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The next time you find yourself despairing over the dystopian hellscape that is life in the Trump 2.0 era, cling to this: Donald Trump may have given Canada’s sustainability movement a major shot in the arm.
\n\n\n\nWith his odious domestic policies, his support of genocidal leaders around the world, his threats to turn Canada into his country’s 51st state, and the ongoing session of four-dimensional surfboard Whac-A-Mole that he calls tariff negotiations, Trump has infuriated many Canadian consumers into a large-scale spurning of American goods.
\n\n\n\nIn many cases, they have shifted their purchasing habits in ways that mirror—and may end up turning into—those of a sustainable-consumption mindset. Label-checking and mindful buying have gone from niche practices to a national pastime, and buying non-US often means buying locally or regionally.
\n\n\n\n“It’s a moment to think about where something comes from, who made it, and what it means to bring it into your home,” wrote Toronto-based sustainability educator and writer Sarah Robertson-Barnes in an email to Asparagus. “The momentum makes it easier for everyone to choose local and sustainable, which is exactly what we want.”
\n\n\n\nEven when Canada’s vastness means that some homegrown products travel longer distances, with higher transportation emissions—for instance, an apple going to Vancouver from Ontario’s main apple-growing region will travel more than 4,000 km, while one from Washington State needs to go only about 400—there are other aspects of sustainability to consider. For example, although both Canada and the US allow farmers to pay fruit-pickers a piece rate instead of an hourly wage, in both countries that rate is based on the state or provincial minimum wage, which in states such as Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is an impoverishing US$7.25/hour, while in BC and Ontario it is over C$17/hour (just under US$13).
\n\n\n\nMatthew Shane, a professor of psychology at Oshawa’s Ontario Tech University, created the website The Canada List after Trump’s annexation threats opened his eyes to Canada’s economic vulnerability. He thinks the distance issue may be taking care of itself, noting that many of the approximately 15,000 monthly visitors who search the site’s 6,500-plus entries of Canadian businesses are already narrowing their scope from Canada-wide to regional and local. “Probably our biggest request at this point is to start putting in some provincial and city filters so that people can start to shop for the goods that are in their own neighbourhood,” he said in a phone interview.
\n\n\n\nSo how big is the shift? Well, in late April, the global market-research company NielsenIQ surveyed more than 5,600 Canadians about their attitudes toward purchasing vis-à-vis the United States. The result: a full 96% of respondents said they were changing their buying habits. Only 4% fell into the category of “Unchanged Shoppers,” with the rest falling into three other categories:
\n\n\n\nVancouver resident Heather Armstrong exemplifies the second of these categories—and the changed shopping practices that go along with it. Although the retired HR specialist has always preferred to buy local food when it was convenient, she now considers herself a “very strict” American Goods Avoider and carefully checks the origin of everything she buys.
\n\n\n\n“Trump is ruining the country. He’s ruining the world,” she says. “So why would we support the US? If we can get the product here, why not do it here?” A daily coffee drinker, Armstrong says she hasn’t gone to her local Starbucks in months.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a moment to think about where something comes from, who made it, and what it means to bring it into your home.
The products to which the Nielsen survey refers are known in marketing-speak as “fast-moving consumer goods,” or FMCGs. They include food, clothes, diapers, household items, and—warranting specific mention on Nielsen’s list—oral backache remedies and processed cheese spreads, both of which are Top 10 items for American Goods Avoiders, the most affluent group.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a reason that Nielsen frames its report as a warning to American businesses: FMCGs make up a good chunk of Canada’s main US imports. According to data-compiling site Trading Economics, consumer items abound on the list of top US imports to Canada, with categories involving food, clothing, and household items each accounting for US$2–6.1 billion of imports.
\n\n\n\nEven the top item on the Trading Economics list, while not exactly an FMCG, still falls under an individual’s discretionary spending power. Cars and trucks—referred to on the list as “vehicles other than railway, tramway”—are our number-one import product from the States, accounting for over US$50 billion in imports. Consumers can find Canadian-made vehicles by consulting the website Driving.ca, which lists the 10 models assembled in Canada in 2025, including the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 hybrids. (Those in the market for a tramway may need to cast a wider net.)
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a sustainable shopper adding a patriotic element to your choices or a patriotic shopper wanting to make more sustainable choices, buying both non-US and sustainable products simply means adding some new criteria to your purchasing process and taking an extra step or two. Here are some tips:
\n\n\n\nSustainability educator Robertson-Barnes points out that starting with shops and makers in your immediate area hits both the Buy Canada and sustainability targets: it keeps money in your community while also reducing your carbon footprint. As you widen your search, she suggests looking first for the label “Product of Canada,” which means that at least 98% of the product must be Canadian, and secondly for “Made in Canada,” as this requires only 51% of the product to be Canadian.
\n\n\n\nCanada is big, but the world is bigger, so you’ll generally do the least floundering if you start by making sure an item is Canadian and check it for sustainability afterwards. Some useful Canadian-product websites are Made in CA—started in 2018 by Torontonian Dylan Lobo in response to Trump 1.0’s tariffs—and Matthew Shane’s Canada List. The latter allows you to filter by Canadian ownership or manufacturing, or—in a new feature that will please the American Goods Avoiders among us—to “Exclude all USA products.” Shane hopes to add filters for provinces and cities this month, allowing you to go fully local if you want to.
\n\n\n\nOnce you have a Canadian item in mind, you can check certification sites for the sustainability quotient of the company that makes it. Some of the big names in certification are B Corp and Ecologo. You can also check the website of your regional sustainability-in-business organization, such as BC Green Business or Green Economy Calgary. Their directories of member businesses are great sources of companies that are both local/regional and sustainable.
\n\n\n\nYes, Facebook owner Meta is a huge part of almost every problem, and yes, with its ban on posting news links in Canada, it is actively working to kill off Canadian journalism like that found in Asparagus. If you can get past this, you’ll find a wealth of groups, most of them with names that are bewilderingly similar permutations of “Made in Canada.” Among the largest of these are Made in Canada – Buy Canadian Products, with 1.4 million members, and straight-up Made in Canada, with 114,000 members.
\n\n\n\nAlong with an abundance of posts from small businesses and artisans touting their wares, these groups feature thousands of members who take their patriotic sleuthing seriously, triumphantly posting where you can find Canadian-made sugar, baked beans, mustard, diapers, bedsheets, body wash, and all those other FMCGs. When there is no fully Canadian source, they post non-US brands—for example, Oasis orange juice, which is made in Québec with oranges from Brazil. If you post an ISO (“in search of”) for any given product, you are likely to get plenty of recommendations.
\n\n\n\nWhen those recommendations are for small and/or home-based businesses, give priority to the ones closest to you, and consider sending the owner an email asking about their sustainability practices. When you’re following up on finds from large companies, do your sustainability research by checking them on certification sites such as the ones listed above.
\n\n\n\nIf Facebook is “just…can’t…do it” territory for you, this subreddit has some of the same content, even though the Reddit format makes the information harder to find. For instance, one member posted “ISO: the highest protein yogurt available in BC by Canadian owned co” and got recommendations of Québec-based Liberté; Delta, BC-based Olympic; and Québec-based, French-owned Oikos, among others.
\n\n\n\nA bonus of Reddit is that members can post news stories, so you’ll find relevant articles there that you can’t on Facebook.
\n\n\n\nWith the Buy Canada movement in its early phases, there aren’t many of these, but some do exist. One is Sarah Robertson-Barnes’ blog Sustainable in the Suburbs. You can get tips and shopping guides from various blogs that focus specifically on sustainable living within Canada: try those listed on FeedSpot’s list of the Top 25 Canadian Sustainable Living Blogs. For instance, Erin Polowy’s site My Green Closet currently features sustainable made-in-Canada swimwear.
\n\n\n\nGoing to ecohubmap and entering “Canada” in the “Countries” field will yield a wide variety of sustainability-focused Canadian businesses, from children’s wear to makers of solar panels. The site doesn’t assess the sustainability of businesses that submit listings, so use it as a starting place and follow up by checking for certifications or asking businesses about their sustainability efforts.
\n\n\n\nFinally, observe the golden rule of sustainable shopping: ask yourself, “Do I really need this?”
\n\n\n\nCan the Trump-fuelled boost to sustainability last in the longer term? Recent surveys suggest that the Buy Canada movement has more staying power than the average consumer boycott—and the longer people are checking labels and prioritizing local, the more likely it is that sustainable-shopping habits will take root, even if they’re byproducts of quite a different motivation.
\n\n\n\nCanada List creator Shane, for one, sees himself as maintaining his Buy Canada habits even after Trump is out of office—and the feedback he gets from his site’s users indicates that they feel the same. “Many of the users of The Canada List are suggesting that it will be a permanent shift,” he says.
\n\n\n\nHeather Armstrong of Vancouver echoes the sentiment. She says she might soften her stance slightly if, for instance, California Governor Gavin Newsom is the next president, but she’ll only buy non-Canadian if she has to. “I think that I and a lot of Canadians now are conditioned to buy Canadian,” she says. “Because now we realize we can.”
\n\n\n\nThis story was first published on The Green House, our membership platform. Join us there for early access, discounts and freebies, community discussions, and to support our work telling the large and small stories of how we can live sustainably.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2492,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[46,19,14,21,8,7],"tags":[415,128,81,117,124,432,596,639,640,363,53],"class_list":["post-2491","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-fashion-beauty","category-food","category-home-garden","category-living","category-society","tag-bathroom","tag-business","tag-canada","tag-certification","tag-fashion","tag-local-food","tag-pamela-swanigan","tag-shopping","tag-skin-care","tag-small-business","tag-us"],"yoast_head":"\nIf you’ve ever gone shopping with an eye to buying sustainable fabrics, you may have come across the Oeko-Tex logo. Not sure what it means or whether it’s a reliable sign of eco-friendly textile production? Let’s find out!
\n\n\n\nSince 1992, the International Association for Research and Testing in the Field of Textile and Leather Ecology has been providing third-party certification to textile products around the world. More commonly known as Oeko-Tex, the organization oversees a number of certifications that ensure products contain only safe levels of harmful substances, including formaldehyde, pesticides, flame retardants, and heavy metals. According to Oeko-Tex, over 53,000 products are certified worldwide, sold by companies like Land’s End, Girlfriend Collective, and Sézane.
\n\n\n\nHead-quartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Oeko-Tex works with 17 independent textile and leather institutes in Europe and Japan. These labs test submitted products to ensure safe levels of substances like arsenic, benzene, and certain petroleum distillates. Thousands of chemicals can be found on textiles, and many have a negative impact on the environment, harming plants and animals. According to the European Union, 20% of global water pollution can be traced back to textile production. Many of the toxic substances Oeko-Tex tests for have been called “forever chemicals” because of their ability to persist in eco-systems for generations.
\n\n\n\nThese chemicals can also have negative impacts on the health of humans, especially babies, young children, the elderly, and those with allergies. Substances found in clothes and other textiles have been linked to health impacts including liver, kidney, and lung disorders; neurotoxicity; and cancer.
\n\n\n\nTo keep shoppers informed about which textiles don’t contain harmful levels of these chemicals—and in some cases meet higher sustainability standards—Oeko-Tex offers seven different certifications.
\n\n\n\nThe first four certifications focus on specific textile products. Standard 100 is the most commonly awarded, with over 34,000 valid certificates around the world. It was launched in 1992, and the association calls it their “original safety standard.” Standard 100 guarantees that textiles contain safe levels of over 1,000 harmful substances. Oeko-Tex reviews the standard’s chemical limits at least once a year. The standard splits products into four classes, with Class 1 meeting the strictest requirements because it consists of products that could touch children’s skin, down to the less-strict Class 4 for textiles with minimal or no skin contact, like carpets and curtains.
\n\n\n\nThe Leather Standard is specifically tailored for leather products, which are manufactured differently from textiles and may have been finished with harmful substances.
\n\n\n\nOrganic Cotton certifies cotton products that have been manufactured without GMOs and are tested for pesticides and other substances.
\n\n\n\nThe Made in Green certification looks beyond the presence of chemicals to certify textiles that are made sustainably and in socially responsible workplaces. Like with Standard 100, materials are tested for harmful substances, and environmental responsibility is examined by looking at a production facility’s chemical management strategies—like pollution prevention and using less hazardous chemicals—and testing wastewater quality. Working conditions are assessed on the basis of fair wages, regular working hours, and workplace safety measures. This label is Oeko-Tex’s fastest growing: in 2024, there was a 52% increase in certifications.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Oeko_tex_-_umbrella_brand_-_11_2022.jpg\")
The remaining three certifications zoom out from specific textile products. The Sustainable Textile and Leather Production label (STeP) certifies a range of facilities—like leather tanners and industrial laundries—for meeting sustainability standards, including the working conditions standards of Made in Green. The idea is that manufacturers can choose STeP-certified facilities from a database when sourcing materials along the textile supply chain.
\n\n\n\nThe Eco Passport certification covers chemicals, colourants, and other substances that have been tested and analyzed against Oeko-Tex’s criteria for a lower environmental impact. It is possible for a company to use Eco Passport–certified substances in the manufacture of products that aren’t Standard 100–certified, and it is also possible for a product to be Standard 100–certified without the use of Eco Passport–certified substances.
\n\n\n\nAnd last, Responsible Business certifies companies that protect human rights and the environment throughout their entire supply chains, from raw material producers to retailers. The label looks at everything from a company’s guidelines for decision-making and accountability measures, to communication transparency and complaint mechanisms. The certification launched in late 2022, and there are currently only three active certifications, all for companies based in Germany.
\n\n\n\nCompanies and manufacturers that want their products or business practices to be Oeko-Tex-certified need to apply through the association. Entities certifying a product submit an application to one of the 17 Oeko-Tex-affiliated testing institutes along with a sample. The lab will then test the sample for the substances in their long list and create a test report. They use a “worst-case” methodology, which means testing articles with the most coating and finishings and the darkest dye—for example, if you’re submitting a range of T-shirts, you’d send in the darkest-coloured shirt. If the results are within Oeko-Tex’s criteria, the product will be certified once additional samples taken from the production line and retailers confirm that the products tested are the same as those on the market.
\n\n\n\nFor the other certifications, the application process typically requires an online self-assessment, an analysis by auditors from one of the institutes, an on-site visit, a list of corrections from the auditor, and then the final report documenting the assessment and certification if all’s up to snuff.
\n\n\n\nThe association is funded by licensing fees paid by companies who have been certified. Companies who want to have an Oeko-Tex label on their products pay the association to test and certify their textiles. As with other eco-logo certifiers, the fact that the organization is supported by certification fees raises the risk that Oeko-Tex might reduce the strictness of its certification criteria in order to bring in more revenue.
\n\n\n\n“It’s an external third-party verification that you’re doing something right,” explains Rod Lohin, the executive director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Corporate Citizenship. Lohin says certifications like Oeko-Tex help a company satisfy demands for sustainability from stakeholders—which could be customers, board members, government, or company staff and owners. Lohin says a certification like Oeko-Tex is an “easy place to start” when it comes to backing up claims of eco-friendliness.
\n\n\n\nSome of the Oeko-Tex standards only certify specific materials or singular products, which could allow unsustainable corporations to greenwash.
Plus, companies with eco-certifications may see positive financial outcomes because of the legitimacy they lend to sustainability claims. A 2019 study out of Hong Kong Polytechnic University found that customers are more willing to pay a premium for products carrying a recognizable eco-label.
\n\n\n\nOn the downside, the cost of maintaining a certification can be a deterrent for companies, especially certifications with as many steps as the Oeko-Tex process. And the resulting higher cost of certified products may deter customers who don’t care about sustainability or would just rather pay less. Being certified might also open up a company to criticism if they lose the certification or slip up in other ways, says Lohin. “You’re more likely to have a stronger backlash,” he says. “I’m sure that keeps some people right on the edge of pursuing a certification.”
\n\n\n\nThough Oeko-Tex tests for harmful chemicals and environmental impact, problems may slip through the cracks. While there’s a long list of chemicals Oeko-Tex tests for, they might miss other harmful components that aren’t yet included on that list. Some of the Oeko-Tex standards only certify specific materials or singular products, which could allow unsustainable corporations to greenwash by selling a few products with an eco-label.
\n\n\n\nSome environmental blogs also criticize the fact that Oeko-Tex-certified producers can use fibres grown with pesticides and fertilizers. And the most common certification, Standard 100, is largely concerned with the end product. For certified items, there is little transparency into the complete lifecycle of the product: Standard 100 doesn’t check where raw materials were grown, processed, or manufactured. It also certifies products made from viscose and rayon— which are chemical-intensive to produce—and polyester, which is derived from fossil fuels. So, while it might be a good marker of protecting human health, it’s not necessarily a mark of sustainability.
\n\n\n\nThat being said, there’s a lot to love about Oeko-Tex. Certified products need to be re-tested annually to keep their certification. (Company and facility-level certifications are good for three years.) The institutes are audited every three years and update their standards. Oeko-Tex also has a Buying Guide and Label Checking tool so consumers can easily look up certified products.
\n\n\n\nA rigorous check for harmful chemicals in textiles, which may miss the bigger picture.
\n\n\n\nThis story was first published on The Green House, our membership platform. Join us there for early access, discounts and freebies, community discussions, and to support our work telling the large and small stories of how we can live sustainably.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2448,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,29,8,10,6,39,23],"tags":[128,117,124,454,281,239],"class_list":["post-2446","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-know-logo","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-start-small","tag-business","tag-certification","tag-fashion","tag-organic","tag-rebecca-gao","tag-textiles"],"yoast_head":"\nNow that spring has sprung, bringing with it sunny days and a sunnier outlook, it’s fair to say that stuffing made the previous months of below-freezing temperatures and dark, damp days tolerable. Not the edible stuffing found in turkey or cooked in dough: the thermal stuffing found in jackets, sleeping bags, and bedding.
\n\n\n\nBut are the products that are keeping you warm leaving the planet out in the cold? The Decider is here to help you choose thermal insulation that protects you and the planet from harmful elements.
\n\n\n\nMost thermally insulating products, like winter jackets and sleeping bags, consist of two main components: an inner filling and an outer shell.
\n\n\n\nThe filling is made from either down—a naturally insulating material made from the small, fluffy feathers found on the underside of waterfowl—or synthetically derived fibres that mimic it. Both types of filling create insulation by trapping heat in the air pockets between clusters of feathers or fibres.
\n\n\n\nThe outer shell is predominantly made from synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester, and sometimes Gore-Tex, since these are lightweight, durable, and water-resistant (hydrophobic). The shell is often chemically treated to strengthen its water resistance. Durable water repellent (DWR) is a common hydrophobic fabric treatment.
\n\n\n\nDown is lightweight and easy to compress, so it can provide the same amount of insulation as synthetic fill while weighing less. An important property of down is its fluffiness, otherwise known as “loft” or “fill power.” This figure measures the volume that is filled by a specific weight of down. In North America, it’s typically calculated as cubic inches per ounce and ranges from 300 to 1,000. A high loft number indicates that the down will provide more volume—and by extension more warmth—at a lighter weight.
\n\n\n\nHowever, unlike its synthetic counterparts, down can clump and lose its insulating properties when it gets wet. To make it more water-resistant, manufacturers sometimes treat it with wax, silicone, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
\n\n\n\nPFAS’ very slow rate of biodegradation means that they tend to accumulate in both humans and the environment, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.”
PFAS are a class of synthetic chemicals widely used in commercial goods due to their ability to repel oil and water. However, their very slow rate of biodegradation means that they tend to accumulate in both humans and the environment, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” Because of their detrimental effects, PFAS are now widely viewed as environmental contaminants.
\n\n\n\nThe good news is that more and more companies are using alternative methods to make their products—inner down and outer shells—hydrophobic. These methods leave them free of PFAS, including subclasses known as PFCs (perfluorinated compounds), PFOSs (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid), and PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid).
\n\n\n\nDr. Patricia Dolez, an associate professor in the University of Alberta’s Human Ecology department, says there are good solutions for both fillings and shells that are not based on PFAS or their variants. “They are using silicones, they are using waxes, and they do a good job.”
\n\n\n\nThe bad news is that companies can be opaque about the exact methods they use to make their down hydrophobic. This makes it difficult to know if they are environmentally friendly. For example, while wax-coated down can biodegrade, silicone-coated down cannot.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re opting for a down-based product but are concerned about unsustainable chemical treatments, you can look for a “bluesign-certified” label. The Swiss company bluesign technologies works with brands to ensure a sustainable textile supply chain, with emphasis on sustainable chemistry. It bestows its bluesign-approved certification on products where 90% of an item’s fabric and at least 30% of its accessories meet its criteria. Some common brands of hydrophobic down, such as Nikwax Hydrophobic Down, Allied Feather + Down’s HyperDry, DownTek, and Marmot’s DownDefender, are all bluesign partners.
\n\n\n\nEven if you use recycled fibres, if the products are coming from the other side of the world, maybe it’s not a very sustainable process or system.
Another concern you may have about down is whether it is sourced responsibly. Down is a byproduct of the meat industry: the feathers are plucked from geese and ducks being raised for meat and eggs. Animals in industrial meat farms are often overfed and subjected to crowded, inhumane conditions. If you care about this aspect of down, look for products with either the Responsible Down Standard (RDS) or the Global Traceable Down Standard logo. Both of these allow brands to source their down from certified farms whose birds have not been subjected to live-plucking, force-feeding, crowded living conditions, disease, discomfort, or distress.
\n\n\n\nOther options are to buy products made with recycled down—which is typically collected from used bedding such as pillows, duvets, and mattresses—and to use down-tracking websites like the ones offered by Sustainable Down Source and Allied. These sites allow you to use the lot number of the down in your product to learn more about where it came from.
\n\n\n\nIf you want to forgo animal products entirely, you can opt for a synthetically derived thermal-insulation material instead. You have many options to choose from, such as PrimaLoft, Thinsulate, Climashield, and Polartec. Many prominent winter-gear companies are even developing their own proprietary thermal-insulation materials—for instance, ThermoBall and Ventrix by The North Face, FullRange by Patagonia, and Coreloft by Arc’teryx.
\n\n\n\nHowever, as noted above, most of these materials are primarily derived from polyester, whose fibres are made from plastic pellets, which in turn are derived from crude oil. This process is immensely environmentally taxing, requiring anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 cubic metres of water to produce 1 kg of polyester fibres. In addition, polyester releases microfibres into the environment when it’s washed, reportedly takes anywhere from 20 to 200 years to biodegrade, and releases greenhouse gases into the environment from landfills.
\n\n\n\nGiven this extreme environmental toll, companies are increasingly using recycled polyester to make both the filling and shells of their products. Recycled polyester is primarily made from plastic bottles rather than fabric products, because, as U of A’s Dolez notes, “most of our clothes are not one material.” For instance, she says, polycotton is a mix of polyester and cotton. “So, to recycle one of them, you need to remove the other one.”
\n\n\n\nCompanies can be opaque about the exact methods they use to make their down hydrophobic.
However, as Dolez points out, “Even if you use green fibres, sustainable fibres, [or] recycled fibres, if [the products] are coming from the other side of the world, maybe it’s not a very sustainable process or system.”
\n\n\n\nIn fact, the greenhouse gas emissions generated from shipping mean that products made overseas usually have a greater environmental cost. They are also more likely to have a serious human cost, as many manufacturing companies in less regulated countries exploit their workers, overworking and underpaying them and subjecting them to unsafe working conditions.
\n\n\n\nYou can minimize both costs by opting for brands that manufacture locally; Wuxly and BEDI Studios, for instance, are two brands that manufacture winter jackets in Canada. You can also research brand websites to gauge how transparent they are about their supply chain. Some good signs are partnerships with nonprofits dedicated to improving environmental and worker conditions, sustainability reports, and labels such as Fair Trade Certified.
\n\n\n\nStill, even if you manage to buy a locally made jacket or sleeping bag filled with recycled down, its outer shell will almost certainly be made of a synthetic material like polyester, nylon, or Gore-Tex. This is because natural fibres like cotton, linen, and silk simply cannot be treated to be as durable and hydrophobic as synthetics.
\n\n\n\nDolez acknowledges that there are some items where you’ll have a hard time finding a material that works better than polyester or nylon. In these cases, she advises, “Find it secondhand.” This way, she says, you can give the product a second life instead of creating demand for virgin synthetic fibre. You can extend its life even further by keeping the item for a long time and repairing it when it breaks down.
\n\n\n\nIf you want a thermal insulation material that is naturally derived and biodegradable, opt for down. If you’re not keen on animal-derived products, opt for polyester.
\n\n\n\nWhile synthetic materials are largely unavoidable in the outer shells of thermal-insulation products, you can mitigate their environmental cost by shopping local and/or secondhand; making sure that their inner filling—whether down or polyester—is responsibly sourced, recycled, and not treated with PFAs; and keeping them for a long time.
\n\n\n\nThis story was first published on The Green House, our membership platform. Join us there for early access, discounts and freebies, community discussions, and to support our work telling the large and small stories of how we can live sustainably.
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2421,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,21,8,10,6,39,23,28,41],"tags":[470,612,124,283,231,613,284],"class_list":["post-2420","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-home-garden","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-start-small","category-decider","category-travel","tag-bed","tag-camping","tag-fashion","tag-sun-woo-baik","tag-travel","tag-winter","tag-zeahaa-rehman"],"yoast_head":"\nIt was about a decade ago when Patricia Bishop of Nova Scotia’s TapRoot Farms realized there might be a future in growing not just food, but fabric. A subscriber to the farm’s produce boxes connected her with some people at NSCAD University—Nova Scotia’s major art and design school—who were working with natural fibres and dyes. They told her they wanted to access local materials like linen, but there were no good-quality ones available.
\n\n\n\n“That was a lightbulb moment for me,” Bishop says of the realization that she could plant flax to turn into linen yarn and fabric. “I thought, oh my goodness, our farm grows food for people. Maybe it can also grow textiles and clothes.”
\n\n\n\nBefore technology introduced synthetic fabrics to the world, local cloth producers were present all over the province. “All parts of rural Nova Scotia were producing linen domestically,” says Jennifer Green, associate professor of textiles at NSCAD. “It was prolific until the early 1900s.” The remainder of the century saw a production decline that led to a more or less total loss of the skill set and knowledge required. But now, thanks to the efforts of passionate pioneers like Bishop and Green, small-scale linen production is seeing a resurgence, both in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nIt was in the early 2000s, when Green was studying weaving at NSCAD, that she fell in love with linen. “I was really captivated,” she says. “I loved the structure of it. I loved the dimensional stability. I loved the lustre.” But when her instructors suggested she learn to spin flax fibre into thread to gain more control over her weaving, she was told that in all of Nova Scotia, there was only one person, journalist and historian Barbara Hines, who had that skill.
\n\n\n\nLuckily, Hines was able to teach Green, and her spinning expertise came with a side of the province’s linen-related history and culture. “That was the first time I really started connecting this growing appreciation for linen to history and land and people,” Green says. “There was a sense of this real cultural loss that we’d sustained.”
\n\n\n\nBefore technology introduced synthetic fabrics, local cloth producers were present all over Nova Scotia.
She also learned more about the environmental benefits of using linen rather than carbon-intensive, highly polluting industrial textiles. “Flax requires very little irrigation and very low chemical inputs like herbicides and pesticides,” she says. The plant also has many uses—the seeds, of course, can be eaten or replanted, and the shives (the parts remaining after the fibre is removed) used in a building material called flaxcrete. In Belgium, Green adds, she visited a linen factory where flax dust was collected to be made into highly flammable fire bricks. “There’s really no waste,” she says.
\n\n\n\nLinen isn’t easy to make. It starts with a flax plant, which, when it grows up, contains strands of fibre within its stem. “The point where the fibre transforms to thread or yarn is the moment that the word changes from flax to linen,” writes Raven Ranson in her book Homegrown Linen: Transforming Flaxseed into Fibre. “Before that can happen, the flax is pulled, sheafed, stooked, dried, broken, scutched, and hackled.” The rich vocabulary speaks to the English language’s long relationship with the linen-making process, and the quick translation is that the flax plant’s stems don’t become fibre—then thread or yarn and fabric—without a lot of sweat equity. They must be picked, softened up through exposure to moisture and broken down by mechanical means before the usable fibre is separated and combed, ready to be spun.
\n\n\n\nAs her career progressed, Green developed plans of starting up a research farm, where she could test various flax varieties and growing and processing techniques. “I was looking for land and I wasn’t having much luck,” she says. Then one day she had her own epiphany: why not partner with existing farmers instead, so she could teach them how to grow flax in exchange for gathering some of the fibre for her work? That moment was the birth of the Flaxmobile, a travelling research and teaching project now going into its third year.
\n\n\n\n![\"Jennifer](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gus-Social-Media-Body-Image.jpg\")
Every spring Green gathers a group of volunteer farmers, then journeys around the province to guide them through the flax-growing process. Farmers get 50% of the crop to use as they wish, as well as a planting log Green writes that records “everything that we went through” from sowing to harvest. In 2022, she kept the remaining half of the fibre to spin, weave, cut and sew into work shirts she plans to give to the farmers as gifts. Last year, she paired farmers with local craftspeople, like jewellery makers and slow fashion companies, to produce goods from the crops. “It’s still in the small-scale proof-of-concept stage,” she says. “But we’re hopefully giving the farmers a sense that there is a potential market for this.”
\n\n\n\nAs for Bishop, from the moment she decided to grow textiles, TapRoot began including fibre in its farm ecosystem: linen, wool, even a few nettles. Learning to grow the flax was one thing. The real challenge, Bishop says, was the processing. “It’s really expensive to start a new industry,” she says. It took them a long time to find the right size equipment—they even designed and built some of their own—and there is still machinery on their wish list, like a spinning machine that would allow them to process the long fibres they currently set aside. Also possibly on deck? A puller, which would harvest their flax crop (historically pulled by hand), allowing them to expand how much they grow.
\n\n\n\nFlax requires very little irrigation and very low chemical inputs like herbicides and pesticides.
TapRoot’s equipment has processed fibre from New Brunswick, Québec, even as far as Texas, and it’s instrumental in helping Green’s community of farmers and craftspeople spin their own flax into figurative gold. Bishop has also run plenty of experiments over the years, like the community-supported linen project that had subscribers receiving a finished piece a month—until she realized it was too ambitious a project to keep up with. She also ran a challenge with new design graduates, to create useful items at a reasonable price point. “Reasonable” turned out to be a relative concept. “They made rugs and bags and placemats,” she says. “The items are very expensive, but they’re really beautiful.”
\n\n\n\nTapRoot has grown quite a bit of flax over the past 10 years, but in some ways, its lasting contribution has been to the community—which is what they’re motivated by, alongside the benefits to the planet of slower fibre production. “We really believe it’s important to have this kind of rural infrastructure,” Bishop says. “At some point in the future, we’re going to need to have the capacity within our communities to feed and clothe ourselves. And I want it to be available.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2313,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,8,10,6,38,23],"tags":[30,516,54,124,296,531,582,567,239],"class_list":["post-2312","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-start-small","tag-agriculture","tag-art","tag-atlantic-region","tag-fashion","tag-kat-tancock","tag-natural-fibre","tag-nova-scotia","tag-plant-fibre","tag-textiles"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen I open the doors to my East Vancouver cobbling shop, Awl Together Leather, I never know what will come through them—we’ve patched a leather tea cozy from the ’40s, remade a white leather driving coat for a local billionaire, saved a bison hide from mildew after the Fraser Valley’s disastrous 2021 flooding, and re-heeled many a wedding shoe. My seven years in this industry have never been boring, but it has shown me how behind we are in addressing rising concerns: diversity and equity within our ranks, fast fashion’s lack of sustainability, and how to pass on skills to future generations.
\n\n\n\nShoe repair was once a cornerstone trade that communities of all sizes could count on to repair various essential items and provide stable careers. That is no longer the case. Shoe-repair shops across the continent are shuttering as their retiring owners cannot find anyone to take up the mantle. The solution is seemingly simple: we need a newly trained generation of cobblers who are keen to curb extreme textile waste through repair. Getting there is the tricky part.
\n\n\n\nLearning the trade can be difficult, mainly because of the two main styles of cobbling shops: the father-to-son enterprise or the one-man “mall cobbler.” From what I’ve seen, a lot of one-man shops are bought and sold cheaply, without the time for new owners to be mentored by their predecessors or build technical skills. This lack of mentorship often leads to bad reviews, burn-out, and closure. I’ve noticed that multi-generational shops typically have white owners and are also more well regarded, as they’ve inherited complex skills and better equipment. However, they typically exclude women, queer, Indigenous, or working-class labourers from gaining ownership status, and sometimes they gatekeep the trickier skills, such as how to operate the notoriously finicky outsole stitching machine.
\n\n\n\nFor new cobblers, these challenges can be compounded by racism, sexism, and stubborn bosses. There’s a reason I’ve been using phrases like “father-to-son” and “one-man shop”: Currently 82% of people working in shoe-repair are men (and the same percentage are over 45). Cobblers are typically creative tradesmen that become self-employed to run their own show and don’t necessarily put in the time to become equitable employers or managers interested in growth and skill transfer. Unfortunately, stories of customers and bosses yelling at staff are not uncommon, nor is wage theft; see the half a million dollars’ of wages that Dayton Boots’ was found to have stolen in 2020.
\n\n\n\n![\"Ariss](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Gus-Social-Media-Shoe-Repair.jpg\")
Customers also don’t tend to realize that the median wage of Canadian cobblers is just $16.71 an hour, lower than BC’s $16.75 minimum wage. Comments like “I’m relieved that you speak English” or “Where are your men?” can dissuade diverse apprentices from continuing in the trade. As if the majority of the world’s clothing and shoes manufacturing isn’t done overseas by skillful and fast-sewing women of color.
\n\n\n\nConversely, there is a growing demand for repair, with the established shops quoting month-long wait times while streamlining their services to focus on projects that turn the most profit. This destines items like handbags and sporting equipment for a landfill. There is also a growing number of people wanting to join the trade: every month our shop receives multiple applications from people eager to learn, who we don’t have the capacity to train. Training heirs for shoe repair shops will benefit us all, and the responsibility to do so should be shared across all types of shops.
\n\n\n\nThe growing demand for repair doesn’t change the fact that the environmental impact of fast fashion in footwear and leather can’t solely be solved by repairers and consumers. Large companies often try to greenwash outlandish production volumes by launching small repair programs. Meanwhile the majority of their stock ends up in landfills. Materials that are designed with planned obsolescence—vinyls, TPU, and paper filled-soles—are becoming more popular and problematic. Consumers and repairers can do our best at reducing our own waste, but eliminating fast-footwear waste will require a fundamental shift in values and production.
\n\n\n\nTraining heirs for shoe repair shops will benefit us all, and the responsibility to do so should be shared across all types of shops.
Cobblers are typically the front line in educating customers on sustainable footwear. And you can help us evolve—by supporting your local cobbling shop, paying or tipping towards livable wages, and investing in better-made footwear that is designed to be repaired. Daily, we hear from customers who are looking for alternatives to “one-season” shoes, sick of adding to landfill waste. For rural communities who have already lost their cobbler, we see an eagerness for mail-in services.
\n\n\n\nCobblers have long been the original up-cyclers, diverting textile waste from landfills through repair, restoration, or remaking beloved items. While the retirement of a generation puts our industry at a tipping point, we are primed to help build a circular textile economy. The answer to the dwindling cobbler population lies in making our industry attractive to a new generation, diversifying who we imagine cobblers to be, and remembering all that we can repair.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2233,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[46,19,8,6,39,7,51,9],"tags":[537,554,330,124,555,60,125,94,510,363,107,162],"class_list":["post-2228","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-society","category-vancouver-area","category-west-coast","tag-ariss-grutter","tag-circular-economy","tag-erin-flegg","tag-fashion","tag-leather","tag-opinion","tag-plastic","tag-recycling","tag-shoes","tag-small-business","tag-vancouver","tag-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nEven the most dedicated anti-plastic advocate would have a hard time eliminating the toxic stuff from every facet of their life. One of the more intractable sources is right underfoot: shoes.
\n\n\n\nAnd we wear a lot of them: The average American bought seven pairs of shoes in 2018. People spend more money on shoes than ever before, with global revenue soaring to US$382 billion in 2022. That year, the US market alone saw US$86 billion in revenue, with an estimated 2.7 billion pairs imported into the country. Almost all of them contained some kind of plastic.
\n\n\n\nThat wasn’t always the case. For millennia, shoes were made of natural materials like wood, twine, and leather. The story of modern footwear, however, is one in which a walk around the block can leave behind invisible pollutants. It’s a story of what designer Bill McDonogh has called “monstrous hybrids”: synthetic fibres, foams, and rubbers bound together in complex and hard-to-recycle constructions, all causing persistent and pernicious environmental effects as they get worn down and thrown away. But what exactly are those effects? And what can we do about them?
\n\n\n\nThe histories of industrial materials and footwear have been intertwined since at least the late 1880s, when—according to historian Thomas Turner’s book The Sports Shoe—“competition between [shoe] manufacturers was fierce.” The increasing popularity of outdoor sports, particularly lawn tennis, “created a need for suitable footwear” that allowed people to “move effectively while also preserving the integrity of the court,” Turner writes. Vulcanized rubber had recently come to market, and manufacturers paired soles made of this material with lightweight leather and fabric uppers, catering to upper-middle class Victorians with money and time to spare.
