Thanks, everyone, for your patience with my jacked up publishing schedule lately. I’m on the biweekly tip because of some consulting stuff through the end of the year, and I don’t like to hit send while there’s a major natural disaster slamming into so many of your lives. I don’t imagine there’s anything I can do for anyone reading this who’s been affected by the storm, but if you ask, I promise I’ll try.
This is not an environmental I told you so, but each weird or monster hurricane is a reminder that every gram of climate action matters. After all, the climate science indicates that our already-warmed oceans made Ian 10 percent worse. I expect that many of you have brought up individual action with friends or family and had it dismissed; the familiar—and fair—argument is that one person can only do so much, but banks and fossil fuel companies could slash global emissions dramatically if they would stop prioritizing profits over planet. I understand that point of view, and, of course, I hear it all the time too.
I wish the Big Banks would stop financing fossil fuel expansion; I wish Big Oil would take its vast stacks of cash and use them to develop clean energy solutions instead of defiling the Arctic. I also wish I had a magic toothbrush that restored the cartilage in my knees with every swipe and shaved minutes off my mile time. I will wish for all of these things, and I’ll celebrate them if they happen. But instead of sitting around waiting, I’m going to figure out every way possible to bring my desired world into being.
That’s what these emails are about. Sure, it’s great if you don’t use tape or eat meat, but those discrete actions matter less than the thinking behind them. And millions of us weaving a mindset of conservation into our everyday actions will make a difference.
Then we can get all capitalist about it. The realities of our market-driven world mean that we need to use the economy as both carrot and stick: Reward right-thinking companies with your business, and publicly spurn those that don’t. When every potential customer is an environmentalist, careless policies are bad business.
Sorry for the preamble, but it’s been a while, and I felt like it was necessary framing for this very complex subject. Back to the studio.
I’d like to introduce you to my mother, Mom. She’s an awesome person who runs a nonprofit that makes children’s hospitals nicer places to be. She has a tiny dog that is trying to kill her, and when she starts calling someone Whatshername” or “Whatshisname,” that poor soul will be on her shit list until the Earth crashes into the sun. She’s a small, badass New York Lady with an oversized bag of wisdom on her at all times.
Here’s one of my favorite gems: Always wear nice underwear, because you never know when you’ll end up in an ambulance with an EMT cutting your pants off. Say what you want about my family’s hand-me-down pessimism or why we care that a paramedic sees our skivvies, this is solid advice. You’re welcome. And thanks, Mom.
I was thinking about this the other day, when I noticed a pair of my own drawers sporting a little unintended ventilation. Embarrassing! And it’s not the only pair with this issue. I need to buy some underwear.
This is an opportunity to make a small, easy, sustainable choice. But it also presents a problem, because I’m caught between two brands: One makes no claims about sustainability while the other regularly touts not just its environmental cred, but its commitment to treating its employees equitably. No-brainer? Unfortunately, the climate conscious company’s underwear is the one that wore out, despite being half as old as its drawer-mate.
So what do I do? Should I buy the more sustainable option and replace it twice as often? Or go with product longevity at the expense of my values?
Let’s make this a little more complicated—and personal: I prefer boxer briefs, which means my undergarments contain a certain amount of stretch. Which means plastic. Every time I wash them, I make microplastics. And when my shorts board the white ships for their journey to the Undying Lands, they will take several orders of magnitude longer to degrade than if I were wearing all-cotton undies.
So what should I do? Well, I’m gonna do what I always do: call up some experts and talk to them about my underwear and read everything I can and boil it all down and share it with you. Sustainable clothing is a minefield, way more complicated than anything else I’ve researched: It’s about agriculture, plastic, water, human rights, ethical treatment of animals, and more. And we all need to wear clothes, even if it’s just a Zoom shirt and some cozy pants.
I’m just beginning my exploration of sustainable garments, so this won’t be the only email I send on the subject. Keep that inbox runway ready for one5c touchdown. And unless your friends and family are full-time nudists (respect), you need to send them this newsletter and get to them to subscribe right now. Right now!
Sustainability in the garment world isn’t just complex, it’s controversial. Recently, a marketing student (hell yeah, get it) sued H&M for false advertising, alleging that the Swedish fast-fashion giant made misleading claims about its “sustainable” line of gear. This, as well as some other legal situations involving various certifications, has a lot of people feeling nervous and unwilling to talk. Is every clothing company dyeing its goods with greenwash? Of course not, but many spokesfolk and pundits asked to go off the record or politely declined to be interviewed for this piece.
“It’s really complicated,” says Sara Kozlowski, Vice President of Education and Sustainability Initiatives at the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “As you’ve likely read in the news, there have been some legal issues.” (See?)
While a greenwashing lawsuit may inspire some of us to skip certain brands, that’s not really what we’re here for. We just want to know, generally, how to buy underwear. (Sorry to drag you into this.) Can we buy stretchy stuff? Do we need to use organic cotton? Is there any seal of approval that tells us, yes, this garment was made with the understanding that we need to un-fuck the planet?
“There’s not a good one-size-fits-all standard that consumers can trust,” says Kozlowski. Boooooo. To clarify, there are numerous standards—but they generally cater to the b2b market, certifying aspects of a garment rather than the article as a whole: what it’s made of, how it’s made, how the company that made it operates, and so on. They’re not always visible to consumers, and they often don’t deliver on what they promise.
Fiber optics
If you can’t just buy a certified garment, the next move is to get informed and try to buy the most sustainable material, right? This is tricky, too. I’m certainly guilty of concocting an oversimplified answer in my mind: Cotton is a natural fiber, so that’s what I should wear. It doesn’t come from oil or shed microplastics. I’ll get the organic stuff, because organic means good. Game, set, matched pair of underwear.
