Go go go, go greens!
I’ll be honest with you. This took a huge fat monkey off our backs!
For years we’ve been after green groups and companies to consider using the greenest tee shirt of them all, the ecoGear tee shirt from recycled cotton and recycled poly.
It was heartbreaking and hugely disappointing to have them choose other products because “ yours is a few dollars more than what we’re paying and it will hurt our fundraising bottomline.”
That’s a huge contradiction right there. Groups that call themselves green or groups that make their paychecks by saying they protect the environment CANNOT choose economy when the ecology is at stake! This turns whatever they claim to do into greenwashing because if you don’t watch the environmental footprints of your own group and its related actions and merchandise, how can you say you’re protecting the environment?
Then again, we don’t really blame them. Paychecks are important after all but most importantly is that none of us want to face the monster in all our closets. Ya, the clothing we all wear. Most of us know, especially those in the environmental protection business, about the massive destruction clothing wreaks upon the environment.
You get countries like Uzbekhistan being declared the environmental disaster of the century by the United Nations for its cotton growing. Rivers in India flow orange water from the dyestuffs. China’s Yangtze river flows blue from all the denim factories along its banks. Fish and animal species have all but disappeared from rivers and lakes where clothing factories discharge their chemicals. Bleach to turn the natural fibres white so they can be ready to dye. Dyestuffs. Then more bleach and enzymes to “soften” the clothing up before going to market. Not to mention the heavy metals and formaldehyde that always gets tossed into the dyeing and finishing processes of making tee shirts and jeans.
In recent months, we’ve been countered with “oh, we process our organic clothing in closed loop production systems where all the waste waters are treated before being released.” Sounds good right? Definitely eco but what they don’t tell you is that when you treat waste waters from dyeing clothing, there is a lot of inert dyestuffs, chemicals etc that are caught in filters or if they use a different capture process, more chemicals are added to the waste waters so that the dead dyestuffs etc are bonded together into a sludge. So they’ll skim the sludge off the surface…what happens to it? No one will tell us.
The point is, to make eco clothing in 2010, with the technology that is available, you don’t have to plant new crops to grow fibres. There is no need to go redye anything and burn up tons of coal and use fresh drinking water for it. There is recycled cotton and our stuff has such a nice handfeel, most people wouldn’t believe it when we tell them its 100% recycled fibres. They look at us like we’re the biggest greenwashers there is.
We could go on but we have another post just beggin to be written.So we’ll close it off with a big thank you to Peter Ormond, Green Party candidate for Hamilton Ontario, for going green with us!
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