National geographic article by daisy dumas

‘Natural’ materials may sound greener – but are they? Daisy Dumas finds out which fabrics are kindest to the planet

Everything we wear, be it from a charity shop or the runways of Milan, starts with a humble fibre. That fibre – from plants,

petrochemicals or animals – is extracted, spun and woven into fabric. It’s dyed and finished be-fore being cut, stitched and sold. Transport often links each phase and water and chemicals prop up the whole process. Locked in every garment are fibres that tell a story of ecological impact.

In 17th century Europe, being at the height of fashion sig-nalled status and either wealth or heavy debt. Now, it can mean a short trip to the High Street and spare change from a ten-

pound note – and an unhealthy detachment from the systems behind our garments.

“Everyone gets the idea that flying apples from New Zealand is bonkers, but they don’t grasp the same idea with Indian cot-ton. If something is cheap, either natural resources or someone making it is probably being exploited,” says John-Paul Flintoff, author of Sew Your Own.

Like Dr Kate Fletcher, he is chipping away at the coalface of popular conscience. Fletcher, reader in sustainable fashion at the London College of Fashion, believes that the real key to sustainability is variety: “The market is dominated by cotton and polyester. We need real ➤

32 NatioNal GeoGraphic GreeN | AUTUMN 2010

Pachacuti uses sustainably harvested

toquilla palm for its Ecuadorian panama

hats (above left, opposite left and centre). Top

right: American star Anne Hathaway wears

a milk-fibre Mr Larkin dress. Inset: Designer Saara Lepokorpi uses

Ingeo, a corn-based biodegradable fabric.

Centre left: Maison Gattinoni’s Ingeo kaftan.

Bottom left: Komodo organic cotton top.

Bottom right: Cotton farms account for 10%

of all herbicide and 20-25% of insecticide

use, despite covering only a few percent of the

world’s cultivable soils

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[ intelligenceliving ]

♦ Buy stuff that is easy to wash and dry

♦ Buy stuff that is built to last

♦ Wear it and use it until it falls apart, or pass it on

♦ Buy second-hand♦ Repair things rather than

throw out♦ Donate or recycle cloth-

ing rather than putting it in the bin

♦ Favour synthetic fibres over natural ones

Tips for keeping the total impact of your clothing to a minimum from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, by Mike Berners-Lee (£8.99, Profile Books)

Wear it well

substitutes that broaden choice for consumers and promote diversity so that we’re not put-ting all our eggs in one basket.”

And to do this, we must begin by dismissing pitching ‘natu-ral’ against ‘man-made’ when asking which is better for the planet. “There’s no cut and dried answer. It is so complex that to draw a simple conclusion would be to miss most of the impor-tant issues,” says Fletcher. “You have to ask yourself what it is that you’re trying to achieve. Less energy? Less water? It’s a false choice to compare natural to man-made.”

Some impacts are obvious – fur, for example – but most fibres are so inherently tied to the system in which they comprise only a part that the environmen-tal impacts are hidden.

Answers are surprisingly counter-intuitive; as Fletcher puts it: “We have to stop per-petuating the myth that natural equals eco.”

NATUrAl ///////////////////////////////Cotton comprises about one third of the world’s fibre produc-tion. It’s renewable, biodegrad-able and easy to harvest and spin. But the UN estimates that

it takes 760 litres of water to pro-duce an average cotton t-shirt, plus litres of pesticides (includ-ing Aldicarb, a powerful nerve agent), fertilisers, defoliants and dye. Its monoculture has wiped biodiversity off the map in swathes of the USA, China and India and – among other dubious responsibilities – is accountable for the devastating loss of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Organic cotton, on the other hand, shows real signs of promise.

Prince Charles supports wool as a more sustainable natural fibre, but even here there are complications and sometimes downsides. Researchers have calculated that it takes 685,000 litres of water to feed the sheep and scour the fleece to make just one suit. On top of this, there are methane emissions, soil ero-sion and pesticides to consider. Organic wool, currently expen-sive and rare, has impressive benefits, as does recycled wool, particularly as a substitute to polyester, technical and heavy-weight fabrics.

Bamboo is far from innocent. It scores well as a crop, sequester-ing carbon, preventing soil ero-sion and growing at breakneck speed (even without pesticides and fertilisers its yield is ten times that of cotton), but – and ➤

Left: reading the labels: one of the most common eco-labels found in Europe is the oeko-tex Standard 100 mark, which looks particularly at health standards. MADE-By is an independent consumer label for fashion companies which are transparent about the social, economic and ecological conditions throughout their whole supply chain. If a garment carries the fairtrade mark, processors and manufacturers have produced evidence that labour rights have been respected

SimplyAd5mm.pdf 1 12/07/2010 13:19

Eco vogue at Tesco


there’s always a but – it requires vast amounts of caustic soda, carbon disulfide (which can cause chronic nervous system damage) and bleach to create soft, usable viscose yarn. Organic bamboo is broken down with enzymes and is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to produce, but as a fabric is very durable.

Linen from flax scores plus points, but hemp, fast-growing and fibre-rich, is blighted by legal issues and pollution from ‘ret-ting’ (a fibre-separation process) cellulose from the plant.

Silk, while not a major concern, is expensive to pro-duce and farmed silk is hardly environmentally neutral – 2,600 silkworms die to make just 400g of raw silk.

SyNTheTic MAN-MAde///////////////////////////////Polyester, comprising 40% of all fibres produced, is the world’s largest fibre group. It depends upon oil and is energy-hungry. It takes heavy metal cobalt, man-ganese salts, sodium bromide and more nasties to extract, yet its water consumption during production is negligible and it has huge recycling potential.

Recycling polyester consumes around 75% less energy and emits 71% less carbon than making virgin material – not much use, however, if recycling facilities are scarce. “It’s not that recycling polyester is too expensive, it’s that virgin poly-ester is too cheap,” says Fletcher. “It’s cheaper to buy oil than to recycle bottles. The true costs of oil aren’t factored in.” Her words are well-timed – as Green goes to press, Deep Horizon belches crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Nylon and acrylic both take vast amounts of energy to pro-duce while acrylic has the added

disadvantage of massive water consumption and nylon emits potent GHG, nitrous oxide. It takes 157mj (megajoules) to pro-duce 1kg of acrylic – compared to 150mj for nylon, 109mj for polyester and 50mj for cotton. For those in doubt, polyviscose is just plain bad news says Fletcher.

NATUrAl MAN-MAde ///////////////////////////////As technology develops, bound-aries between man-made and natural fibres are rapidly blur-ring. Science is leaps ahead of what we constitute as ‘wearable’. Coconut, rice straw, chicken feathers, seaweed (SeaCell, from Germany, even claims to nourish and moisturise the skin), soya, peat, peanuts, milk and nettle – even paper – are all being investigated as renewable fibres but most require consider-able research and development before becoming mainstream.

“Recycled synthetics are much more promising than virgin materials,” says Fletcher, who is also excited by Lyocell, a fabric better known by its brand name Tencel, made from eucalyptus. It is carbon neutral and is made in a closed-circuit system, with 99.5% of the solvent used in the cellulose extraction recycled. The consumer, however, must absorb its high costs.

A corn-based biodegrad-able fabric called Ingeo (as experimented with by Versace) and natural fibre-based Cupro (derived from the waste products in the cotton industry) are not panaceas. Utterly compromised by the lack of infrastructure available to provide ideal condi-tions for its decomposition, In-geo’s addition to landfill causes the potential emission of more methane than a polyester shirt lying inert next to it. ➤


Established ethical fashion label ‘From Somewhere’ launched its first collab-orative ‘upcycling’ range with Tesco earlier this year. (Styles shown here are from the first collection.)

The diffusion line, called ‘From Somewhere to F&F,’ uses recycled, obsolete or waste textile stock, which would otherwise be burned or buried in landfill sites.

Its designer Orsola de Castro (right) told us, “We’ve always been about infiltrat-ing – if you’re isolated, you don’t take it further. The bad guys are looking to me for solutions – it’s a victory for the sustain-ability movement.

“It is a way of manag-ing waste in a creative way, rather than pretending the problem doesn’t exist.”

Buy online from tesco.com/clothing, in sizes 8-18. Prices from £16.

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www.GreeNNatGeo.co.uk | 39

So, I ask Fletcher, are there any fibres the eco-aware should outright avoid? “Virgin materials, viscose, acrylic and there’s no way PVC should be used.”

Beyond these concerns, the greenness of fibres gets more complex still. Ethical fashion company Pachacuti, which works with alpaca for its knit-wear and the toquilla palm for its panama hats, was the world’s first company to label all of its products ‘Certified Fair Trade and Sustainable’. The founder, Carry Somers, says that 90% of the CO2 impact of clothing is post sale, in the ‘use phase’. Designing with alpaca wool, which naturally repels odours and stains, minimises use phases.

In his newly-published, How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Foot-print of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee found the carbon footprint of his jeans to be 6kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) compared to 3kg for his nylon trousers.

Simply put, nylon will last longer and wash and dry quicker.

Fletcher envisages a time when all impacts across all gar-ments’ life cycles are considered from the design table – when ecologically intelligent design dwarfs fast, passive fashion.

Orsola de Castro, founder of London Fashion Week’s ethi-cal branch, Estethica, and the ‘From Somewhere’ label told me “The fashion industry has been complacent: change is manda-tory.” While she has seen eco fashion and diverse use of fibres gain momentum – “it’s amazing to watch the ugly duckling turn into the beautiful swan” – they remain the costlier option.

US designer Casey Larkin, whose milk-fibre Mr Larkin dress label has received red-carpet plaudits, told me, “I have to dedi-cate added time into knowing sources, mills, processes, finish-ings – and make sure they meet my code of standards.” But mills are expanding their product

ranges and de Castro believes that now “there is more support and knowledge” than ever.

Where compassionate design-ers tread, a new breed of ethical standards steps in parallel tracks. Look out for Oeko-Tex, Made-By and Fairtrade labels – proof of a fibre’s provenance.

And a foolproof tactic for next time you shop? According to Somers, “consumers should think about how long the gar-ment they’re buying will last and how much wear they’ll get out of it. Ultimately, it may be better to spend £100 rather than £10.”

We could do worse than tak-ing a leaf out of Fletcher’s book. “Choose something that you feel a real connection to and have an emotional link with. Fashion isn’t just about purchasing, looking and styling – it may help consum-ers’ understanding and connects with who we are as people.”

Your outfit is more than the sum of its fibres. Contact and source details: page 92

5 great autumn eco buys

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1. Good jacket: yorkshire wool by Izzy Lane, from £75, izzylane.com.

2. Good dress: such as one from People tree, from £65,

peopletree.co.uk. 3. Good jeans: Monkee Genes, made from fully organic bamboo fabric, approved by the Soil Association, £50, asos.com or see monkeegenes.co.uk. 4. Good separates: Zadig oversize organic cotton knit jumper, £55, Locus hemp weave trousers, £60, Komodo, a member of MADE-By, komodo.co.uk. 5. Good shirt: in cotton poplin, ¤67, from fairtrade-certified Article 23, article-23.com. Stockists and mail order: see websites

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National geographic article by daisy dumas

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