\n\n\n\nAfter World War II, as synthetic plastics saturated the marketplace, things started to change. In leather shoes, “you see this progression from natural leather and the sole being a true [natural] rubber, to a more processed leather that has vinyl mixed in it, and the sole being some kind of thermoplastic base,” said Ariss Grutter—co-owner of Awl Together Leather, a cobbling and leatherworking shop in Vancouver, BC—in an interview.
\n\n\n\nThose thermoplastic polyurethanes, or TPUs, are generally derived from fossil fuels, and Grutter pointed out that they’re typically lighter-weight and cheaper than natural rubbers. Synthetics are also often more comfortable, which helps them sell better, Grutter suggested.
\n\n\n\nThe average American bought seven pairs of shoes in 2018.
But these materials also present a challenge: when TPU gets old or worn out, “It just crumbles apart. And when that happens,” explained Grutter, “you can’t glue to it because it’s structurally unsound.” This means the entire sole needs replacing, which Grutter said can cost as much as buying a new pair.
\n\n\n\nRunning a modern cobbling business means dealing with the aftermath of manufacturers’ preference for cheap but short-lived synthetics over more durable natural materials. Such synthetics can be a headache for Grutter. “One thing we consistently cannot repair is pleather,” they said. “We see it a lot in the lining of tall boots, or mixed in with leather as a way to cut costs in production. We can’t really glue to it; we can’t [repair] it if it’s peeling.”
\n\n\n\nAnd when a shoe isn’t repaired—whether because it can’t be, or its owner didn’t think it could be—it’s likely to go to a landfill. One 2007 study found that 85% of used shoes in the UK were sent to the dump rather than recycled or reused. It’s bad enough that the plastics inside most shoes are derived from fossil fuels; once they’re in the landfill, shoe plastics degrade as they’re exposed to sunlight and release ethylene and methane, two potent greenhouse gasses.
\n\n\n\nPlastic shoes aren’t only a source of pollution when they’re disposed of, though. Recent studies have found that shoes can also be a source of microplastic pollution as we wear them.
\n\n\n\nA real-world wear test that measured how much plastic soles wore down over time was conducted five years ago by a group of environmental science master’s students at the University of California Santa Barbara. The students estimated that between 9,000 and 400,000 metric tonnes of microplastics are released from shoes globally per year from regular use. In a video about the study, team member Andrea Cheung explained that the lower bound of their estimate—9,000 metric tonnes—is roughly the same mass as the first three floors of the Empire State Building, while 400,000 metric tonnes is like the entire building plus 20 more floors.
\n\n\n\nIn a study at Australia’s University of New England, researchers led by PhD candidate Nicola Forster found that trail running events deposit significant plastic fibres and rubber fragments onto soil and rock surfaces in conservation and wilderness areas. They estimate that 100 runners release about 425,000 rubber particles over a 10 km race. These particles ranged in size from 20 microns—about the width of a thin human hair—and 500 microns, the size of a coarse sand grain. With trail running gaining popularity, big events might contribute a huge increase in plastic pollution in protected wilderness areas, the study suggests.
\n\n\n\nThe journal Environmental Science and Technology recently published an opinion piece calling for plastics to be classified as “persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic” (PBT) pollutants. According to the opinion’s 22 co-authors, plastic pollution pervades and persists in all natural environments; it accumulates in aquatic organisms who directly ingest particles and/or take them in through the food chain; and can be toxic, altering genetics, causing inflammation, changing feeding behaviour, and affecting reproduction in aquatic animals. In humans, the social costs for plastic pollution are unevenly distributed, with seafood-dependent coastal communities at greater risk than other populations.
\n\n\n\n“Because the density of plastic is very low, particles can be transported by the wind. That’s why you find pollutants in the Arctic, in Antarctica, and even the Galapagos Islands.”
According to the article, designating plastics as PBT pollutants would help regulatory efforts to “control and eliminate the manufacture and use of harmful or toxic plastics,” among other measures.
\n\n\n\nJuan José Alava, an ocean pollution researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is one of the opinion’s co-authors. He said in an interview that plastic pollution can move around the world thanks to air and ocean currents. “Because the density of plastic is very low, [particles] can be transported by the wind,” he explained. “That’s why you find pollutants in the Arctic, in Antarctica, and even the Galapagos Islands.” An estimated 170 trillion plastic particles are floating on the surface of the world’s oceans, in what researchers have dubbed a “plastic smog.”
\n\n\n\nThe Australian study mentions research that shows plastic particles can indeed be moved around by wind, or end up in groundwater, lakes, and rivers. Another study by Forster showed that microplastics on soil “remain relatively immobile” in the rain, suggesting that particles from shoes can also persist in the environment surrounding trails.
\n\n\n\nWhat happens to the soil that takes in that plastic? Researchers at Konkuk University in Seoul, Korea, studied how different types of shoe fragments affected mung bean plants and the soil they grew in. They found that sneaker sole fragments reduced the soil’s capacity to hold water and leached benzothiazole, a common additive to synthetic rubbers known to inhibit plant growth.Downstream, there are also disturbing effects. UBC’s Alava pointed to how microplastic accumulation in marine birds causes plasticosis, a disease where persistent inflammation from plastic in the gastrointestinal tract causes internal scarring and tissue deformation. This affects their ability to grow, digest food, and ultimately survive.
\n\n\n\nThe footwear industry has seen a surge of small brands like Nothing New and Blueview exploring different methods of making shoes more sustainably, including using post-consumer recycled materials in uppers, laces, and labels, or constructing shoes from industrially compostable materials. These companies only make up a tiny proportion of the market, though.
\n\n\n\nThe biggest brands have also taken some action by making products out of recycled plastics and launching return and recycling programs. But these efforts have been far from robust. Since 1992, Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program has enabled customers to bring their used shoes to a Nike retail location, from which the shoes are shipped off to a recycling centre to be processed into materials for track surfaces and future Nike shoes and garments.
\n\n\n\nOver its 31-year run, Reuse-A-Shoe has recycled an estimated 28 million pairs of shoes. But that number pales compared to what Nike produces. In 2005 alone, the company sold an estimated 12 million pairs of just a single shoe model: the Air Force One.
\n\n\n\nBeyond its low volume, Reuse-A-Shoe has other shortcomings. A 2019 assessment by researchers at the University of Queensland suggested that “the actual effectiveness of this program in limiting Nike’s environmental impact is not clear,” adding that “the major issue, which potentially offsets the environmental gains made by Reuse-A-Shoe, is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation of goods to the recycling facilities.”
\n\n\n\nAdidas had been sourcing some “ocean plastic” from bottles collected at a luxury resort in the Maldives, not on any shoreline.
In 2020, Nike put the program on pause following Covid-induced retail closures, and in 2021, shut it down entirely in the UK as Brexit raised costs about 30%. The Nike website says that Reuse-A-Shoe “may still be found at most Nike stores” in other countries and directs customers to contact their local store to check.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Nike’s major competitor Adidas announced a shoe in 2015 made from “Ocean Plastic,” referring to plastic bottles gathered from polluted shorelines. In 2021 they also released a fully recyclable shoe, which has since been expanded into a line of clothes and shoes called “Made To Be Remade.” The intent was to create products made from a single material that could be ground up and remade into more of the same product. In 2020, Adidas reported that “more than half of all the polyester” in its products was recycled polyester. And in 2022, the company said they produced approximately 27 million pairs of shoes using the aforementioned intercepted plastic.
\n\n\n\nBut the exact proportion of diverted plastic used in those shoes remains unclear. And despite the “Ocean Plastic” branding, the program does not involve recovering plastic from aquatic environments, only the shore. Furthermore, British investigative news show Dispatches found that Adidas had been sourcing some plastic from bottles collected at a luxury resort in the Maldives, not on any shoreline.
\n\n\n\nWith solutions on the manufacturing side that don’t seem sufficient to the problem, are there actions individuals can take? On the microplastic pollution side of things, shoppers can opt out entirely by buying leather- or wooden-soled shoes—but at the expense of availability, affordability, and comfort.
\n\n\n\nIn the context of trail running, the University of New England scientists recommend avoiding sensitive wilderness areas and high-abrasion surfaces—like rock and steep inclines—to stem the flow of microplastics into delicate ecosystems. Other scholars looking into this issue recommend regular cleaning of trail surfaces, which could be done by volunteer crews.
\n\n\n\nTo reduce the quantity of plastic shoe waste overall, individuals can endeavour to give their shoes the longest life possible. A shoe repair renaissance would see the practice of getting shoes fixed when they’re worn out replace the cradle-to-grave model that modern footwear—and indeed, most modern consumer goods—currently follow.
\n\n\n\nOne way to ease that process is to buy shoes whose manufacturer makes getting them repaired easy. Birkenstock, for example, makes all parts of their product available for cobblers to purchase. “I can buy a footbed, the buckles, the soling materials, and I can repair a Birkenstock a thousand times over,” said Grutter.
\n\n\n\nBut even if Birkenstocks don’t fit your style or budget, repair may still be an option. “Cobbling has decreased in popularity,” said Grutter. “So people don’t entirely know what is possible.” Instead of assuming that worn-out goods have only one possible destiny, we can start by checking if they can be fixed.
\n\n\n\n“A lot of people who buy fast-fashion shoes don’t realize that those actually can be repaired,” said Grutter. “I can patch, resole, reglue. I would encourage people to go speak to your local cobbler.”
\n\n\n\nThis article is third in a series about reducing plastic in our lives. The series was made possible by a Vancity Community Branch Grant. Read the first story: “7 Ways to Cut Plastic at Home.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2096,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,8,6,39],"tags":[153,555,125,94,510,283,162],"class_list":["post-2095","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","tag-landfills","tag-leather","tag-plastic","tag-recycling","tag-shoes","tag-sun-woo-baik","tag-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nLeftover fabric scraps from industrial sewing operations and film productions. Textile factory surplus and fabric printed with discontinued patterns. Bundles of cloth handed down from someone’s relative who has stopped sewing. Typically, these textiles would wind up in the landfill. But for East Vancouver designer Tina Ozols, they’re the starting place for the garments she sells under her indie fashion label, Oona Clothing Company.
\n\n\n\nOona is a one-woman show, and visitors to Ozols’ Clark Drive studio are immediately immersed into a work space humming with her creativity, focus, and effort. A sewing area faces the street windows, while the adjacent open studio houses new designs displayed alongside tidy stacks of folded clothing, ready to label and ship. Racks of around 1,000 brown paper patterns hang from clothes hangers.
\n\n\n\nOzols’ path to design started early. “With dolls, I never actually got to them doing anything or talking to each other,” she muses. “I always made sure that their outfits were right first. And when that was settled, I put them away.”
\n\n\n\nThe fashion industry itself gives me a lot of tough feelings.
Her skill is a gift from her grandmothers; both were seamstresses. Her paternal grandmother Alma was born in Latvia in 1920. Once in Canada, she worked at a factory in Toronto using machines to embroider swimming and Brownie badges until she retired. Maternal grandmother Mary, on the other hand, knitted “a million” items for family, made quilts and clothes for children and grandchildren, and also had a doll-making business.
\n\n\n\n“Just seeing someone making things with confidence—and not focusing on any one skill set—allowed me to feel a freedom to explore whatever creative endeavour caught my fancy,” shares Ozols.
\n\n\n\nIn 1999, she completed a three-year fashion design program at Fanshawe College in London, ON. When Ozols first started Oona in 2001, she was making anything she could out of very little. She made jewelry out of small things she had collected over time: beads, chains, pieces of hardware from her parents’ garage. As she started out with almost no budget, one of the first things she made was a run of skirts that were sewn from yardage she assembled herself by weaving strips of scrap fabric together.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/OonaClothing_WebBody1-1.jpg\")
This creative problem-solving probably has something to do with how Ozols identifies: she introduces herself as a maker, rather than a “fashion designer.” When she was younger, she cared about magazines and the designers in them. But now the word “fashion” is loaded for her, both because of its association with fast fashion, and how wasteful that entire industry can be. “I do appreciate the art of it,” she says of high fashion. “I know that it has a place, but the actual industry itself gives me a lot of tough feelings.”
\n\n\n\nInstead of buying into the fast-fashion model, she chooses “to be creative with existing materials—some I may not have chosen.” And she puts energy into thinking about “how to prevent as much waste as I can, and think of ways to use it.” Some of the ways she’s come up with include creating what she calls “frankenfabrics” (yardage she stitches together from fabric scraps that would be otherwise too small to make anything out of), and repurposing thrown-out artists’ canvas frames for making silkscreens. She has used karate belts, zippers, rope, and leather to make accessories like braided belts, toiletry bags, glasses and pencil cases, purses, and wallets. This year, she’s challenged herself to use only what she already has in the studio.
\n\n\n\nOne of those things in the studio is her very first serious sewing machine—and it’s not just for decor. The 26-year-old Pfaff 6085 is still her go-to for some tasks, including sewing every single button hole. Old machines can be fixed, Ozols explains, whereas new ones are made with many plastic parts that can’t be repaired. We’re not taught to take care of things, she says, “because we can get another one or we already have 12 more. Unfortunately that allows us to devalue everything, which is really too bad.”
\n\n\n\nI hear from folks who have had an Oona item for 15-plus years, and it is still holding together.
Planned obsolescence in electronics parallels the way textiles are no longer made to last. Wool is no longer the quality it once was, says Ozols, but we can find vintage coats that last for years. “Being mindful of buying things that will last,” she says, “can balance some of the other choices that we’re forced to make.”
\n\n\n\nOzols makes sure that Oona articles are indeed made to last. “I still hear from folks who have had an Oona item for 10- or 15-plus years and—while faded and worn—[it] is still holding together,” she says. “And it pleases me greatly!”
\n\n\n\nIn addition to her interests in reducing waste and making garments that last, she’s motivated to create clothing that fits as many bodies as possible. Her line of underwear for all bodies—which she calls “Unders”—has been a big hit. The underwear is generally made from all new fabric sourced locally, though she also makes “Heavy Metal Hot Pants” for which the fronts are made from upcycled heavy-metal or punk band t-shirts. She will also make custom Unders out of special t-shirts clients provide.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/OonaClothing_WebBody5-1.jpg\")
Custom underwear might sound like the ultimate luxury, but Ozols makes sure her undergarments are available to community members who can’t afford extravagance. She explains that underwear is something that isn’t donated enough for those in need. Or, if it is, the quality is often poor. So Ozols donates her products regularly to the Evelyne Saller Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which provides support services to low-income and at-risk adults in that neighbourhood.
\n\n\n\nRegular prices for Unders range from C$16-40, depending on the style. But anyone can donate a pair for only C$5, and Ozols will add it to her next delivery. She also tops up the pile each time from her own stock. “Spending $5 for someone to feel that they are being treated with some dignity—instead of being asked to wear used or ill-fitting cheap underwear—is worth it to me!”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1498,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[13,19,8,10,7,23,51,9],"tags":[554,118,124,263,363,283,239,93],"class_list":["post-1477","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-design","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-magazine","category-society","category-start-small","category-vancouver-area","category-west-coast","tag-circular-economy","tag-design","tag-fashion","tag-odette-auger","tag-small-business","tag-sun-woo-baik","tag-textiles","tag-zero-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nEileen Fisher’s secondhand boutique in southeast Seattle doesn’t look like a stereotypical thrift shop. Instead of making customers squeeze through crowded aisles and rummage through packed racks of clothes, Eileen Fisher Renew welcomes them with tidy displays and high ceilings. Along one wall, a dry cleaner’s conveyor belt repurposed into a clothing rack presents garments organized by colour. In front of it, racks and tables feature mini-collections curated by manager Megan Arnaud. Everything is displayed as though it’s brand new. Sometimes new customers don’t even realize it’s a secondhand store.
\n\n\n\nAs the Seattle retail lead for Eileen Fisher RENEW — which takes back and recycles used Eileen Fisher garments — Arnaud is on a mission to destigmatize secondhand shopping. “We want to change the way people think about buying things that have been used before,” she said. “Clothing is one of the most recyclable things we consume, and it is the least recycled of them all.”
\n\n\n\nClothing is one of the most recyclable things we consume, and is the least recycled of them all.
Around the world, people discard clothing at an alarming rate. The average North American, for example, throws away about 37 kg of clothes — or about half their body weight — every year. But less than 15% of it is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, a growing number of brands, ranging from Patagonia to H&M, are taking back old clothing and figuring out how to deal with it in a sustainable way. In the process, they’re promoting secondhand shopping and exploring new recycling techniques. They also want to convince their customers, as well as their competitors, that used clothes are a valuable resource, not junk.
\n\n\n\nClothing sales are rising rapidly — and, with them, clothing waste. More than 100 billion units of clothing were sold in 2015, up from 50 billion units in 2000. Much of the growth is driven by fast fashion, with retailers such as Asos, H&M, and Zara putting out more than a dozen collections a year. According to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, people discard most of these items after wearing them a handful of times, sometimes within a year. The result: mountains of garbage. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.
\n\n\n\nIt’s trash with high environmental costs. In 2018, greenhouse gas emissions from the fashion industry amounted to 2.1 billion metric tonnes, or 4% of global emissions, making the fashion industry a major contributor to the climate crisis, according to McKinsey research. The process of creating clothes also contributes to other types of pollution. Dying clothes often releases toxic chemicals into water systems. Clothing production also drains freshwater resources. For example, it takes 2,700 litres of water to produce a single cotton T-shirt. That’s equivalent to drinking water for one person for two-and-a-half years.
\n\n\n\nPart of the solution to the problem lies in your closet. Michael Stanley-Jones, co-secretary of the United Nations Alliance for Sustainable Fashion from 2018 to 2020, said that reusing and recycling old clothes can help reduce fashion’s ecological footprint. In fact, he said, we will only be able to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — a set of environmental and social targets for the world to reach by 2030 — if the fashion industry transforms. “Reducing fashion waste would support achieving goals on sustainable water consumption, on lowering our carbon footprint, on fewer chemical inputs to agriculture. There’s a whole range of ways fashion is linked to the 2030 agenda.”
\n\n\n\nA growing number of companies, ranging from North Face to Levi’s, have responded to the challenge by launching take-back programs that promise to reuse and recycle the textiles customers bring in. Diverse companies are also encouraging customers to use clothing for as long as possible. Both Patagonia, with its long history of promoting sustainability, and H&M, with its reputation for disposable fast fashion, run websites that give customers tips on how to care for and mend their clothes.
\n\n\n\nThese aren’t simply do-good projects: the fashion industry is responding to its customers’ desires. In a 2020 McKinsey survey, 67% percent of consumers said they considered the use of sustainable materials when purchasing apparel. In addition, over half of Gen Z and Millennials look for items secondhand before purchasing them new, according to research commissioned by online thrift store thredUP.
\n\n\n\nHalf of clothes donated to charity are cut up into rags for industrial use or reprocessed into fibres.
Many take-back programs pass on reusable clothes to charity or secondhand markets in poor countries, where they end up in the trash if no one buys them. But some, including Patagonia, North Face, and Eileen Fisher, are cleaning up, mending, and reselling their own used products. In the process, they’re grabbing a chunk of the growing secondhand market, which may outpace fast fashion within a decade, according to the 2019 State of Fashion report.
\n\n\n\nOf course, not everything can be resold. Companies deal with some clothes that are beyond repair by turning them into new ones, a process called upcycling. One example is Patagonia’s ReCrafted collection. Launched in 2019, it includes vests, bags, and T-shirts made from deconstructed clothes that are too worn for wear. Similarly, Eileen Fisher’s Resewn Collection has featured cashmere sweaters constructed from patches of frayed ones, and flowy tunics made from damaged silk pants.
\n\n\n\nDuring a tour of Eileen Fisher’s recycling warehouse in Seattle in September 2019, Lilah Horowitz, creative lead of Eileen Fisher RENEW, showed off a prototype of a wool coat made from remnants of four different coats. A few weeks later, it sold as part of a collection of sweaters and jackets that retailed for between US$398 and US$798. The collection challenged stereotypes about what constitutes valuable clothing, she said. “It can be high design and sit on this playing field with all these other designers, but it’s all made from already worn and zeroed-out damaged clothes.”
\n\n\n\nOne major obstacle is a lack of technology for textile recycling.
However, only a fraction of old clothes are upcycled in this way. Half of clothes donated to charity are either cut up into rags for industrial use or reprocessed into fibres for furniture stuffing, home insulation, carpet padding, and other uses. And even though H&M has gathered over 140,000 metric tonnes of used textiles since 2013, it has recycled less than 1% of those into new clothes. Between 35% and 45% of the clothes from its take-back program are shredded into fibres for products such as insulation.
\n\n\n\nThis kind of recycling, sometimes called downcycling, creates lower-grade products that ultimately end up in a landfill. That’s bad news for the environment. It’s also a challenge for brands such as H&M and Eileen Fisher that have pledged to build a circular system in which clothes are continuously recycled to reduce demand on the planet’s resources.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebBody.jpg\")
One major obstacle is a lack of technology for textile recycling. For instance, while Eileen Fisher has developed solutions for some of the clothes it receives that are too worn for wear—including a felting machine that turns scraps of fabrics such as cashmere into new textiles—the company still didn’t have solutions for about 10% of them as of 2020. Instead, the company was stockpiling items in warehouses in Seattle and Irvington, NY, until it found ways to recycle them.
\n\n\n\nEven Patagonia, which began recycling soda bottles into fleeces in the early ’90s and now makes 69% of its products from recycled materials, is not sure how all its clothes will be recycled.
\n\n\n\nOne problem is that many clothes contain a mix of fibres that are difficult to separate. “When we think about the most common fabric on the planet, which is a polyester-cotton blend, those two things historically are incompatible with traditional recycling,” said Matt Dwyer, head of product impact and innovation at Patagonia. “Part of the problem is: how do I get them back? You know, what’s the infrastructure? There’s no blue bin for my garment when I’m done with it. But, on the other hand, it’s a technology problem.”
\n\n\n\nFashion companies need to design clothes from the perspective of what can and can’t be recycled.
Clothing recyclability can improve with more thoughtful design, said Cynthia Power, who directed Eileen Fisher RENEW from 2016 to 2021. Fashion companies need to design clothes “from the perspective of what can and can’t be recycled, and to try to limit as much as possible the materials that can’t be recycled,” she said. For example, clothes made of 100% natural fibres such as cotton and wool are easier to handle than natural-synthetic blends.
\n\n\n\nThe fact is, today’s recycling projects — which take in just a fraction of the world’s discarded clothes — are a long way from solving fashion’s garbage crisis. Ultimately, the fashion industry may need to take a page out of Patagonia’s book and work to sell fewer clothes. In 2011, Patagonia launched its Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign with a full-page ad in the New York Times. It featured a Patagonia jacket that took 135 litres of water to make and generated about 9 kilograms of carbon dioxide in the process.
\n\n\n\n“The environmental cost of everything we make is astonishing,” the ad said. “Don’t buy what you don’t need.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":867,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,8,6,39],"tags":[256,128,124,366,94,639,93],"class_list":["post-517","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","tag-alia-dharssi","tag-business","tag-fashion","tag-industry","tag-recycling","tag-shopping","tag-zero-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nIs recycling the fix for fast fashion’s infamous footprint?
\n"},"alt_text":"A jean jacket customized with red lower half, an orange flower patch, and a white square patch embroidered with flowers.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"293494","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"17482","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"139253","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"7922","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"88206","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-Recycling-Solve-Fashions-Ecological-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=867"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":19,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/living/fashion-beauty/","name":"Fashion & Beauty","slug":"fashion-beauty","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nIf you shop for makeup or skin care products — regardless of whether you keep up with new releases or still use products bought on sale two years ago (guilty!) — you have likely come across brands touting their “clean” offerings.
\n\n\n\nThere is no official definition of “clean beauty.” In general, products labeled this way replace potentially harmful synthetics with natural ingredients. These can be organic (produced without harmful pesticides), natural (sourced from nature and minimally modified), naturally derived (sourced from nature with some chemical modification), chemical-free (sans any synthetic chemicals), non-toxic (free of harmful chemicals like formaldehyde, lead, etc.), or green (produced in an environmentally friendly way). “Clean” can also refer to product packaging made with sustainable materials and methods. The implication is that “clean” products are better for us, and probably the planet too.
\n\n\n\nClean beauty products are not necessarily safer or better than other products.
Clean beauty’s popularity raises many questions. Are these products really better? Or is this term just another form of greenwashing at best, and scaremongering at worst?
\n\n\n\n“Clean beauty products are not necessarily safer or better than other products,” Dr. Brad A. Brod, a clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Asparagus via email. “[The phrase] gives consumers a false sense of security that a product with that label is safer than other products, and this is not based on evidence.”
\n\n\n\nSo, is there a way for consumers to verify that a brand and its products are truly less harmful than others? Enter the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
\n\n\n\nEWG is a non-profit, American lobbying group founded in 1993 by lobbyists who wanted to reform US chemical safety and agricultural laws. It educates shoppers about potentially harmful chemicals in products they use — ranging from food, to household products, to cosmetics — and lobbies for policies that prohibit or suppress the use of these chemicals. In 2004, EWG launched the online database Skin Deep to educate the public about potentially harmful chemicals in their products, followed by the EWG Verified label in 2015.
\n\n\n\nAccording to EWG’s 2020 annual report, the organization generated approximately US$13 million dollars in revenue. This included about US$4 million raised from foundations, and US$6 million from individual donations. Additionally, EWG earned US$2 million from licensing and consulting related to EWG Verified.
\n\n\n\nSkin Deep is an online database containing detailed information about the ingredients of over 60,000 cosmetic and personal-care products sold in the US, and potential human health hazards linked to their ingredients. Surprisingly for a group with “environmental” in the name, EWG doesn’t explicitly concern itself with ecological harms.
\n\n\n\nThe database gives each ingredient a data availability rating and a hazard or concern rating. The former refers to how much scientists know about an ingredient and its potential risks, while the latter refers to how hazardous it might be. Skin Deep gives products an overall rating based on a weighted average of its ingredients’ scores. For example, 16 of an unscented Dove soap bar’s 17 ingredients are rated low concern, while one is rated moderate concern, leading to an overall low-concern rating.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebBody.jpg\")
The EWG Verified mark on a product indicates that a company’s formulations and manufacturing processes meet EWG’s safety criteria. Currently, makeup and products for babies, hair, nails, oral hygiene, and skin can receive an EWG Verified label, though EWG is starting to include household products.
\n\n\n\nIf a company wants an EWG label on a product, it must disclose all the product’s ingredients, including fragrances and flavors. No certified product can contain any ingredients on EWG’s unacceptable or restricted lists, and all personal-care products must attain Skin Deep’s low-concern rating. EWG forbids all ingredients restricted by European regulators, who have stricter requirements than the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Products must also pass tests looking for potentially harmful microbes like E. coli.
\n\n\n\nThe company also needs to follow the European Union’s labeling guidelines for nanomaterials and ensure manufacturing practices in line with the FDA’s guidelines — which include assessing the sustainability of buildings, facilities, equipment, and raw materials. They must commit to submitting reports on product problems or serious adverse events — such as disfigurement, hospitalization or death — to both the FDA and EWG, as well as abide by any future changes in EWG’s unacceptable and restricted lists.
\n\n\n\nEWG’s ratings of “toxic” materials and the data available about them is sometimes inaccurate.
EWG charges companies a fee of US$250 to apply for the label. If an application is approved, the company must pay additional fees to use EWG Verified. Ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per year, fees vary depending on the company’s size, and the number and sales of EWG Verified products, among other factors, according to EWG’s website. Every three years, the company must seek recertification and pay a renewal fee to continue using the EWG verified logo on its product.
\n\n\n\nEWG is the sole body involved in verifying that a company is eligible for the logo and issuing the logo. Unlike all other eco-logos reviewed by Know Logo to date, EWG Verified does not depend on third-party certifiers or overseers to confirm that companies meet their standards. This lack of independent review could lead to conflict of interest: namely, EWG might certify products to collect certification fees, rather than because they’ve met a vigorous standard.
\n\n\n\nConsumers can buy EWG Verified products directly from brands’ websites, or find them at retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, among others. Well-known brands with EWG Verified products include Revlon, Olay, Herbal Essences and Almay.
\n\n\n\nEWG Verified seems like an easy way to verify if cosmetic and personal-care products are “clean.” The label forces companies to be completely transparent about all the ingredients in their products — including fragrances and flavors, which companies often don’t disclose since they’re considered trade secrets. This makes it easy for consumers to spot potential hidden allergens.
\n\n\n\nHowever, a product’s lack of an EWG Verified logo — or a high-concern rating on Skin Deep — doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe. EWG’s ratings of “toxic” materials and the data available about them is sometimes inaccurate.
\n\n\n\nTake formaldehyde. Skin Deep rates four chemicals that release formaldehyde — diazolidinyl urea, imidazolidinyl urea, DMDM hydantoin, quaternium-15 — with toxicity scores of 5, 5, 6, and 7 , respectively. (Scores are out of 10, where 1 means “low hazard”). The Skin Deep website also states that the latter two are either known to be, or similar to, “human toxicant[s].”
\n\n\n\nHowever, this toxicity depends on the amount included in cosmetic products. “Many safe products contain formaldehyde-releasing preservatives which release extremely low levels of formaldehyde well beneath the threshold for safety,” explained UPenn’s Brod. “Small amount[s] of formaldehyde are in our bodies as a metabolic byproduct.”
\n\n\n\nParabens are another ingredient demonized by EWG and the clean beauty industry at large. A 2019 article on EWG’s website arguing against paraben-use in cosmetics states that “scientific studies suggest that parabens can disrupt hormones in the body and harm fertility and reproductive organs, affect birth outcomes, and increase the risk of cancer.”
\n\n\n\nTo encourage consumer distrust of substances that aren’t necessarily toxic risks crossing the line into fearmongering.
Brod explains, however, that there are hundreds of parabens, only a few of which are used in cosmetics. “The few used in the US personal-care products industry have been vetted and tested by experts and found to be safe and non-carcinogenic,” he explained, pointing out that both the Cosmetic Ingredient Review and FDA have found parabens used in personal care products safe.
\n\n\n\n“Studies in rats and yeast cells have shown parabens to be thousands to millions of times weaker than estradiol, an endogenous sex hormone,” says Brod about parabens’ potential to disrupt hormones (“endogenous” means it’s naturally produced within the body). “Given that women are exposed to much more potent natural estrogens, along with estrogens in oral contraceptive pills and even phytoestrogens in food, the extremely weak estrogenicity of parabens is unlikely to be meaningful.”
\n\n\n\nAdditionally, EWG’s credibility has been tainted by its history of overstating chemical risks — such as its annual “dirty dozen” list of fruits and vegetables high in pesticides. The list’s methodology does not “follow any established scientific procedures” according to a 2011 UC Davis study published in the Journal of Toxicology. The most recent version of EWG’s annual sunscreen guide suggests that Vitamin A, a common ingredient in many sunscreens, may cause “cancerous tumors when used on skin exposed to sunlight,” despite there being limited data to support this link.
\n\n\n\nSkin Deep also states that “companies are allowed to use almost any ingredient they wish without regard for how safe they are” since “the US government doesn’t review the toxicity of products.” Cosmetic products and ingredients in the US do not have to be approved by FDA to go to market; however, the FDA monitors cosmetic products and their ingredients and takes regulatory action against products “found to be in violation [of rules set by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act],” according to an email from FDA spokesperson Courtney Rhodes.
\n\n\n\nWhile motivating companies and governments to be more transparent about ingredients in cosmetics is beneficial to consumers, it’s important to remember that a substance’s toxicity often depends on its concentration. To encourage consumer distrust of substances that aren’t necessarily toxic at the right concentrations risks crossing the line into fearmongering.
\n\n\n\nEncourages transparency, but overstates some risks. Not third-party certified, or concerned with eco-hazards (despite the name).
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1299,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,29,8,10,23],"tags":[97,117,75,640,284],"class_list":["post-724","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-know-logo","category-living","category-magazine","category-start-small","tag-beauty","tag-certification","tag-health","tag-skin-care","tag-zeahaa-rehman"],"yoast_head":"\nClean beauty’s popularity raises many questions. Are these products really better? Or is this term just another form of greenwashing at best, and scaremongering at worst? Enter Know Logo.
\n"},"alt_text":"Makeup brushes in a roll-up case, small containers, nail polish, and flowers spread out on a grey table.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"305803","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"19093","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"170850","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"8690","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"102012","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Clean-Beauty-Standard_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1299"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":19,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/living/fashion-beauty/","name":"Fashion & Beauty","slug":"fashion-beauty","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nWhen I first met Sharon Kallis in October 2020, she was weaving a coat she had been working on for 12 years. That is if you account for the process as she does: 11 years of knowledge-gathering, added to the time taken to hand-harvest, prepare, and weave the lustrous brown fibres for the fabric. After that, the coat could be assembled: the various pieces could be stitched together, the pockets knit and sewn in, and the seams finished. But the length of Kallis’ undertaking wasn’t the only reason this would be an extraordinary coat. She was also crafting the garment from a plant most people fear: stinging nettle.
\n\n\n\nKallis is an artist, but not the kind that you’ll find holding gallery shows or lounging around a paint-speckled urban studio. In the late 1990s, she had just graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, too broke to afford art materials. Then she discovered a green-waste pile in her local park, where the park’s gardener had been discarding grounds-work clippings.
\n\n\n\n“I started poking that pile of sticks with this attitude of like, ‘Enough of anything can be made into something.’” That moment led to two decades of learning about, and working with, unwanted plants from Vancouver’s public parks — like nettle.
\n\n\n\nNettle thread creates a fabric even softer and stronger than linen.
Kallis, who has a shock of short white hair and a dimple in her right cheek, talks with her hands as she tells me that people often misunderstand nettle. They often see it as invasive, even though it’s native to the northern hemisphere. Plus, most people associate it with its sting: the plant’s deep-green, toothed leaves and long stems are coated in tiny hairs that inject acids and neurotransmitters into the skin, causing a rash. In Kallis’ experience, though, the pain isn’t extreme. “The fear is worse than the thing itself,” she says with a wry smile.
\n\n\n\nIn the history of textile agriculture, nettle was once used in clothing, thread, fishing nets, and travel bags, but Kallis says that it became sidelined in favour of plants like flax and cotton because it’s difficult to process. Kallis harvests the plant with her bare hands — she says she feels only minor stings, and there is medicine in the plants that helps with her arthritis. She softens bundles of nettle stems underfoot, and cracks the stems open to reveal precious fibres.
\n\n\n\nFollowing that, she rolls the nettle fibres on her thighs, makes them run parallel by “carding” or combing them, and boils them in borax, which removes oils and prepares the fibres for dyeing. Only then are they ready to be spun into thread. That thread creates a fabric even softer and stronger than linen. To Kallis, that’s a fabric whose value cannot be easily measured.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebBody.jpg\")
“I have ancestral roots that connect me to Ireland, Wales, Britain, Scotland, and Germany, all of which are places that nettle has a very strong history in clothing.” Nettle, Kallis says, allows her to connect her own ancestral traditions with those of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, upon whose unceded territory she lives and works. The Indigenous people of the BC coast used to make mats and fishing nets out of nettle: “There’s a shared tradition that we have.”
\n\n\n\nThe tradition of weaving with nettle indeed spans many cultures. Kallis tells me she has learned that in ancient agrarian societies, enslaved people and the poor would clothe themselves with nettle, while landowners wore linen. Years ago, Kallis heard someone call nettle “the clothing of the landless.” As someone who doesn’t anticipate ever owning property, that term resonates with her.
\n\n\n\nIn Vancouver, real estate is among the most expensive in Canada, and Kallis lives below the poverty line. Her work is funded through grants and small stipends from the province and the city, but those funds don’t cover all her work hours. A production grant from the BC Arts Council covered only around 35–40% of the time she spent producing the nettle coat. Still, Kallis says she has an excellent life, which she attributes to social housing: She rents a small co-op apartment in the Downtown Eastside, often called Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. That apartment is where she rode out the first pandemic winter weaving her coat.
\n\n\n\nWeaving with nettle — which springs up from the roadsides, ditches, and wastelands of the Vancouver area — has brought Kallis to the roots of what we wear.
An outsider might assume that weaving is a solitary process, but Kallis’ practice is deeply rooted in community and collective discovery. She says that working with and learning from four Squamish women — Sesemiya-Tracy Williams, Meagan Innes, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, and Senaqwila Wyss — enabled her to reframe and deepen her relationship to plants in the first place.
\n\n\n\nWhen she works with nettle fibres today, she is drawing upon techniques she learned from two “textile skillholders” in her community — Penny Coupland and Karen Barnaby — as well as nettle weaver Allan Brown based in Brighton, UK. As part of EartHand Gleaners Society, Kallis’ art nonprofit, she also runs conversation circles with people interested in the stories of their own ancestral textiles.
\n\n\n\nIn August 2021, Kallis put the finishing touches on the coat. When we caught up several months later, she likened the feeling to completing a good book. “You have this moment of mourning,” she says. “Of like, ‘Now what?’” She’s looking ahead to the next cloth she wants to weave and the next garment she wants to make — for her, there’s so much left to explore. “Nettle Pants 2030,” she jokes. In the meantime, the coat will be included in an exhibition called Plant Kingdom opening at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, NS, this May.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebBody2.jpg\")
There is a disconnect between mass-produced fast fashion and the effort required to create a single garment from locally sourced materials; Kallis’ process speaks to this. We often don’t understand that effort because we don’t know where our clothing comes from. Kallis tells me that she posted a picture of the unfinished coat in a Facebook group called Nettles for Textiles. A stranger messaged her to ask about commissions: how much would it cost for her to make them a similar garment? As she recounted this for me, she laughed. “It’s like, trust me. You can’t afford it.”
\n\n\n\nFive years ago, Kallis was learning to grow and spin linen with local weaver Rebecca Graham. “I counted my hours of labor — just the spinning for linen would have put this skein of yarn at about $300 if I was paying myself a living wage. That wasn’t taking into consideration Rebecca’s time in growing the flax and processing it into strips ready for spinning, nor the value of the land that we were growing the flax on.”
\n\n\n\nWe often don’t understand the effort required to create a single garment from locally sourced materials because we don’t know where our clothing comes from.
Kallis believes that once you start to unpack how labour-intensive it is to make clothing, you’ll realize how much our wardrobes are “subsidized” by exploited workers. “We are so indebted to people living poor lives in order for us to clothe ourselves the way we do.” That was true even before fast fashion: the history of cotton in the United States is intertwined with the history of slavery.
\n\n\n\nSo weaving with nettle — which springs up from the roadsides, ditches, and wastelands of the Vancouver area — has brought Kallis to the roots of what we wear. “The story of Rumpelstiltskin and the farmer’s daughter spinning straw into gold — that’s the story of clothing,” she tells me. “The gold is cloth.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1346,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[13,19,8,6,38,7],"tags":[30,298,531,567,239,240],"class_list":["post-784","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-design","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-society","tag-agriculture","tag-jadine-ngan","tag-natural-fibre","tag-plant-fibre","tag-textiles","tag-weaving"],"yoast_head":"\nSharon Kallis took 12 years to make a coat from stinging nettle, including 11 years of knowledge-gathering, and hand-harvesting, preparing, and weaving the lustrous brown fibres into fabric.
\n"},"alt_text":"Sharon Kallis's hands sewing panels of woven nettle into a coat. She wears rings on her right thumb and left ring finger.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"117811","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"15341","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"104511","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"6762","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"66909","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reclaiming-a-Tradition-of-Weaving-with-Nettle_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1346"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":13,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/society/art-design/","name":"Art & Design","slug":"art-design","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nWhen 3-year-old Jude Leyton of Kingston, ON, was found in the woods last spring after three days lost and alone, the constables on his case were shocked he was alright — and credited his wool sweater for keeping him warm. When Leyton’s parents put that sweater on, they likely had no idea it would save his life.
\n\n\n\nWool is a radical textile hidden in plain sight.
I’m not saying we should dress our children in sweaters every day lest the unthinkable happen. But this story reminds us that wool is a radical textile hidden in plain sight. Particularly as we search for alternatives to oil-based-polymer clothing made in exploitative factories — wool just might be the soil-to-soil solution for so many of our woes.
\n\n\n\nWool is truly a wonder-fibre. Wool’s air pockets can help us regulate our body temperature. Its elasticity makes it ideal for long-lasting, well-fitting clothing. Wool can absorb up to one-third of its weight in water without feeling damp. It is naturally fire retardant (as you may remember from my article about mattresses). Because wool doesn’t wrinkle, nor does it like being washed and dried, tired parents do even less laundry. I have literally never washed most of my kids’ sweaters.
\n\n\n\nThe Vikings’ sails and overclothes were likely made of wool; it’s difficult to say for sure, as these organic materials have long since biodegraded, a testimony to wool’s eco-footprint. The mythical Amazon warrior women are depicted as wearing felted wool garments in battle. Women resisting German occupation in both WWI and WWII stitched coded messages in their knitting patterns.
\n\n\n\nI have literally never washed most of my kids’ sweaters.
Parents scouring Facebook Marketplace for vintage cable knits are a far cry from these epic histories. Particularly because wool-coveting is often accompanied by worry about the cost. A responsibly sourced Merino base layer set from Canadian company Wee Woolies costs about US$70 — that’s almost half of our weekly grocery bill. A pair of Smart Wool socks is about US$13, or three dinners’ worth of proteins. Even though I know wool’s qualities make it invaluable, that’s still a lot.
\n\n\n\nBut I feel like wearing ethically sourced wool is a teeny, tiny act of rebellion against the fast-fashion petrostate. So I scour buy-and-sell groups; if I’m lucky I can find a base layer set for US$20 and a set of four pairs of pre-loved socks for US$12. But thrifting takes mental bandwidth and time, and still isn’t free. All hail hand-me-downs and friends who know the value of circulating our sacred wool items.
\n\n\n\nPeople who know me are likely chuckling by this point (in a mockingly exasperated way, if they’re my husband). At the end of last year, I started needle felting, which is the art of stabbing a very poky needle into loose wool until it becomes a solid sculpture. I just love the way that wool’s tiny fibres weave together with friction and force to create something magical. Since then I’ve become deeply enamoured with all things sheep and sheep adjacent. I knew I was in a special place when I started watching Outlander to ogle the wool, not the humans wearing it.
\n\n\n\nFor thousands of years, humans made nature into clothing — silk, wool, cotton, flax — knowing each step like the backs of our very tired hands. Of course, the need for textiles would also cause enslavement, wars, and colonization. But over the last century, humans have discovered increasingly toxic ways to make textiles faster and cheaper: from chemicals (a recent study found toddler clothing from online retailer Shein contained 20 times the safe limit of lead), to pesticides (in the early 1970s, 80% of US-produced DDT was used on cotton crops), to oil-based textiles (about 60% of material made into clothing worldwide is plastic, according to the United Nations Environment Program).
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WoolBody1.jpeg\")
Author and farmer Rebecca Burgess is the executive director of the American non-profit organization Fibershed. In her 2021 book of the same name, Burgess warns that “we have been blindly wearing carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors on the biggest organ of our body — how crazy is that?” Burgess believes that, like we did with tobacco and DDT, we’ll realize too late what we’ve done to our bodies and our ecosystems.
\n\n\n\nBurgess is passionate about “fibresheds”: regional textile networks of local farmers, spinners, weavers, designers, dyers, and creators. These fibresheds are focused “on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity of all the parts.” Soil to skin, back to soil again. Of course, Indigenous peoples around the world and through time have been deeply connected with their fibresheds, but without this name attached. Nonetheless, I like how the word “fibreshed” links into our notions of watershed and foodshed.
\n\n\n\nWhen considering expanding my family’s wool wardrobe, I was briefly lured by flashy companies. I considered Wool&’s dress challenge, in which customers get a US$100 gift certificate for wearing a Wool& merino dress every day for 100 days and document each outfit. I’m proud to say I paused before hitting “buy now” on any of their dresses, which cost between US$128–188.
\n\n\n\nAlthough the company motto is “Live simply. Consume carefully. Do good,” what specifically are they doing to support those principles? In some cases, they say, Australian wool is shipped to China for processing, and then to Portland, OR, for retail. Even if I accepted this dress would cross oceans, I’d want to know about their farm standards. By late 2024, they aim to phase out mulesing (painful skin removal to prevent parasites), but that’s a basic no-brainer. I’d want to see way more that’s in line with the Responsible Wool Standard, for example.
\n\n\n\nLarge companies that walk the talk when it comes to responsible wool are rare. But it isn’t hard to source felting and weaving fibres close to home, as Alberta has the second highest number of sheep in Canada, with almost a fifth of the country’s sheep in total. We have one of Canada’s few large mills, which are also among the last North American mills to perform every step of the process themselves, from super-dirty raw fleece to finished yarn and roving (carded and combed fibres that have not yet been spun). They source their wool with integrity from Western Canadian producers adhering to ethical standards. Their dyes are minimal-impact, and they even boast a line of naturally dyed yarn.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/WoolBody2.jpeg\")
Keeping with the idea of exploring my fibreshed, I drove 20 minutes to spend a morning with Tara Klager, the writer, shepherd, and farmer behind Providence Lane Homestead. My 4-year-old human, Mini Ewe, and I watched the “flerd” (flock/herd of sheep and alpaca) go about their happy daily routines. Many of Klager’s sheep even follow her around, not because they are mindlessly obedient—as the ridiculous phrase “sheeple” implies—but because, as Klager points out, they are excellent judges of character, and she is their person.
\n\n\n\nProvidence Lane is grounded in regenerative agriculture, a beautiful term with no universally accepted definition. It incorporates permaculture, biodynamics, the water cycle, rotational grazing, and so much more, as I’ve written about elsewhere. Sheep, it turns out, can actually revitalize our essential native grasslands and play a key role in rebalancing the ecosystem when raised in line with regenerative agriculture.
\n\n\n\nFor thousands of years, humans made nature into clothing, knowing each step like the backs of our very tired hands.
Klager wants people (you?) to contact local farms, go for a visit, and ask good questions about whether their practices match your values. How does your farm help heal the land? What specific regenerative strategies do you use, if any? Tell me about your sheep care; what makes a healthy, happy animal in your mind? What specific animal care standards do you meet or exceed? Klager is proud to be animal-welfare certified by A Greener World, for example.
\n\n\n\nTo Klager, regenerative agriculture is about restoring balance to the land through technical expertise and exceptional animal care. “Where I’m standing is as much of an actor as I am. The land isn’t a canvas I can impose my vision upon. It’s a stage with a full cast and crew and I’m one more player, just the latest in millennia.” Regenerative agriculture is “a good way to reconcile the future with the past, science with storytelling, legacy with inspiration, settler with Indigenous, and humanity with the natural world we’ve worked so hard to subdue.”
\n\n\n\nKlager is able to make this beautiful vision a reality. But she knows too well that wool is hugely devalued on the world market. Seventy-five years ago, she said, wool was a hot commodity and Canada was on the leading edge. But in the era of fast fashion and synthetics, some shepherds are forced to destroy their fleece because it’s not worth the time and money to process. But some, like Klager, are taking it to woollen mills, spinning it themselves, and hand-dyeing it for personal use or to sell. In fact, I recently helped on a sheep-shearing day, and came away with floofy raw fleece to clean, card, and spin or felt.
\n\n\n\nI just bought a pair of locally hand-dyed indigo wool socks from The General Bean, which I’m quite excited about. I like picking up locally made woollen goods like these, but for more substantial pieces, I have to go farther afield. I’ve been lucky enough to buy some key pieces from lovely Canadian companies like Anian, whose wool is post-consumer recycled. I regularly check the Patagonia sales for myself, and Wee Woolies for the kids, as they both make efforts to ensure ethical, sustainable sourcing (though much of their wool is from New Zealand).
\n\n\n\nIn the era of fast fashion, shepherds are forced to destroy their fleece because it’s not worth the time and money to process.
I don’t buy these items often and so many can’t afford them at all. So until more local-ish wool options are produced at a scale large enough to be affordable (which I believe is possible with enough consumer demand and fibreshed advocacy) I’m happy thrifting and getting hand-me-downs, felting the kids some not-plastic toys, and knitting the occasional small piece.
\n\n\n\nI bought a skein of yarn Klager spun, made with adorable Shelby and M’lynn’s fleece; I’m making Mini Ewe a headband to keep her hair out of her eyes at ballet class. It’s a minuscule action, but every stitch puts a tiny, rebellious smile on my face.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":307,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,20,8,10,43,22],"tags":[249,124,531,60,94,239,530],"class_list":["post-309","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-kids-parenting","category-living","category-magazine","category-black-sheep-parent","category-voices","tag-brianna-sharpe","tag-fashion","tag-natural-fibre","tag-opinion","tag-recycling","tag-textiles","tag-wool"],"yoast_head":"\nMini Ewe meets real-live ewes at Providence Lane Homestead near Cochrane, AB.
\n"},"alt_text":"","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1125,"file":"2022/08/Wool-1.jpg","filesize":"307404","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Wool-1-300x225.jpg","width":300,"height":225,"filesize":"22143","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1-300x225.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Wool-1-1024x768.jpg","width":1024,"height":768,"filesize":"182756","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1-1024x768.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Wool-1-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"8304","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Wool-1-768x576.jpg","width":768,"height":576,"filesize":"111943","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1-768x576.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Wool-1.jpg","width":1500,"height":1125,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wool-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=307"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":19,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/living/fashion-beauty/","name":"Fashion & Beauty","slug":"fashion-beauty","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\n“Does it smell like marijuana?”
\n\n\n\n“Is it at all soft?”
\n\n\n\n“Does it scratch your skin?”
\n\n\n\nThese are some of the questions people ask when I mention that my jacket is made from hemp fabric. Perhaps my favourite of all is: “Can you get high by wearing it?”
\n\n\n\nIn brief: no, it doesn’t smell like marijuana. Yes, it’s somewhat soft, and no, not scratchy. You can’t get high from wearing hemp, but wouldn’t that be something!
\n\n\n\nPurchased two years ago from a boutique in Toronto’s west end, my boxy, earthy-brown hemp jacket had an above-average price tag thanks to its organic materials and “Made in the USA” label. I asked myself: Is it worth it? Can I afford it? Will I wear it? The salesperson, noticing my hesitation, gave me a persuasive pitch on hemp clothing: its durability, breathability, and tendency to get softer with age. They told me to see the jacket as an “investment piece,” both for my closet and the future of fashion. I was convinced.
\n\n\n\nThe fashion industry has a sustainability problem. Its heavy use of land, water, and fossil fuels — combined with complex global supply chains and the pervasive use of chemicals in textile dyeing and processing — makes it one of the world’s major polluters. According to the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, the industry is the second biggest consumer of water and generates 20% of the world’s wastewater. Increased use of synthetic fibres derived from petroleum, like polyester, is making things worse, because their production emits more greenhouse gasses than cotton’s.
\n\n\n\nOne way for fashion to lessen its impacts is to invest in alternative processes and materials, like hemp.
One way for fashion to lessen its impacts is to invest in alternative processes and materials, like hemp. Many news organizations and blogs have written about its potential — the Toronto Star called it an “up-and-coming sustainable superstar.” Major brands like Stella McCartney, Patagonia, and Levi’s have included hemp textiles in recent collections.
\n\n\n\nWhile hemp could indeed contribute to a more sustainable fashion industry, increasing its presence in our closets is easier said than done. In theory, Canada could lead the way to this greener fashion era — hemp is one of the few fibre crops that can grow in our climate, and we grow a lot of it. But we’re a long way from having the necessary infrastructure to grow, process, and manufacture hemp textiles on a global scale.
\n\n\n\nFashion may market hemp as a new material, but the earliest hemp cloth found by archaeologists dates back to 8000 BCE. And it’s not like making fabric from hemp was a lost art. Dr. Jan Slaski, a long-time hemp researcher, told me about growing up in Poland, where cannabis was grown for centuries to make into clothing and cordage. “My dream was to own a nylon T-shirt,” he says. “That was the coolest thing a young kid could have. Nobody dreamt of having a hemp shirt because everyone was already wearing them.”
\n\n\n\nBut while Slaski and his peers were wearing hemp, kids in North America were not. It was illegal to grow any kind of cannabis in Canada between 1938 and 1998. Similarly, the US effectively banned the cultivation of cannabis from 1937 until 2018. Cultivation of industrial hemp was banned in some European countries during the 20th century, but never all of them.
\n\n\n\nIndustrial hemp is the same species — Cannabis sativa — as recreational marijuana. The primary difference is that marijuana contains up to 30% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the principal compound that gets people high), whereas hemp contains no more than 0.3% THC.
\n\n\n\nNobody dreamt of having a hemp shirt because everyone was already wearing them.
They also look and grow differently. Hemp plants cultivated for fibre are slender and grow 3–5 metres tall, so that long fibres can be extracted from their stalks. Marijuana plants are short and bushy, as are hemp varieties cultivated for cannabidiol (CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid garnering attention for its therapeutic uses), which is derived from the plants’ flowering heads and leaves. The most common hemp cultivars in Canada are grown as a grain (to use in food or to press for oil).They are narrow and grow up to two metres. Dual-purpose varieties also exist that allow both grain and fibre to be extracted from the same plant.
\n\n\n\nSince decriminalizing its cultivation in 1998, Canada has become a major hemp producer. In 2019 a total of 37,435 hectares of hemp were planted in Canada, an increase of about 6,000 hectares from 2018. But little of that is for textiles. “I would guesstimate that this year about 80–85% of the acres will be devoted to grain,” Slaski tells me, “while fibre and CBD account for the rest.”
\n\n\n\nGiven all that Canadian hemp cultivation, I wonder: why wasn’t my jacket labeled “Made in Canada”?
\n\n\n\nHemp as a crop has numerous environmental benefits. It revives unhealthy soil by “vacuuming” out heavy metals, pesticides, or radioactive materials. It yields more fibre per area cultivated than either cotton or flax. Hemp’s deep and robust root system allows for growth with minimal rain. And it requires no pesticides and minimal fertilizer (if any at all). “I never sprayed my crop,” says Danyka Dunseith, a first-generation hemp farmer located in Stratford, ON. “That’s the amazing thing about hemp — it wants to grow and it will grow regardless of the terrain.”
\n\n\n\nWhile hemp is indeed forgiving, it requires proper management to yield a commercially viable crop. “If you put hemp seeds in the ground in your garden, and leave it without watering or anything, it will grow,” says Slaski, who works at InnoTech Alberta, a provincially funded research institute. “But it will be one fifth or one tenth of what it will be capable of delivering.” Along with his team in Vegreville, AB, Slaski steers a processing facility developing hemp fibre applications. He also holds field days to educate potential hemp farmers on how to successfully manage the crop.
\n\n\n\nTo understand why a Canadian hemp textile industry didn’t immediately blossom in 1998, it helps to understand how the plant is made into fabric. Hemp stalks (also called straw) contain two types of fibre: bast and hurd, which can be extracted from the same stalk. Sturdier bast is derived from the outer layer, and hurd consists of the shorter, finer fibres of the central woody core. Absorbent hurd accounts for about half the stalk and can be used as animal bedding, building materials, and garden mulch. Bast — with its strength and mildew-resistance — is suitable for textiles, paper, and rope, and can make up between 10 and 40% of the stalk.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebBody.jpg\")
“It would be a shame, or economically unfeasible, or plainly stupid, if [Canada] wouldn’t develop applications for both types of fibres,” says Slaski.
