It's mud season here, or rather it's about to be. From now until late spring, I won't bother attempting to clean my car, will have to corral the dog into the room off the kitchen after walks and force my daughter to take her shoes off before stepping into the house.
Despite the inevitable mess, I love it. It's the first sign of spring, and the changing season always makes me appreciate the world. Plus, there's nothing quite like watching the grin appear on my daughter's face when she jumps into a puddle of mud. To do that, though, she needs the right clothes and footwear. Kids grow way too fast, and so, I've been hunting online marketplaces for used, still in-good-condition rain boots and a few pairs of rain pants. I try to buy most of her outdoor gear, secondhand.
More clothing and textile waste ends up in landfills now than at any other time in history—17 million tons of it in the U.S., alone in 2018, according to the most recent data from the Environmental Protection Agency. That equals about 6 percent of the total municipal solid waste. In the 1960s, the EPA estimated clothing and footwear accounted for 1.4 million tons of garbage. What happened?
The introduction of so-called Fast Fashion or clothing and accessories designed to quickly and inexpensively be replicated from runaway looks so they could make it onto store racks fast and be priced cheaply. Now, the production of fashion accounts for more than 10 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than international flights and shipping combined, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Most of that clothing is made from polyester, a type of plastic created from fossil fuels, which, as consumers have shopped for new clothes more often, and thrown more of it away, has ended up in landfills.
Once there, textiles leach toxic chemicals and dyes into the soil and the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. It can take up to 200 years or more for it to decompose.
We're trying to prevent that in our own small way by buying used clothing when it makes sense, and normalizing the idea that the clothes that no longer fit her will get donated or sold to someone else. For the things I can't buy used, I try to buy pieces from a few select brands that make clothing out of natural, organic clothing.
What if instead of ending up in a landfill, your top was either recycled or ended up breaking down in a few weeks or months in your backyard, where you could eventually use it to help poppy flowers bloom or lettuce grow?
It sounds simple. After all, anything that grows decomposes, but to be compostable, clothing has to be made from natural fibers, such as cotton, silk and wool. It's not just what the clothing is made out of that determines if it can be composted, though. Many materials are treated and finished with chemicals that prevent them from being composted even if they're made out of natural materials.
While a few companies do make compostable fashion, their pieces are, of course, more expensive than non-compostable clothing. And even when a brand says a piece of clothing is compostable, sometimes that means it only is if you pull out all the seams, which are often done with a polyester thread. Who is really going to do that?
We also don't yet know much about the impacts of using the resulting compost. Now that my town finally collects food scraps curbside, we've started to use our at-home compost as something to experiment with. We see how long it takes for compostable packaging, for instance, actually to decompose, and maybe as my child grows out of some clothing that can't be used in some other way, we'll do the same with it. I'm not sure I'd use that compost to grow food, though. We'll likely stick to using it for non-edible flowers and trees.
Compostable fashion is just one part of the puzzle of making the clothing industry more sustainable. Recycling textile waste is another piece of the puzzle although that process has its own problems including availability, the quality of the new material produced and the byproducts of the process. In the long term, we need to change our habits. We need to get out of the routine of buying so many pieces of clothing cheaply. But it shouldn't fall on consumers. Companies should be responsible for the entire lifespan of their product including its end of life.
In the meantime though, here are a few simple ways I’m trying to reduce our dependence on fast fashion.
Shopping used when possible.
Buying clothing made from organic cotton and other natural materials.
Always trying to pass on clothing by giving it to friends, or people in my local community or reselling it.
Recycling textiles through Simple Recycling or brands like & Other Stories, Madewell and For Days.
Experimenting with composting textiles.
~ Bridget
P.S. Here are a few things that I've been up to:
Published: A story on public oyster gardening for Modern Farmer, which I wish was something all coastal towns did. A report on canned tuna for Martha Stewart.
Working: A story on what we owe the places we travel to in the era of climate change for Teen Vogue, reusing take-out containers for Martha Stewart, and another on in-season produce.
Reading: Willow is not just an “environmentalist” concern in Heated, Sarah Wildman's incredible essay on the impossible in The New York Times and Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen.