Sustainable Fashion

What’s the biggest number you can think of? Mine was 535

Well the world now buys 80 BILLION pieces of clothing each year.

Lots of these clothes come from ‘fast fashion companies’

These are companies that make lots and lots of really cheap, bright pretty clothes, so we want to buy lots of them, and keep buying more of them when they wear out, or when we see something prettier.

But these clothes are also often not very well made, so they fall apart really easily and we throw them away. And sometimes people even throw away clothes that aren’t so damaged or old.

We found out that in the UK, 35 tonnes of clothes that could be re-used go into rubbish or garbage dumps (that’s landfill) each year…. That’s about the same amount of clothes as the weight of 29 thousand big red London buses.

In the USA, almost 1 million tonnes of children’s clothing waste is thrown away (into landfill) every year.

We also learnt that for every child under age 11 in the USA (and apparently there are 48.9 million of those) 45 pounds of clothing gets thrown away each year and only 5 pounds gets recycled.

A lot of these clothes, like T-shirts and dresses, may be made using cotton.

Cotton grows on plants in lovely puffy balls, in the USA, China, and India mostly.

But on these big big cotton farms, farmers use HUGE HUGE HUGE amounts of water and chemicals to help the cotton plants grow… that’s not good for our earth either ☹

We discovered that is takes 2,720 litres of water to make just one new T-shirt.

That’s how much water a grown up might normally drink over 3 years, or it’s the same as 136 of those big bottles of water that we have in our homes.

That’s so much precious water, on just one t-shirt!

These numbers are so crazy that, for me, it’s hard to understand them. How about you?

What I do understand is they are BIG numbers, TOO BIG!

We found out that some of the things we LOVE in our clothes – glitter, sparkles and sequins, are actually not good for the environment. They are made from plastic.

And as we heard from Emma’s presentation on plastic pollution, there’s even plastic in some types of fabric…

And that’s not good! If our old clothes end up in the earth or the sea they might hurt the land or the animals and sea creatures

We have to give people the benefit of the doubt, mostly people weren’t trying to hurt the planet!

When Coco Channel was busy doing exciting and adventurous things in fashion design, she and others like, her had no idea about how fashion could affect the environment.

In fact, it’s really only in the last 20 years that people have begun to understand some of the information we know now about how we might be hurting our planet without meaning to, and how we need to protect our earth.

‘Green’ is another way of saying something or someone who cares about the environment and is trying to take care of it!

Some special organisations, like one called Traid, have been set up to work very especially on helping us (the people who buy the clothes), and the manufacturers (the people who make the clothes), understand the problems in the fashion world.

They are also asking the big fashion companies to do better and work harder to protect the environment when they make their clothes.

These are just some of those organisations…

Stella grew up on farm with lots of animals around. Her father is Paul McCartney – he is a very well known musician from a huge band called the Beatles.

Stella always loved clothes and when she was 8 years old she decided that she wanted to becomes a fashion designer.

When she went to study fashion at university as a teenager, she often had fights with her teachers who wanted her to use feathers and fur and leather in her designs. Stella refused and promised that she would never use any products that came from an animal. She believed it was wrong to hurt or kill an animal so that humans could have fancy clothes.

When she opened her own clothes shops she made a promise to herself… none of her clothes would ever be made from materials that harmed animals and she would try and find fabrics and cloth that were made in ways that didn’t hurt the planet.

Leather comes from animals, so instead of using leather she uses Mylo, which looks like leather but is made from Mushrooms! And instead of using silk made by silkworms, she uses silk made from yeast protein! Yeast is the stuff that makes our bread and pizza dough rise up and get bigger and more delicious!

Polyester is not good for the environment because it contains teeny tiny plastic bits called fibres, so instead all the polyester that Stella uses comes form recycled water bottles…

Whilst this problem feels a little bit HUGE, there’s actually a lot that we can all do.

Let’s start with our own clothes…. We could take a look at the labels on our clothes and begin investigating and understanding which fabrics are the really yucky ones for the environment… maybe we could try to look for more earth friendly cloth shops, and choose organic cotton, vegan shoes, and biodegradable glitter when we can!

But we’re quite small still…. I still don’t buy my own clothes... Do you?

No, I guess it’s our mamas and dadas that buy our clothes mostly… maybe we need to teach them about this and ask them to help us help the earth by making good choices about what we buy.

Also, do you have a friend or relative who is always buying you clothes for Christmas or your birthday? My Granda is that person for me. Maybe we need to try and share these ideas with our grandparents, aunts and uncles? Even better, our teachers and our other friends… and maybe we could go even further?