Nope. “It’s important to recognize, number one, how much water is involved in farming cotton—even if it’s organic,” says Kozlowski. She notes that thoughtfully farmed and processed cotton can be a sustainable choice, but many parts of the world are facing unprecedented drought as a result of global warming, so you need to know where your stuff is coming from. “We’re seeing intense water shortages.”
Kozlowski recommends looking for the GOTS—Global Organic Textile Standard—mark on cotton clothing, but cautions that “even if the fiber is organic, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the supply chain and logistics and the finishing and the dyeing and everything else that’s associated with making a garment are done in a way that’s safe and sustainable.”
This is an issue echoed in a New York Times investigation from earlier this year. It’s an incredible story that I won’t insult by trying to summarize. Set aside 15 minutes and read it. (After you’re done with this newsletter. TY.)
But is *any* cotton better than wearing a synthetic garment, which is basically a slick second skin crafted from oil? This question is just as tough to answer. “Any synthetic material most likely contains plastic or petroleum byproduct,” says Kozlowski. “If it is recycled, great; it’s being taken out of the waste stream. But you would need to know what the manufacturing process involves.”
Sometimes, as with performance outerwear, synthetic is the only reasonable choice, and brands, like Patagonia and Nike seem to be making a real effort to use a high percentage of post-consumer plastic in their gear, keeping spent water bottles from clotting landfills. But there’s also evidence that some of these so-called recycled fibers are in fact virgin plastic. “Sometimes mills will say that what they’re making is recycled PET, but it was actually produced only to be made into the textile,” says Kozlowski.
Wool is another option with promise. It’s a natural fiber that can be repurposed (often downcycled), but you’re basically wearing the textile equivalent of dairy: the product of a methane-emitting ruminant occupying land that could otherwise be used for carbon-absorbing forests or grasslands.
As with beef, though, the way a sheep is farmed can have a major impact on the greenhouse gasses it pumps into the atmosphere. If the wool in your garments was the result of regenerative agriculture, that could be a very good look. But “ethical treatment of the sheep is a key issue that still lacks transparency—especially in the shearing and care steps,” says Kozlowski, who recommends the GOTS mark for wool garments as well.
Whether your garment wears the GOTS mark or Textile Exchange’s Organic Content Standard or the Eco Tex seal of approval or claims to be 6,000-percent post-consumer plastic, all these considerations make it clear that you can’t rely on a certification alone—especially considering that “these marks can be very expensive,” says Kozlowski, noting that smaller brands are some of the largest innovators when it comes to sustainability.
It seems like you can’t win, and, yeah: Any article of clothing you buy will come with its own environmental cost. You cannot be perfect. You can do your best.
Your own seal of approval may be the most meaningful. “Buying responsibly does involve a little bit of consumer awareness and self education around the materials and then how and where things are made,” she says. Do some research and be sure the company you’re buying from is as committed to sustainable clothing and ethical manufacturing practices as you are. Buying from certified B-corporations can be a meaningful shortcut, as they dig deeper than you and Google probably can.
New to you
While there are as many opinions about what constitutes a sustainable garment as there are American flag t-shirts in your local Walmart, I did get some flavor of the same advice from everyone I spoke to, even the off-the-record gang:
Buy less stuff
Keep it for longer
Repair it instead of replacing it
There was also unanimous support for buying pre-owned before opting for brand-new. You can break the environmental footprint of a garment down to how the raw ingredients are created, how the garment is constructed, and how it makes its way from the factory to your ass. But “so much of the environmental impact occurs in the supply chain and almost two thirds is directly material production,” says Kozlowski.
Buying used makes a huge difference here, and it’s not hard to find options. Patagonia sells pre-owned gear on its website right alongside its new stuff, and companies like ThredUp and StockX bring ecomm convenience to used clothes and more. Hell, I’ve gotten some great old clothes off eBay, and there’s always always the Salvation Army, Goodwill, and your local thrift store.
Fortunately-slash-unfortunately, there’s not a great secondary-market solve for underpants, and that makes me, at least, feel pressure to make the right choice. My collection of size Ms averages out to 100 grams per pair, 6 percent synthetic, per their labels. I don’t actually buy that last stat, because the waistband is super stretchy and definitely not the same material as the butt-covering part,;so I am going to bump that up to 10 percent overall and say that each pair of underwear represents 10 grams of plastic waste. All of which will probably persist long after I kick the recycling bin. If I buy three pairs of underwear every other year for the rest of my life, that’s a legacy of 75 garbage garments. 750 grams of plastic bequeathed to the landfills.
That may not seem like a lot, but I’m not the only person who wears underpants. If only every American threw away only 75 pairs of underwear in each of their lives, that would be 249,000 metric tons of waste plastic. From 50 years of underwear alone. (And yes, I am making many assumptions about your undergarments.) Expanding this out to t-shirts and bathing suits and Hammertime pants and so on makes fast fashion feel like an express train to the future depicted in Wall-E.
You can probably guess what I’m going to do. Yup, I’m buying the longer-lasting ones. Though I do plan to call the company first, in the off chance that they’re just not good at hyping their sustainability cred. Maybe I’ll learn something; and if I do, you can be sure it’ll end up in your inbox in a couple weeks.
Until then, I’ll leave you with an old saying I learned from my neighbor: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” I hadn’t heard it before she said it to me, but lately I’ve been finding myself chanting it under my breath. It came into use during the Depression, not the climate emergency, but it’s a thousand percent relevant. You never know who’s carrying around a bag of wisdom.
Take care of yourself—and the rest of us too
Joe
joe@one5c.com