\n\n\n\nThe first step in converting hemp stalks to textile fibres is “retting,” letting stalks rot to loosen the bonds between fibres. The second step, decortication, is a mechanical process that breaks the stalks to separate bast from hurd. Next comes scutching: broken stems are beaten to extract remaining bits of hurd. Degumming removes sticky pectin and lignin from the fibre. Hackling, one of the final steps, is the process of combing the bast in preparation for spinning. Only after all this is it ready to be spun into a yarn, and eventually woven or knit into fabric.
\n\n\n\nSome of this process is currently happening in Canada. Québec-based Eko-Terre — a sister company of major uniform-maker, Logistik Unicorp — specializes in the sustainable development of natural textile fibres. In 2011, Sustainable Development Technology Canada — a federal funding body — committed over C$1 million to Logistik, some of which has funded Eko-Terre’s research into the best conditions for cultivating hemp for textiles in Canada, how to decorticate it, and other processes for converting straw to textile fibre.
\n\n\n\nIt would be a shame, or plainly stupid, if Canada wouldn’t develop applications for both types of hemp fibres.
“Processing hemp is very expensive,” comments Dr. Carlos Agudelo, Eko-Terre’s chief operating officer, “and it is very difficult for us because we have to create a reliable supply chain in order to start investing in more processes here in Canada.”
\n\n\n\nAgudelo and his team have developed pilot plants for decortication and refinement. Degumming, he tells me, is currently outsourced internationally. In the last two years, Eko-Terre has processed more than 2,000 metric tonnes of hemp, and plans to grow to “at least 14,000 tonnes of straw in the coming years.” Meanwhile, Agudelo tells me, China produces more than ten times that in a year, though official numbers are hard to come by.
\n\n\n\n“The textile market is the most demanding in terms of fibre quality,” says InnoTech’s Slaski. Within a hemp stalk, the bast and hurd are connected by sticky carbohydrates like pectin. For high-quality textiles, these fibres need to be thoroughly washed and separated.
\n\n\n\n“Once you remove these sticky parts, you have a cotton-like fibre,” says Agudelo. Additional treatment processes can make the fibre even softer, though it’s not always necessary.
\n\n\n\nHemp for fibre is cultivated in several provinces, but plants in northern Alberta grow taller and yield more fibre due to the area’s extended summer daylight hours. Day length is particularly important because, as daylight decreases, the plant begins to flower, after which fibres become more coarse. Agudelo tells me that Eko-Terre plans to contract 10,000 hectares of hemp for textile fibre in Alberta in the coming years, and install their first industrial-scale processing lines for decortication and refinement.
\n\n\n\nConsumer interest will be a crucial factor in any potential hemp fashion boom. And shoppers do seem ready. In a 2020 survey of close to 19,000 consumers around the world, nearly six in 10 respondents said environmental impact is an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
\n\n\n\nOne brand hoping to reach those shoppers is Ontario-based Immortelle. Founded in 2020 by Aneta Sofronova, Immortelle currently makes small batches of loungewear, naturally dyed bucket hats, and soon-to-launch jumpsuits, mostly from hemp fabrics.
\n\n\n\nAfter earning her Bachelor of Design in fashion from Ryerson University in Toronto, Sofronova landed a job she loved at the Hudson’s Bay Company. But for years after, she worked with brands that didn’t align with her values, which led her to “completely lose interest in the industry.” She stepped away from fashion to focus on improving her health.
\n\n\n\n“I started becoming health conscious” she says, crediting this period for her return to fashion. “I decided it had to be healthy through and through,” she says, and resolved to work only with natural materials and dyes.
\n\n\n\nSofronova is originally from Moldova, and before founding Immortelle had no idea her project had a family connection. “When I told my mom I wanted to work with hemp,” she says, “I was told how she and my grandma would grow it and do the retting process in the river.”
\n\n\n\nYour natural garment has a chance of biodegrading, whereas a polyester garment becomes a contaminant.
Sourcing hemp fabrics is not as easy or sustainable as Sofronova would like it to be. “I have a supplier in BC that imports from China,” she says, lamenting the carbon footprint of that process, and wishing she could find Canadian-processed hemp. “Right now I have to work with what I find.”
\n\n\n\nImmortelle’s garments — like hemp clothes from brands including Patagonia and T-shirt maker Jungmaven — are mostly made from hemp-cotton blends, which are softer than 100% hemp fabric. “You can have hemp on its own, there’s nothing wrong with it,” says Dr. Anika Kozlowski, a professor of fashion design, ethics, and sustainability at Ryerson. “It just depends what properties you want your end product to have.”
\n\n\n\nPure hemp’s stiffness makes it a “harder sell,” adds Sofronova, so it’s blended to make it more “palatable” to shoppers.
\n\n\n\nKozlowski would like this to change. “Maybe if we used it in different ways,” she says, “It would expand our understanding and use of [hemp] outside of how it’s been branded.” Unblended hemp could be used to make structured jackets and pants, she tells me, rather than loungewear or T-shirts.
\n\n\n\nWhether consumers are ready for unblended hemp or not, Kozlowski welcomes the fact that hemp is making its way into garments. “The industry needs to diversify its material pool,” she says. “Your natural garment has a chance of biodegrading… Whereas a polyester garment does not live well in our current ecology — it becomes a contaminant.”
\n\n\n\nIn addition to reducing harmful waste, investing in hemp textiles would allow for shorter fashion supply chains. In 2010, Rebecca Burgess — a weaver and natural dyer from San Geronimo in northern California — set herself a one-year challenge of developing a personal wardrobe using only fibres, labour, and dyes sourced within a 240 kilometre radius from her home. Her success in creating a regional natural-fibre supply chain inspired her to found the nonprofit Fibershed.
\n\n\n\nSince its creation, Fibershed has grown into an international grassroots network, including four locations across Canada. Chapters operate mostly with wool, but the problems they’re trying to address affect other natural fibres. Jane Underhill is the president of Toronto’s Upper Canada Fibreshed (note Canadian spelling), and hopes to see a natural-fibre manufacturing sector develop in Canada. “There’s the myth that natural fibres are too expensive,” says Underhill. “That it costs too much to manufacture them in Canada. That Canada can’t bring back a manufacturing sector. All those old-school beliefs. We know that those aren’t true.”
\n\n\n\n“If we want to support local clothing and local fibre, we have to be willing to purchase clothing at a higher price,” says Kozlowski. But she cautions against blaming shoppers who purchase fast fashion, instead questioning the lack of “sustainable affordable versions.”
\n\n\n\nIf we want to support local clothing and local fibre, we have to be willing to purchase clothing at a higher price.
Canada’s increase in hemp cultivation signals that a market for hemp-derived products is growing. But there are still several hurdles to overcome in the fashion realm. Limited production, high material cost, and competition with dominant materials like cotton and polyester create significant barriers to hemp going mainstream.
\n\n\n\n“I don’t think hemp will ever be as widespread as cotton,” says Agudelo. He does believe hemp could take a sizable share of the textile market, but it will take “many many years.”
\n\n\n\nLikening hemp clothing to pricier sustainable choices like organic food, he says “it’s not for everybody.” Still, Agudelo argues, “When you believe you have to reduce your footprint and have a sustainable garment, you should use hemp.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1413,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[46,19,8,6,38,7],"tags":[428,81,350,400,124,531,567,161,239],"class_list":["post-1529","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-society","tag-annika-flores","tag-canada","tag-cannabis","tag-cristina-petrucci","tag-fashion","tag-natural-fibre","tag-plant-fibre","tag-sustainability","tag-textiles"],"yoast_head":"\nIndustrial hemp plants grow 3–5 metres tall, allowing long fibres to be extracted from their stalks and made into textiles.
\n"},"alt_text":"A field of tall, thin plants with thin, serrated leaves at sunset.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"268620","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"21196","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"192710","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"9444","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"116241","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Could-Canadas-Green-Rush-Include-Hemp-Clothing_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1413"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":46,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/society/economy/","name":"Economy","slug":"economy","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nWhen I first became passionate about avoiding fast fashion, I found it hard to find one closet staple — jeans. I pored through lists of sustainable and ethical denim brands; each seemed like a good investment, but was out of my budget. In recent years, that’s begun to change. Major retailers like Target have begun selling jeans from Fair Trade USA-certified factories for under $30. Beyond denim, other fair-trade clothing has cropped up in stores, both mainstream and niche. But what does the seal’s growing abundance mean? Do fair-trade jeans truly embrace ethical labour and environmental standards?
\n\n\n\nFounded in 1998, Fair Trade USA originally certified a network of coffee growers. When coffee companies sourced beans from fair-trade farms — which met certain environmental and labour standards — and paid growers a set minimum above-market price, they received Fair Trade Certified labels. By the early 2000s, Fair Trade USA had expanded to tea, cocoa, and produce. Its sticker could be found on everything from chocolate bars to bananas. In 2010, the company began certifying cotton apparel and linens, and factories producing them.
\n\n\n\nFair Trade USA has three apparel certifications. First, Fair Trade Certified Factory and Fair Trade Certified Sewing seals certify garments manufactured in Fair Trade USA-certified factories; the raw materials, including fabric, are uncertified. This certification appears on jeans from Madewell and Target’s Universal Thread line, and on Mountain Equipment Coop’s fair-trade line.
\n\n\n\nSecond, the Fair Trade Certified Cotton seal guarantees the cotton in the product comes from fair-trade sources and makes up at least 20% of the raw materials. The nonprofit doesn’t certify other fabrics, but some companies incorporate sustainability in other ways. For example, Patagonia makes products with a Fair Trade Sewing seal from recycled polyester.
\n\n\n\nThird, the Fair Trade Certified logo with no caveats guarantees the product is made in a certified factory and fair-trade cotton makes up at least 50% of the fabric mix. Fewer brands have this certification. HAE Now’s cotton products and Vonadhona’s T-shirts meet these standards.
\n\n\n\nThe Fair Trade USA Factory Standard for Apparel and Home Goods aims to empower workers, while ensuring fair working conditions and environmentally responsible production. Certification requirements fall into four categories. First, empowerment standards focus on ensuring workers can negotiate and work with management to improve working conditions. Second, social responsibility standards require factories to uphold labour, health, and safety standards, and buyers to commit to long-term purchases to create a stable climate for factories to improve working conditions. Third, factories must meet environmental standards and continuously improve environmental practices.
\n\n\n\nThe money funds community projects, like childcare facilities, computer centers, and health care clinics.
Fourth, the certification promotes economic development by requiring brands to pay Fair Trade Certified suppliers a premium above the cost of goods. The premium goes into an account managed by a committee of elected workers and non-voting management representatives, which funds community projects, such as childcare facilities, computer centers, and health care clinics, or distributes cash bonuses to employees.
\n\n\n\nSuppliers must comply with a long list of Fair Trade USA factory standards, the majority of which must be met immediately. Others can be met within one or three years of certification. Fair Trade USA grants certification for three years at time with third-party certification audits completed triannually and third-party surveillance audits in intervening years. If a supplier is not complying with requirements, they must remedy the problems. Otherwise, they can lose certification.
\n\n\n\nFair Trade Certified Cotton is grown on fair-trade farms and, depending on the certificate holder, may be spun in certified mills and processing facilities. Factories and traders can purchase unprocessed seed cotton or spun and dyed textiles from a list of certified suppliers. Certified farms must avoid pesticides and fertilizers banned by Fair Trade USA and follow waste disposal requirements that aim to protect soil quality and biodiversity. Additionally, cotton buyers, like traders or processors, must pay farms a minimum price for cotton, a crop whose value often fluctuates.
\n\n\n\nBrands, factories, and farms seeking certification pay for audits through a third party. Fair Trade USA charges clothing brands a portion of sales depending on the scale of their operation. It also receives donations and grants. Some critics have questioned this financial structure, as the more suppliers it certifies, the more licensing fees it generates.
\n\n\n\nTo Asparagus’ knowledge, Fair Trade USA is the only third-party fair-trade certifier for discrete apparel factories. Other groups like Fairtrade International also certify cotton.
\n\n\n\nIn terms of cotton, Fair Trade USA and Fairtrade International have some differences. Fair Trade International prioritizes small-scale producers while Fair Trade USA certifies both plantations and small farms. Wage Requirements also differ. Fairtrade International requires farms pay workers a living wage within six years or a union-negotiated deadline; Fair Trade USA requires progression towards a living wage without a definitive timeline. Both groups monitor suppliers with audits, prohibit forced labor, and require that workers have the right to join unions.
\n\n\n\nFair Trade USA’s apparel program has worked with dozens of brands to shift fraught supply chains and source clothes from more ethical manufacturers. But Anna Canning, campaigns manager for the Fair World Project, a fair trade watchdog group, worries brands benefit too much from Fair Trade USA’s individual factory and cotton logos.
\n\n\n\n“What we see overall is a lot of marketing of impact, but less so systems to back that up,” she said, pointing to J. Crew’s fair-trade jeans. When they debuted, J. Crew received a rush of media coverage. But, even though the jeans were sewn in a Fair Trade USA-certified factory, the farming, spinning, and dying of the cotton in the jeans were not evaluated by Fair Trade USA.
\n\n\n\nToo often, uncertified cotton is harvested or spun unethically.
Too often, uncertified cotton is harvested or spun unethically. Forced labor was prevalent in the 2019 cotton harvests in Uzbekistan and has been documented during cotton harvests Turkmenistan. Child labor has been reported in other major cotton-producing countries like India, Pakistan, and Burkina Faso. Many cotton laborers work seasonally, are from poorer regions, and are exposed to dangerous pesticides. Beyond that, cotton’s prices can rapidly fluctuate, leaving workers at risk of uncertain wages and poverty.
\n\n\n\nIn addition, some worker’s rights groups and academics question the effectiveness of audits, which are at the heart of Fair Trade USA’s process. They worry workers may not feel comfortable speaking honestly and annual visits don’t provide a full picture of what happens year-round.
\n\n\n\nThe complete Fair Trade USA Certified Seal is the best option for fair-trade cotton goods. However, certified apparel that is not 100% cotton contains non-certified materials, too.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Are-Fair-Trade-Clothes-the-Fairest-of-them-All_WebBody1.jpg\")
In these cases, you can research where the producer sources other materials. Groups like Fair Trade Federation and Fair World Project assemble lists of brands with ethical and transparent supply chains. You can also consider other fabric certifications, including the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), Cradle to Cradle, and Textile Exchange. Finally, buying clothes second hand is perhaps the most sustainable option, as it reduces waste and extends the life of garments.
\n\n\n\nPersonally, I decided against buying certified jeans. I prefer clothes for which supplier transparency extends from the beginning of the supply chain to the end. Still, it seemed impossible a Fair Trade logo could appear within big box stores just five years ago. I’m hopeful its popularity will continue to grow.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1322,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,49,29,8,10,7,23],"tags":[117,289,124],"class_list":["post-757","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-human-rights","category-know-logo","category-living","category-magazine","category-society","category-start-small","tag-certification","tag-emma-rubin","tag-fashion"],"yoast_head":"\nLast February, I invited a group of friends over to mend clothing and drink tea. While the snow fell outside, we gushed over thread colours, shared techniques, and admired one another’s handiwork. I repurposed an old (unused) diaper liner into a patch for jeans. My friend Gisele showed us how to darn a wool sock, whisking us back to a slower time. Although the evening was more banter than backstitch, it turned fixing fabric into a chance for connection instead of a chore.
\n\n\n\nOur plan to meet again in March was ripped away like almost everything else that month. But the spirit of that gathering has stuck with me, beyond just being a symbol of the “before times.” Although I can’t mend in community, making colourful repairs to my kids’ clothing has become a way to affirm my love for them and the world we live in. And more than that — it’s a reminder that we can always create new stories using pieces of broken ones.
\n\n\n\nI’m not writing this piece as a mending expert; I don’t have much technique, and nothing I’ve done is particularly Insta-worthy. But my stitches seem to hold, and are a way I resist both the monotony of stay-at-home parenting, and the lure of online pandemic shopping.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/patched-jeans-1-1024x765.jpg\")
This September, five-year-old Little Grey Lamb started kindergarten. The tiny backpack we bought him last year wouldn’t hold all the things he’d need for class, so I picked up a new-to-us one at our local gear exchange. It’s sturdy but shabby, so I embroidered yellow stars to hide some tiny holes. Showing up on that first day, so many other kids had brand-new Avengers or Spider-Man packs. I momentarily felt bad. But not only has he never asked for such a bag, I know when he looks at those little stars, he remembers how I make things special for him by making special things for him.
\n\n\n\nMaking colourful repairs to my kids’ clothing has become a way to affirm my love for them and the world we live in.
Mending influencer Kate Sekules (yes, there is such a thing!) says “the opposite of hate is mending,” which resonates with me. This small act conveys so much care for my family and the planet. As the pandemic pushes us indoors, it’s also making us all reevaluate our commitment to “fast fashion” — and reaffirming our commitment to sweatpants. It’s dismaying that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has become US$74 billion richer through this time. But I think, increasingly, people are trying to reuse what we own instead of making people like him richer.
\n\n\n\nMy friend Jess says her mending is aspirational: she dreams of living a handcrafted life, but her family’s day-to-day means that fast fashion and quick fixes are realities. “Mending is kinda like my middle finger to [those realities],” she says. “If I can get clothes to last through both kids, at least it’s something.” When possible, she buys clothes from organic indie designers, and mending them when they’re worn out helps justify the expense.
\n\n\n\nLike so many parents over the last seven months, I’ve spent 4000% more time with my kids than I ever thought I would. So much of it has been warm and wonderful. But while I think I’m a great part-time stay-at-home parent, I’m distinctly mediocre when I have to do it full time — so I’ve had to find ways to make this new life my own. There are always dishes in the sink, and I’m pitiful at keeping the living room tidy, but I’ve canned our jam for the year and mended my way through a small pile of worn-out knees.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/gisele-1.jpg\")
Similarly, my friend Gisele uses needle and thread to make her home-bound existence more enjoyable. “Mending got me through helping my kids with pandemic schooling at home,” she says. “Anyone who has taught a kid to read knows what torture this is. Having something simple to do at the same time gave my hands something to do and helped me not go crazy.”
\n\n\n\nAs Kate Sekules pointed out in a recent episode of the vintage style podcast Pre-Loved, the history of mending is “not … very sexy.” In conversation with the show’s host, Emily Stochl, Sekules goes on to explain that across time and culture, clothes were often the most valuable and labour-intensive thing people would own. These days, of course, the opposite can also be true. Mending takes time and mental space, which are resources many can’t justify spending when t-shirts are $5 at Walmart.
\n\n\n\n“[Mending] has got a sort of shameful history, of course, because mending in history speaks of poverty and deprivation, and even worse things,” Sekules says. Perhaps in homage to that painful history, she is trying to politicize mending; she’s created a series called “sewhername,” in which she stitches the names of Black women who have died at the hands of the police onto pieces of clothing.
\n\n\n\nThere are many cultural histories wound up in the act of fixing clothes, most notably the Japanese tradition of sashiko: that swoon-worthy white stitching over dark fabric. The fractal-like patterns are actually lines of running stitch carefully linked together. According to Atsushi Futatsuya — a sashiko educator who grew up surrounded by this centuries-old technique — it was created of necessity by Japanese families who couldn’t afford new clothing or fabric. “Sashiko was developed for that purpose of surviving through the days, especially in winter: repairing, mending, stretching the fabric,” he says. “It is the deep down history.”
\n\n\n\nNeedles and thread have long had the potential to add strength in tough times, to show care in a bleak world.
Even the iconic white thread on indigo fabric of sashiko reveals its history, says Futatsuya, as they were the cheapest and most available materials. The creative stitching would have been done by someone for whom speed was important and whose skill with a needle would make their fabric stronger.
\n\n\n\nFutatsuya is an ardent protector of what he calls “the Japaneseness” of this stitching practice. “If one starts not caring [about] the origin of its culture, then the culture may be repainted,” he said in an interview earlier this year with Matador. “There are people behind the culture.”
\n\n\n\nMy little projects are not sashiko. In fact, Futatsuya is worried that sashiko culture is being “re-painted” by the new (non-Japanese) trend of visible mending. But through these varied histories, I’m reminded that needles and thread have long had the potential to write new stories: to give new life to a garment, to add strength in tough times, to show care in a bleak world. These days, we need to believe we can put something beautiful on top of something broken — not to erase the flaws, but to make the burden bearable.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":323,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[18,19,20,8,10,43,22],"tags":[249,121,124,60,120,94,239,93],"class_list":["post-343","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awards","category-fashion-beauty","category-kids-parenting","category-living","category-magazine","category-black-sheep-parent","category-voices","tag-brianna-sharpe","tag-children","tag-fashion","tag-opinion","tag-parenting","tag-recycling","tag-textiles","tag-zero-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nMending by the author’s friend Jess: “This mend was just trying to get the rhythm of the stitching on the left leg, and trying to create a patch from scratch. I want my kids growing up knowing rainbows and all they stand for.”
\n"},"alt_text":"Jeans with mended thighs. One leg has a dark rectangle patch with a stitched rainbow; the other has rows of yellow stitches.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1298,"height":1298,"file":"2022/08/Jess-1.jpg","filesize":311206,"sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Jess-1-300x300.jpg","width":300,"height":300,"filesize":29972,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1-300x300.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Jess-1-1024x1024.jpg","width":1024,"height":1024,"filesize":369617,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1-1024x1024.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Jess-1-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":8244,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Jess-1-768x768.jpg","width":768,"height":768,"filesize":212360,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1-768x768.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Jess-1.jpg","width":1298,"height":1298,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","keywords":[]}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jess-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=323"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":18,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/awards/","name":"Awards","slug":"awards","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nWhen Katherine Soucie was a fashion student in the ’90s, she found herself face-to-face with the dark side of her chosen field. By day she visited textile mills outside Toronto where masses of material were going to waste. By night she joined her then-boyfriend on the job for night-time trash-hauling trips to Michigan. “The smell of these massive graveyards — as I like to describe them — still haunts me to this day,” says Soucie, 40. “I saw everything there you could possibly imagine.”
\n\n\n\n“I made a declaration to myself when I was 18–19 that I would not contribute to this.”
\n\n\n\nNow based in Vancouver, Soucie has her own textile and design company, Sans Soucie — whose name comes from the French expression for “worry free.” True to her vow, Soucie isn’t contributing to landfills full of clothing. Instead, she and her team transform textile waste into one-of-a-kind fabrics and garments.
\n\n\n\nUnfortunately, small operations like Soucie’s can’t solve the fashion industry’s massive waste problem alone. Like the late-capitalist environment it operates in, the business of fashion runs fast and dirty. It’s also huge. According to 2017’s State of Fashion report — published annually by The Business of Fashion magazine and global consulting firm McKinsey & Company — if the US$2.4 trillion fashion industry were a country, it would have the world’s seventh largest economy.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/small-jeans.jpg\")
It’s often claimed that apparel manufacturing is the dirtiest industry in the world after oil. While there’s no solid evidence behind this claim, fashion is unquestionably doing a lot of environmental damage, using vast quantities of water, emitting greenhouse gases, and filling up our landfills. Here are some of the fashion industry’s monstrous numbers:
\n\n\n\nThese impacts aren’t poised to go down. As more of the world’s population finds its way into the middle class, global consumption is expected to increase; the 2019 State of Fashion report predicts worldwide clothing sales will grow five-fold by 2050.
\n\n\n\nIn the face of global climate change and a growing garbage crisis, it’s clear the fashion industry’s impact needs to be mitigated, and fast. Business-as-usual thinking still dominates the sector, but changes are coming to the world of fashion thanks to efforts by independent producers like Soucie, shoppers’ growing demand for secondhand clothes, and industry-level initiatives to clean up the supply chain.
\n\n\n\nSoucie sees the impact of fast fashion not only on the environment, but on clothing design itself. “We no longer have the skillset to produce tailored garments,” she says. “They take time. Mass production leaves no space for fitted garments.” Fast-fashion brands do indeed operate at breakneck speeds — according to a 2017 report by market research firm Coresight, Zara usually puts out 20 collections a year, and H&M releases 16.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Soucie is doing her best to slow her corner of the industry down, putting out only one collection annually. Her process starts with a shipment of textile waste, which she began sourcing from Montreal’s Doris Hosiery Mill in 2007 (the mill was purchased by multinational Gildan in 2014). When the partnership began, Doris produced almost a thousand kilograms of waste per week, and Soucie still sounds flabbergasted at the figure more than a decade later.
\n\n\n\nSans Soucie can only make a small dent in that volume: Every few months, they receive 40–100 kilograms of waste nylon hose. The scraps are first assessed by Soucie and her two employees, and sorted according to their structure, then dyed with non-toxic pigment until the water runs clear, so no residue is released into the environment. She speaks enthusiastically of this method’s serendipitous results, in which the hosiery sometimes reacts differently than anticipated.
\n\n\n\nA community has been built of this waste-material resource that I value.
“I need to exhaust whatever is residual in the dye pot before adding new colour, giving me the opportunity to layer colour and produce some really unique things that cannot be duplicated,” she says. After dyeing, the scraps are ready to be sewn into a patchwork, which she then uses to construct new designs.
\n\n\n\nAs a result of this process, Soucie’s clothes are rarely monochrome — most of her pieces have a marbled appearance, with stitches creating an abstract geometric look. The light texture of the nylon brings fluidity to her dresses, skirts, and other garments.
\n\n\n\nSeven years after Soucie started producing her own textiles, business owners in Vancouver began inquiring about the fabric she was making. Textile artists Kristen Chursinoff and Michelle Sirois, and jeweler Louise Perrone have all incorporated Soucie’s remnants into their products.
\n\n\n\n“Not that I have ever undervalued the role of scrap,” says Soucie, “but to see the ability and opportunity of something — where I have only used a fraction of the larger piece — to transform into something more, moves me every time. A community has been built of this waste-material resource that I value, and now they value. And it allows for the story to continue a bit further.”
\n\n\n\nOn the opposite side of the globe, a pair of entrepreneurs in South Africa are also embracing the potential of “waste.” Cape Town’s Sealand Gear — founded by avid surfers Mike Schlebach and Jasper Eales — uses waste material from yacht sails, billboard ads, and tents to create a line of hip but practical bags, apparel, and accessories.
\n\n\n\nManaging director Schlebach and product designer Eales launched Sealand in 2015 as an extension of their outdoorsy and environmentally friendly lifestyles. They wanted to create products they could use both on camping and surf trips, and at home in the city. In April 2019 — after three years of selling online and through select shops in South Africa — they opened their first store in downtown Cape Town.
\n\n\n\nWe create goods that last a long time. It may seem like bad business, because people won’t come back. But at least we’re selling something that didn’t hurt the environment.
The location has a “Concept Room” where shoppers can choose materials to customize their own “Toastie,” the name Sealand gives its line of pouches. The experience helps customers learn more about Sealand’s upcycling process and the waste materials they work with. Another way the company raises awareness among its clientele is by stamping each product with the signature of the staffer who made it, giving credit and attention to the employees whose work would be anonymous at most other fashion brands.
\n\n\n\nOperating on a larger scale than Sans Soucie, Sealand upcycles around 20 tonnes of yacht sails and billboard ads every year. They buy waste material from sail and tent factories, and also swap products with local yacht clubs and sailors in exchange for old sails.
\n\n\n\nFor the status quo to change, Schlebach, 41, believes the onus is on both manufacturers and individuals. “Consumers have to slow their consumption habits down and invest in better quality things,” he says. “We create durable goods so they last a long time. It may seem like bad business sense, because then people won’t come back… But at least we’re selling them something that didn’t hurt the environment on the way.”
\n\n\n\nMahima Gujral founded New Delhi-based eco-brand Sui. Her company produces apparel and accessories made exclusively from ethically produced hemp and organic cotton. Taking inspiration from her world travels, Gujral, 29, designs garments tailored enough to flatter, yet flowy enough for comfort. Sui generally manufactures only one piece per size, and mostly make to order, to avoid unsold inventory.
\n\n\n\n“A lot of people want to make the change,” says Gujral, “but sustainable fashion can also come with a price tag.” She’s right. The process of transforming waste materials into new goods or sourcing ethical materials often results in high prices, putting products like Sealand’s, Sui’s, and Sans Soucie’s out of reach for many shoppers.
\n\n\n\nSui recently launched an under-$100 range to make their products more accessible, a process Gujral found challenging. “It’s hard to keep prices low when you’re trying to buy the right fabric and pay people the right salaries,” she says.
\n\n\n\nIt’s hard to keep prices low when you’re trying to buy the right fabric and pay people the right salaries.
However, small-scale eco-fashion operations aren’t the only sustainable game in town. The less labour-intensive process of helping old clothes find new homes is a booming business. According to a report by market research firm GlobalData, the secondhand clothing market isn’t just growing, it’s threatening high street stores. In 2018, the US secondhand market was worth $24 billion, with fast fashion valued at $35 billion. By 2028, GlobalData predicts the thrift business will grow to $64 billion, while fast fashion is forecast to reach only $44 billion.
\n\n\n\nThe Toronto thrift store Black Market first opened its doors in 1998, initially selling T-shirts for punk bands. Over the years, most of their mom and pop neighbours on Queen Street West have been replaced by mass brands like Gap, Zara, and H&M, but Black Market has survived two decades by offering vintage clothing at reasonable prices.
\n\n\n\nTracey Opperman, one of the store’s founders, thinks it’s up to the consumer’s “whim” to change the garment industry: “We’re all catering to a supply and demand. If consumers demand cheap clothes, then they will get cheap clothes. But if they start demanding sustainably made clothes, then producers will have to pull up their socks.”
\n\n\n\nBy 2028, the thrift business will grow to $64 billion, while fast fashion is forecast to reach only $44 billion.
The Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 was the most fatal garment-factory accident in history, and is an important recent example of consumers demanding — and getting — some systemic change from the fashion industry. Collective outrage over the deaths of more than 1,000 Bangladeshi workers became the impetus for improving transparency in fashion supply chains.
\n\n\n\nAfter the incident, 220 brands with factories in Bangladesh signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, which focused on the structural safety of buildings and ensured workers’ rights to refuse work in an unsafe environment. The agreement expired in 2018, however, and to date 193 companies have signed on to its three-year extension. So the momentum seems to be holding, if slightly diminished.
\n\n\n\nIf Opperman is right and the power is in consumers’ hands, the question is: what will it take before the public demands environmentally ethical and sustainable practices from top fashion brands? And how can we ensure lasting change in the industry, rather than superficial and temporary shifts?
\n\n\n\nBusinesses like Sans Soucie, Sealand, and Sui might be walking the talk, but small enterprises like theirs can’t turn the tide for the entire industry. “Small brands do have the power to make a difference,” says Sui’s Gujral. “But at the end of the day, it’s the big ones that really need to change.”
\n\n\n\nIn the apparel business, it doesn’t get much bigger than H&M. And the Swedish fast-fashion giant has recently become enthusiastic about recycling and reusing textiles. Projected behind the cashiers at one of their Toronto locations is the exhortation: “Be a fashion recycler.” The finer print underneath tells customers to bring in old clothes so the retailer can “give them a new life.”
\n\n\n\nThis initiative hasn’t gone without criticism, though. The CBC program Marketplace did an investigation into clothing recycling, and learned from iCollect — the company handling H&M’s Canadian donations — that only about 35% of what they pick up gets recycled. And not into new clothes, but as “products like carpet padding, painters’ cloths or insulation.”
\n\n\n\nSmall brands do have the power to make a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s the big ones that really need to change.
Interviewed by Marketplace, Elizabeth Cline — author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion — criticized the recycling program as “an easy sustainability win,” because it allows H&M to project itself as a sustainable organization without rethinking its linear production model.
\n\n\n\nAccording to its sustainability report, H&M collected 17,771 metric tonnes of textiles worldwide in 2017 — equivalent to 89 million T-shirts. By 2018, though, only 1.4% of the material used to make H&M clothes was from recycled textiles. The corporation has promised that 100% of its products will be made from recycled or sustainably sourced materials by 2030.
\n\n\n\nSoucie believes that even switching to “sustainably sourced” non-recycled materials isn’t enough of a change, though. “If we were to stop manufacturing textiles now,” she says, “we have more than enough to carry us for quite a few centuries.”
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/small-sneakers.jpg\")
Over and above the clothes consumers purchase, mass manufacturers are also responsible for billions of dollars worth of unsold inventory. In 2017, luxury brand Burberry burned £28.6 million worth of unsold apparel, accessories, and perfumes rather than reduce prices, donate the remaindered inventory, or make it available for reuse or recycling. When this fact was revealed last year, public outcry caused the company to abandon the practice. In 2018, H&M was left with $4.3 billion dollars of unsold clothing and accessories, but said it would try and steadily reduce that volume through sales.
\n\n\n\nTo radically reduce the amount of waste it produces, the fashion industry needs to switch from a linear “take-make-dispose” model to a circular economy in which waste materials and used items find their way back into production instead of the landfill. At some point, Sui started making headbands, earrings, diary covers, and tablecloths with leftover fabric. Sans Soucie and Sealand take a similar zero-waste approach.
\n\n\n\nWhile no major clothing companies seem to be moving in this direction yet, a global consumer brand in another sector is adopting strategies that could be emulated by fashion players. IKEA — the world’s largest furniture retailer — has committed to becoming a completely circular business by 2030.
\n\n\n\nIn 2018, IKEA launched sell-back programs in a number of countries, including Australia, Japan, and Canada. According to an IKEA Canada spokesperson, the country’s program received 17,000 applications in its first six months. The Canadian scheme allows consumers to return items in working condition in exchange for store credit, by submitting photos online of the furniture they want to sell back. IKEA then resells these used items at a discounted price.
\n\n\n\nThis year, IKEA decided to disrupt its model further by launching a furniture rental program that will be introduced worldwide by 2020, with pilots currently underway in Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and the Netherlands.
\n\n\n\nIf we were to stop manufacturing textiles now, we have more than enough for quite a few centuries.
Some companies in the fashion sector are taking similar steps. Outdoor brands including Patagonia, REI, and The North Face accept returns of used and damaged products, refurbish them, and then resell them at a discount. And though it isn’t a sell-back policy, Levi’s recently announced a 20% discount to shoppers who bring in old denim for recycling. New York-based Rent the Runway has offered designer duds for hire for almost a decade, but no major fashion manufacturers have attempted this model for their own wares.
\n\n\n\nThere are efforts underway within the fashion industry to mainstream reusing, recycling, and upcycling programs. Launched in 2010, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation works to help industry and society transition to circular systems. In 2017, the foundation launched the Make Fashion Circular project in partnership with brands including Burberry and H&M, providing a platform for collaboration, research, and innovation within the apparel industry.
\n\n\n\nThe initiative aims to create a fashion industry that benefits the environment, business, and consumers by adopting the following principles: reducing the amount of water, power and other natural resources used in production; phasing out polluting materials in textiles; keeping clothing in use (through programs like sell-back and rental); and massively improving recycling.
\n\n\n\nWhile it tackles the hard, slow process of system-change, Make Fashion Circular is simultaneously trying to raise public awareness with short-term campaigns. In March, the initiative launched the #WearNext campaign in New York, to keep clothes out of landfills. Over 1,100 collection boxes were set up around the city for people to drop off used clothes over a three-month period. The garments will be given a “new life” by the project’s reseller and recycler partners.
\n\n\n\nThat kind of awareness-raising isn’t just about publicity, it’s a necessary part of changing the system. “Movements don’t happen in silence,” says Soucie.
\n\n\n\nSmall players like those profiled in this article can set the example, but change needs to come at the top, from the 20 companies that make 97% of the apparel industry’s profits, a club that includes fast-fashion companies H&M, Uniqlo, and Zara, sports giants Nike and Adidas, luxury brands LVMH, Hermès, and Burberry, and mainstream clothiers Gap and Ross.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/small-sunglasses.jpg\")
Ultimately, Soucie sees collaboration between large and small players as the industry’s way forward. “Businesses can collaborate together, because not all businesses can function independently and produce circularly. I am collaborating with a big manufacturer,” she points out. “More collaboration is the future of the industry.”
\n\n\n\nAnd what does the future look like for the upcycling method she’s developed over her career? “When I started doing this, I didn’t think I’d be doing this 15 years later,” she muses. “But I am hoping that I won’t be doing this for the rest of my life, because I hope less waste will be produced in the future.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1460,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,8,10,6,39,51,9],"tags":[554,335,124,94,266,93],"class_list":["post-592","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-vancouver-area","category-west-coast","tag-circular-economy","tag-emily-cooper","tag-fashion","tag-recycling","tag-shreya-kalra","tag-zero-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nIt’s that special time of year when the air seems to suck the moisture out of every square inch of exposed skin. I only have to lick my lips a few times before finding myself in the vicious chapped-lip cycle. As a teenager, I swore by my little pot of Blistex. But when I started working at a health food store, it didn’t take long to find out the main ingredient of that and every other drugstore lip balm was problematic: petrolatum.
\n\n\n\nPetroleum jelly is a by-product of the crude oil extraction process. Workers encountered it on oil rigs in the 1800s, where the waxy substance — which they called “rod wax” — slowed machinery down. Upon removing it by hand, these workers found it helped heal their chapped skin, which led chemist Robert Cheeseborough (founder of Vaseline) to develop a distillation process that let it be marketed to the masses.
\n\n\n\nThe good news? Oil isn’t being harvested specifically for the production of cosmetic petrolatum, so buying it isn’t destroying the Earth any faster than we’re currently destroying it. The bad? It’s still a by-product of the oil industry, which means it’s not eco-friendly, and it’s not sustainable.
\n\n\n\nOil isn’t being harvested specifically for the production of petroleum jelly, but it’s still a by-product of the oil industry, which means it’s not eco-friendly.
There’s some debate as to whether or not petrolatum is harmful to humans. It’s non-comedogenic, so it won’t clog pores and cause acne; however it is occlusive, which means it acts as a seal where applied. The barrier allows chapped skin to heal more quickly, but it doesn’t actually add moisture to the skin. That’s why some people’s skin immediately chaps again once the petroleum jelly comes off.
\n\n\n\nYou may see articles in green beauty blogs railing against petrolatum as an ingredient because of potential contamination issues, but the purification process it goes through in order to be approved for cosmetic use is rigorous. However, it should be noted that, according to one 2018 study, significant levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were found in personal care items in Nigeria. That doesn’t necessarily mean people in North America will find similar levels in products made here, but to say that petroleum by-products are harmless, as some popular sites have claimed, is inaccurate.
\n\n\n\nAlternative lip-balm ingredients — which you’ll find in indie balms as well as more natural drugstore brands like Burt’s Bees and EOS — can be divided into two categories: animal-based and plant-based.
\n\n\n\nAnimal-based ingredients include beeswax, lanolin, and emu oil. Of these three, beeswax — which acts similarly to petrolatum — is the most popular. The difference is that it allows some air through. As long as you’re buying a lip balm that uses local or certified organic beeswax, it’s a good bet. Otherwise you may end up with beeswax that’s been adulterated with paraffin.
\n\n\n\nLanolin is secreted through the skin of sheep, and has been used as a protective salve as far back as the ancient Greeks. It’s an emollient wax that protects and conditions the skin, but it can be allergenic. The Indigenous peoples of Australia have used emu oil to heal skin conditions for millennia. It’s high in vitamin E and appears to have anti-inflammatory properties, so think of it as a healing moisturizer. Because emus must be killed to make the oil, the challenge is ensuring it comes from an ethical company that uses all parts of the animal after it’s slaughtered.
\n\n\n\nCompanies don’t need to disclose the source of isolated vitamin E, so unless you call, you can’t be sure whether it’s derived from sunflower oil or palm oil, or if it’s synthetic.
Plant-based ingredients include vitamin E, shea and cocoa butter, jojoba oil, and coconut oil. Of these, the hardest to get a handle on is vitamin E, which may also be listed as tocopherol, or tocopherol acetate. Companies don’t need to disclose the source of the isolated ingredient, so unless you call the lip balm company listing this ingredient, you can’t be sure whether it’s derived from sunflower oil or palm oil, or if it’s synthetic.
\n\n\n\nPalm oil is problematic because of its enormous environmental impact, both in terms of deforestation and endangered species habitat destruction. Synthetic vitamin E is often used in skin care products, and is made from petrochemical derivatives, including hydroquinone and toluene, which are known to be carcinogenic. An ethical lip balm company should have no problem disclosing their source. A spokesperson for Eco Lips, Jane Merten, told me their vitamin E came from sunflower oil.
\n\n\n\nBoth shea and cocoa butter are often found in natural lip balms. It’s important to make sure companies that use them are Fair Trade Certified, or members of the Global Shea Alliance. Unfortunately, organic certification isn’t an indication of how farmers are treated or compensated. As Asparagus contributor Alia Dharssi explained in the Decider about chocolate, “cocoa production is linked to child labour, slavery, deforestation, and low wages.”
\n\n\n\nShea trees are native to the Sahel in Africa, where the nuts are collected by 16 million women in the rural communities of 21 different countries. GSA certification ensures that shea nuts aren’t being overharvested, and that the women involved are learning sustainable business practices.
\n\n\n\nWhat makes both of these nut butters superior to petrolatum is their ability to form a barrier on the lips while continuing to let the skin underneath breathe. If you’re not living in the tropical regions where they grow, though, you may want to consider their carbon impact.
\n\n\n\nThe ethics of coconut oil are harder to parse, because monkeys are often used in coconut harvesting.
Jojoba oil is harvested from the seeds of the jojoba plant, a shrub with wide, waxy leaves found primarily in hot, dry climates like Arizona, Peru, and Mexico. Some companies report increasing swings in seasonal temperatures have made this delicate plant more challenging to coax into flower, but it continues to be available and used as a moisturizing ingredient in many lip balms.
\n\n\n\nThe ethics of coconut oil are harder to parse, because monkeys are often used in coconut harvesting, but there’s debate about whether this is abuse or just animal labour, akin to that done by sheepdogs. As with cocoa and shea, it’s preferable to go with Fair Trade Certified in order to ensure farmers and labourers are being paid and treated fairly, however not all Fair Trade certifications cover ethical animal treatment.
\n\n\n\nMost lip balm comes in plastic tubes that are difficult to recycle because their small size makes them incompatible with with the mechanical systems typically used in recycling operations. Since the tubes are generally single-use, that’s a lot of plastic not being recycled.
\n\n\n\nSome companies are now creating recycling initiatives themselves, though. Burt’s Bees pays the shipping for US customers to send them empty lip balm tubes, which they’ll recycle. EOS has partnered with TerraCycle both in Canada and the US in a similar program that will cover the cost for customers to ship back empty packaging to be recycled in-house.
\n\n\n\nOne packaging option that’s been around far longer than plastic is the lip-balm tin. These may be more easily recyclable in municipal programs that use magnets in their sorting process (probably a good idea to check with yours). But they’re also reusable as knickknack holders, DIY sewing kits, and more.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re trying to protect those lips and the planet, it’s not as simple as grabbing whatever’s next to the drugstore checkout.
Refillable lip balm companies exist, though they’re few and far between. Their products are more of an investment, but knowing your lip-balm holder can double as a cute necklace that will last as long as you get chapped lips, could ease the financial pain.
\n\n\n\nAnd finally, there are biodegradable cardboard lip-balm tubes out there. But according to Eco Lips’ Merten, consumers aren’t yet willing to embrace a new product that doesn’t work exactly like classic lip-balm tubes. The line Eco Lips released in cardboard tubes was discontinued recently due to low demand. However, California’s Organic Essence and Vancouver’s Plenty + Spare sell lip balms in cardboard tubes for those committed to a biodegradable MO.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re trying to protect those lips and the planet, it’s unfortunately not as simple as grabbing whatever’s next to the drugstore checkout. But if you take some time squinting at ingredient lists, you should be able to find something that will scratch both itches. Or soothe them.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":860,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[19,8,10,6,39,28],"tags":[97,98,325,255,640,101],"class_list":["post-506","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-decider","tag-beauty","tag-ecology","tag-gender","tag-glynis-ratcliffe","tag-skin-care","tag-women"],"yoast_head":"\nI’ll be honest. I’m a bit shallow and vain. I want to look cool. But I care about the environment. So, I’ve been looking for a secondhand leather jacket for nine long months. Last week at Turnabout, the closest consignment store to my house, my heart skipped a beat when I saw a beautiful leather moto jacket on the rack. My palms started to sweat with excitement. Could my quest be over?!
\n\n\n\nI tried it on. My heart sank. I could zip it up, but it was too tight across my back. I took it off and inspected it, hoping the garment would magically increase in size. I debated if I could make it work. In the end, I left the store deflated that I’d come so close to finding what I’ve been searching for so long.
\n\n\n\nI can already hear some of you screaming at me, “Why don’t you just go buy a new one that fits?” Isn’t the time I’ve put into this search worth spending the full price? Probably. But here’s the thing; I don’t want to buy clothes from regular stores any more. Just like 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg told reporters when she traveled 32 hours by train to the World Economic Forum, “I want to practice as I preach.”
\n\n\n\nI want to shop more ethically, and I still want to look like a badass woman in a cool jacket. What’s an ethical fashionista to do?
I claim to be an environmentalist, but I can do more. I want to shop more ethically. I want a genuine leather jacket because I know how much “vegan leather” sucks, but I also don’t want to directly support the leather industry. And I still want to look like a badass woman in a cool jacket that works for Vancouver’s spring and fall seasons. GAH!!! What’s an ethical fashionista to do?
\n\n\n\nWhen I was a teenager, I used to spend hours rummaging through thrift stores, scraping hangers against metal racks searching for treasures. Now as an adult, I don’t have that kind of time, and my patience is wearing thin. This used leather jacket quest has become a Sisyphean task, and I now feel like an environmentalist in hell. I know I could go to a store and pay full price for the new leather jacket of my dreams. But I’ve been reading, and I’ve learned that fashion is fucking up the planet.
\n\n\n\nDid you know that one garbage truck’s worth of textiles is wasted every single second, and that fashion is responsible for 92 million metric tonnes of solid waste dumped in landfills each year? And did you know that the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of carbon emissions globally, and 20% of wastewater? And did you further know that garment workers are some of the lowest-paid in the world, very often in unsafe conditions?
\n\n\n\nIn order to keep up with the growing demand for fast fashion, natural fibers have largely been replaced by synthetic ones, i.e. plastics. I.e. fabrics made from oil. Yeah, it’s very likely your clothing is a product of the petroleum industry. How do your stretchy jeans feel now? Sludgy?
\n\n\n\nYour clothing is a product of the petroleum industry. How do your stretchy jeans feel now? Sludgy?
According to Fast Company, “oil-based polyester has now replaced cotton as the number one fiber in our clothing.” This means that when we wash our synthetic clothing, we’re releasing microplastics into our water system. Esquire magazine went so far as to say “Fast Fashion is Absolutely Destroying the Planet.” They’re not wrong.
\n\n\n\nSo with all that in mind, I’m sucking it up, putting away my online-shopping clicker finger, and hitting the racks at my local thrift and consignment stores.
\n\n\n\nI acknowledge that a number of privileges help me shop secondhand: I live in a neighbourhood that has over a dozen thrift, consignment, and resale stores within walking distance; I wear a “regular” size and can find clothing that fits me in these stores; my shoe size is average; I have a wacky work schedule that provides me flex time to browse; I don’t have kids or another adult to care for; and I’m able to easily move my body in and out of stores, changerooms, and clothing without assistance.
\n\n\n\nSo here I am, willing and able to bypass the fast-fashion industry, and I’ve been stuck with the question: How? How will I know what to purchase and what to leave behind? Where do I find the good stuff?
\n\n\n\nFirst, I need to know where to go. There are three major categories of secondhand store: thrift shops, consignment stores, and online sites. Thrift stores are usually run by volunteers, and the proceeds go to charity. Often they have the lowest prices, but you’re likely to spend more time searching to find fashionable and quality items. Resale/consignment stores have a picky person making choices about what the store puts on their racks. If you’re short on time, you’re likely to find more things you want if you have similar taste to the store’s gatekeeper.
\n\n\n\nConsignment stores have a picky person making choices, so you’re likely to find more things you want if you have similar taste to the store’s gatekeeper.
There are more and more websites popping up with secondhand vintage and designer labels. ThredUP keeps popping up in targeted ads since I started working on this essay. I haven’t purchased anything from them because the environmental impacts of online shopping aren’t great, thanks to shipping emissions and plastic wrapping. EBay is another place my thrifty friends recommended. It’s important to double-check your measurements against the measurements of the garment before buying, because many online places have a zero-return policy.
\n\n\n\nDepending on where you live, there might also be local Facebook groups dedicated to clothing swapping or secondhand selling (search “clothing swap” or “buy and sell” along with the name of your hometown or neighbourhood).
\n\n\n\nBut what should I be looking for? First, I’m aiming for natural fibers like cotton, wool, cashmere, linen, silk, leather, and hemp. For the rest, I reached out to some avid frugalista friends. Here’s what they suggested:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYou already have five black-and-white-striped shirts; do you really need another?
I have a friend who’s a secondhand shopping pro, and her philosophy is: “If it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’s not meant for me.” Just like that leather jacket I saw the other day; it was meant for someone else. I went in again a few days later and it was gone, probably to a tiny millennial with a sewing kit.
\n\n\n\nLooking good isn’t just about having nice threads, it’s about the inner glow that comes from making good choices.
I know that one day I’ll find my jacket. It will be worth the wait, because I know looking good isn’t just about having nice threads, it’s about the inner glow that comes from making good choices. Choices that don’t contribute to environmental destruction.
\n\n\n\nNow go get that inner green-goddess glow, and let me know if you come across a secondhand black leather moto-style jacket in size 6!
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":844,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[27,19,8,10,6,39,22],"tags":[124,91,60,94,251,639,93],"class_list":["post-472","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environmentalist-from-hell","category-fashion-beauty","category-living","category-magazine","category-planet","category-plastic-pollution","category-voices","tag-fashion","tag-humour","tag-opinion","tag-recycling","tag-sara-bynoe","tag-shopping","tag-zero-waste"],"yoast_head":"\nAbout three years ago, I bought a vegan leather jacket for over $200. I’d looked for a stylish moto jacket for over a year before I happened upon one at Anthropologie. I wasn’t expecting to purchase vegan leather, but when I finally saw something close to perfection and read “vegan” on the label, I quickly considered the ethics and impulsively threw down my credit card. My quest was over!
\n\n\n\nNow, I have to say, I’ve been happy with my purchase. It has attracted compliments from stylish strangers, it makes me look super badass, and, I’ll be honest, I feel a bit smug when I say, “It’s vegan.” But, after a few years of consistent spring and fall wearing, it’s starting to show signs of age. This spring I saw cracks in the “leather” around the shoulders, and noticed the base material poking through at the seams. I’m concerned about its future.
\n\n\n\nHere’s the thing: Vegan leather is plastic.
What will I do with it when the “leather” cracks more? It’s going to look like I’m wearing a half-canvas garbage bag. Unlike leather, it’s not going to get softer — or that casual, worn-in look — with age. No one will be able to repurpose the material to make a bag or a belt, and no one else will want to wear it. So, most likely, it’ll end up in the landfill. How long will it take to decompose? Probably a very long time, because here’s the thing: Vegan leather is plastic.
\n\n\n\nOnly now — after my jacket began to erode, and my new Matt and Nat backpack (“Finest quality #vegan accessories”) got scuff-marks within a week of purchase — have I started to unpack the clever marketing behind “vegan leather.” Long-time vegetarian though I am, I’m now unsure which is worse for the planet, fake leather or real leather.
\n\n\n\nLet me break this down for you.
\n\n\n\nThe big problem for me with real leather is that animals die to produce it, and, as a vegetarian, this bothers me. I’m also aware that factory-farmed animals are treated poorly, and that animal-farming creates pollution and uses resources that could be better used elsewhere (see my earlier Asparagus column on why I became a vegetarian).
\n\n\n\nYes, I hear your “They were going to die anyway for others to eat their meat, leather is a good way of using the whole animal, and even you wear leather shoes, Bynoe!” arguments. I do wear leather shoes, and I struggle with it on the daily, which is why I bought the vegan leather jacket in the first place.
\n\n\n\nThe process of tanning leather is also a major source of pollution. It involves toxic chemicals that aren’t good for the earth, or for the workers doing the tanning. If people think about the life cycle of leather, many assume that it’s biodegradable, but archaeologists have found un-decomposed leather goods from 2,500 years ago, so… (shrug).
\n\n\n\nVegan leather enthusiasts will argue that it requires no slaughtering of animals, or waste of agriculture and water resources. But “vegan leather,” as it turns out, is a fancy way of saying polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane (PU). When I hear PVC, I think of plastic pants on dominatrixes or goth kids, probably because I came of age in the 90s. Not a lot has changed since then, though, at least as far as the chemical process for making plastic that looks like animal skin goes. Actually, not a lot has changed in the fashion sense, either. The 90s are back, unfortunately.
\n\n\n\nPU “leather” fabric is made by applying or laminating a 100% polyurethane finish to a base material like polyester, cotton, nylon, or rayon. An artificial grain pattern is applied to the surface to imitate the look of real leather. PVC “leather” is similar to PU, but instead of polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride is applied to the base material, after first being combined with with stabilizers (to protect it), plasticizers (to soften it) and lubricants (to make it flexible).
\n\n\n\nLike most plastics, PVC and polyurethane have their roots in the petroleum industry.
From an environmental perspective, the main concern with polyurethane is that solvents are used to make it into a liquid, and solvents are highly toxic — the chemicals involved have been linked to cancer and birth defects. There’s also the concern that plastics stick around forever, and are hard to recycle once they’ve been bonded to another material. Also, like most plastics, PVC and PU have their roots in the petroleum industry, which, you may have heard, has a crap-load of environmental impacts.
\n\n\n\nAfter all this research, it’s clear to me that, as far as plastic leather goes, PU is less horrible than PVC. Since it doesn’t require the same chemical plasticizers, its creation doesn’t cause as much chemical waste. I just checked the labels on my two expensive vegan leather purchases: Both say they are made with polyurethane (phewf!), but both were also made in China, a country that doesn’t have a great track record on clean manufacturing.
\n\n\n\nAnd, as mentioned, my vegan leather jacket is damaged, with no way to repair it. So, when it comes to durability there’s no contest: vegan leather doesn’t last as long as real leather. When I’m spending upwards of $200, I don’t think it’s wrong to expect my purchase to last longer than a few seasons. You’ve probably heard about the damaging effects of fast fashion, already — I don’t want to hurt animals, but I also don’t want to contribute to this disaster.
\n\n\n\nBy now you’re probably thinking, “Sara, you spent too much on your jacket and I don’t care. Just tell me what I should buy!” Ok, Alicia Silverstone, here’s what I think: if you’re an animal lover, and a true vegan abstaining from all other animal products, the pain that’s created by real leather production is your number one concern. So, buy fake leather, but know that it still causes environmental damage.
\n\n\n\nUnless you’re willing to become a nudist, you’re going to have to face the fact that all commercial textile manufacturing pollutes.
If you’re another kind of eco-warrior, the lines really are blurred about what to do: unless you’re willing to become a nudist, you’re going to have to face the fact that all commercial textile manufacturing pollutes.
\n\n\n\nWhat will I do, personally, when my vegan leather jacket wears out? After looking into the pollution from both kinds of leather, the real and the fake — and knowing that eco-alternatives like pineapple leather sadly aren’t widely available yet — I’ll likely look for a vintage leather jacket. That way, I can hit multiple birds with one stone: reducing waste, reusing an item, and not participating in today’s harmful farming and leather-tanning industries.
\n\n\n\nSo, if you see me in a year wearing a cracked pleather jacket, know that I haven’t yet found the right vintage replacement. “Vegan leather” is a clever marketing term for plastic fabric, and it’s not worth dropping $200 on, no matter how many compliments I get.
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