Facts about Fabric

1. The average American throws away about 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per year.

2. 10% of all agricultural chemicals and 25% of insecticides in the U.S. are used to grow cotton.

3. It takes almost 1/3 of a pound of chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) to grow enough cotton for just ONE T-shirt.

4. Seven of the fifteen pesticides used on cotton are considered "possible", "likely", "probable", or "known" human carcinogens (acephate, dichloropropene, diuron, fluometuron, pendimethalin, tribufos, and trifluralin) according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

5. Some studies have shown that organic farmed soils have a better ability to absorb and retain carbon, which would be beneficial in the fight to reduce global warming.

6. Organically grown crops also use less fossil fuel than conventional crops, another benefit in the fight to reduce global warming.

7. Pesticides are suspected to be responsible for the severe drop in honeybees, the increase in frogs with extra legs and eyes, and annual death of 67 million birds.

8. The U.S. textile "recycling industry" (which actually re-purposes rather than recycles), with some 2,000 companies, removes annually from the solid waste stream 2.5 billion pounds of post consumer textile product waste.

Why Recycle?

Thankfully, going green is finally catching on in the main stream media. It seems like every one is talking about what we can do to lessen our impact on the earth. This is great news. There are many small changes we can make in our every day lives that will add up to make a big difference.

There is so much information that can be shared on the topic that I won’t try to go into it all here. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend joining CoOp America. The have a great web site and also publish several magazines and newsletters that have all the information you can want about going green. 

What I wanted to focus on here was recycling fabric. This was an area that I hadn’t really thought much about until I learned some startling facts. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2006, Americans generated 11.8 million tons of textile waste. Even more alarming, about 60% of the clothes recovered for secondhand use by thrift stores (including Goodwill and Salvation Army) are then shipped thousands of miles and sold overseas. So when we get rid of our old clothes, we are not only adding to the solid waste, but we are part of a system that uses valuable energy to ship them off to foreign countries, where some say these clothes are replacing traditional locally made textiles. This creates all sorts of cultural and economic ramifications.

So what can you do to lessen your impact? Here are a few ideas: