M CT Is that the time You're going to be late You drag yourself from the warmth of your bed and yank open your drawers Hey What happened here Inside you find tufts of silky white fibers as soft as bunny tails hanging from stalks where your jeans and shirts should be And what s this Thick slippery oil pools in the bottom of your sock drawer and drips from the hangers in your closet Where are your clothes You don t usually see it so dramatically but your clothing comes from things that were once alive T shirts and jeans begin their lives as cotton growing in places like India or the southern United States Socks bathing suits shirts fuzzy pajamas and jackets contain atoms from tiny aquatic organisms that swam in a prehistoric sea Between their birth and the shopping mall those microscopic life forms died were buried by mud and eventually got squeezed and cooked into petroleum deep within the Earth Hundreds of millions of years later we humans pump this black gold up to the surface and deliver it to refineries where it is processed into synthetic fabrics like acrylic and polyester Half the fabric on Earth today is made from petroleum based
Every year humans collectively spend one thousand billion dollars on clothes And more than two thirds of all that money comes from shoppers just in the United States Canada and western Europe that's a very small part of the world's population You probably own a lot more clothes than your parents did when they were kids You could balance an adult golden retriever against the average weight of the clothes each kid in your class buys in a year What's in style changes faster and the temptation to buy is far greater than ever before You see more ads in a day than your great grandparents saw in their whole lives But just as too much cheap fast food isn't good for your body too much cheap fast fashion isn't good for the Earth All those throwaway fashions gobble up raw materials faster than the planet can replenish them and guzzle oil that can never be replaced Plus to make clothes so cheaply companies may cut corners on environmental safety or underpay the people who grow and produce their materials Trouble is you can't see these negatives because there are so many steps between the crop the fiber the factory the transporter the distributor and the store You're just looking for a new shirt Before all these concerns about clothing lead to thoughts of going without brrrrrrr consider this Experts all over the world are inventing safer healthier materials for clothing and transforming the clothing we no longer wear in ways you never le imagined So slip into something comfortable and turn the
An Sil Oh H 0 U U HOW THIRSTY ARE YOUR CLOTHES How do we make everyone's wardrobe as eco friendly as it is fashionable Great style color comfort price the last thing you think about when you're shopping is how much your clothes drink But many of your favorite clothes have an almost unquenchable thirst Nearly 2 5 billion T shirts are sold on Earth each year Unlike synthetic fabrics such as fleece the fibers in your 100 cotton T shirts and denim jeans were grown not manufactured Conventionally grown cotton is intensively farmed to get the highest yield that s the biggest harvest for the smallest unit of land And that cotton is one thirsty plant It takes twenty five bathtubs of water to grow enough cotton for one lonely T shirt It also takes lots of oil to power heavy farm machinery and make fertilizers Plus even more oil is needed to create the astonishing amounts of human made chemical pesticides used to prevent insects mice and other animals from damaging the
The perfect T shirt With an eye for finding greener options designers have launched a contest to create the perfect T shirt made from materials that do as little harm to the planet as possible Which would you choose to wear's meet the contestants OD O are T shirt A Bamboo This plant grows like Jack's beanstalk reaching adult size in or four years without the aid of pesticides It requires much less water than cotton and can even survive droughts But Critics say the processes needed to turn bamboo into soft T shirts require lots of nasty toxic chemicals but T shirt B Hemp Hemp also grows very quickly and it needs much less water land to grow than cotton But Critics feel hemp should not be grown because it's a of marijuana Industrial hemp is legal in Canada parts of Europe China India but currently not the United
