

Her environmentally conscious clothing choice intrigued me. Although I try to consciously purchase my food, I have never delved into consciously buying my clothes. After all, it has always seemed too complicated to me. Elte came to the conclusion that she would wear second-hand clothes because they are always good. Even though I feel eccentric when I buy a garment second-hand, completely doing away with so-called ‘fast-fashion shopping’ is too big a lifestyle change for me. Still, I did want to improve my buying habits, as the garment industry is the most polluting industry in the world.

With food, you can follow clear rules to keep your purchases environmentally friendly. For example, do not consume meat and choose fruits and vegetables that have not been flown in from the other side of the world. When buying clothes, however, I had no idea of ‘rules’ to follow so that your purchases remain conscious. For instance, should I avoid certain shops or read the labels from now on to find out what my clothes are made of and in which country they were produced? The internet informed me that synthetic fabrics such as Nylon and Polyester should be avoided. This is because these fabrics create an amount of plastic microfibres in the water when washing, equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles a year.

Happy to find my ‘rule’ to environmentally conscious shopping, I told my niece this in a phone conversation. She studies Fashion and Textile Technologies and unfortunately had to help me out of my dream. Polyester does indeed create microfibres in the water and is also not sustainable as it uses fossil fuels. However, alternatives such as cotton are not much better. Untreated waste from factories is dumped into rivers, affecting not only the fish and plants living in the rivers but also the animals and people living along the rivers. Pollutants also get into the water by fertilising the soil for cotton production. In addition, producing 1kg of cotton requires as much as 20 000 litres of water. As a result, the Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has already turned into a desert.

In search of better rules

Disappointed that I had not found clear rules, I indeed had to accept that environmentally conscious shopping is simply complicated. Still, I found out a few practical tips that I did manage to apply immediately. For example, I now no longer have my purchases wrapped in the shop because gift wrapping paper is not sustainable. Instead, you can wrap presents in an old newspaper, which also looks very nice by the way. In addition, buying over the internet creates a lot of unnecessary packaging, especially if you return half the clothes. Washing your clothes more consciously can also have a big impact. For example, the WRAP report ‘Valuing Our Clothes’ from 2012 states that the UK's carbon footprint was reduced by 700,000 tonnes as a result of people washing at lower temperatures and ironing their clothes and throwing them in the dryer less often. So these small changes have a huge effect on the climate.

However, the most important change you can make in your buying habits is to buy less clothes. According to Greenpeace, people now buy 60% more clothes than 15 years ago and the time people keep them has halved. Wearing clothes for two years instead of one could reduce clothing emissions by 24%. That means only buying clothes that you really like and will wear for a long time. If, despite your good intentions, you still need to update your wardrobe, collect all your old clothes and bring them to the clothing swap at the DWARS pledge tomorrow. There, blogger Alexandra from My Slow World will also talk about the ‘rules’ for a climate-friendly wardrobe. Being a conscious consumer remains complicated, but with every ‘rule’ we discover, we get one step closer.

You can learn more about this topic during the clothing exchange taking place tomorrow. For details, check the agenda: https://dwars.org/groningen/agenda/kledingruil/

Would you like to write your own piece for DWARS in Debate? You can! Send an email to redactie.groningen@dwars.org and we will help you further.