If you don’t know her from her books, Fibershed and Harvesting Color you’ll likely remember Rebecca Burgess from the panel discussion two weeks ago that I hosted with the team at Climate Farmers in which she and Aroa Alvarez Fernandez spoke about the potential of regenerative fashion and textiles to transform the current clothing industry. After that discussion I felt compelled to speak to her again to explore some of the options that are available to everyone to rediscover the value in our wardrobes and care for our clothing as investments. 

This is no minor change. The fashion industry around the world is now second only to the oil industry as the largest polluter on Earth. This affects everyone and is tied to many aspects of our lives, from growing fibers, to processing fabrics and dying them, to the millions of people who work in the industry from farming to retail. It’s responsible for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions due to its long supply chains and energy intensive production, but even more severe is the industry’s impact on our water supplies. For example 85 % of the daily needs in water of the entire population of India would be covered by the water used just to grow cotton in the country, and yet it’s estimated that 100 million people there do not have secure access to drinking water. In most of the countries in which garments are produced, untreated toxic wastewaters from textiles factories are dumped directly into the rivers. The contamination eventually reaches the sea and then spreads around the globe.

But while the destruction of the clothing industry is staggering, there are a lot of simple things that all of us can change in our consumption and care habits to do our part to fix this. Since this is certainly not my own area of expertise, I asked Rebecca what her own hierarchy of clothing purchases are and how she decides what garments to invest in. 

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Links:

https://fibershed.org/

carboncycle.org

https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/fibershed/

colorhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52510936-fibershed?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9GnJJbKvzv&rank=1