Combating climate change - clothing

[watervole]

Yesterday saw temperature records broken all over Europe.

Scientific certainty on the man-made causes of climate change is now well over 99% .

We are an a very big, heavy ship and it is set on a course that will be very difficult to alter.

All we can say, is that the sooner we start to change that course, the better our chances of not crashing into the hypothetical iceberg.  The later we make changes, the less effective they will be.

Global temperature rises are not being driven by just the CO2 we emit this year, but by that plus ALL THE CO2 WE HAVE EVER EMITTED.

Most people reading this will never see lower temperatures in their lifetimes.  We're fighting for our children and our grandchildren.

Our children, if we're really lucky, will see temperatures stabilise in their lifetime.

Our grandchildren, if, and only if, our generation take action now, may see a reduction in temperature, if someone finds a way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere in large quantities.

Remember that planting trees will only absorb the CO2 emitted by cutting down those trees in the first place.  It will not remove the CO2 from fossil fuels.

So, who's ready for lifestyle changes?

Let's tackle clothing for today:

It's estimated that clothing accounts for 10% of the world's carbon emissions. That's because the production of clothing is very energy intensive and the supply chains are very long, with clothing being shipped all around the globe.

Now add in the environmental cost of washing all those clothes and the plastic fibres released by laundering poly-cotton, nylon, polyester, etc.

Now add in the problem of disposing of all the millions of garments that get thrown away every year - most of it is impossible to recycle and goes straight to landfill.

Can you reduce your own impact?

Why not try and see how long you can go without buying a new (second-hand is allowed) item of clothing?

I'm aiming for a year. The last new item I bought was last August, at Purbeck folk festival.  All I've bought since then is a second-hand pair of trousers, two scarves from a charity shop and a second-hand waistcoat for my sword dance costume.

I have a wardrobe full of clothes.  Apart from the occasional item of underwear, I really have all I need for all round the year for a long time to come.  All I'm expecting to buy in the foreseeable future is a pair of linen trousers - linen being a relatively environmentally friendly fabric and cooler to wear in summer, and I need something to protect my legs from insect bites when I go walking on the heath.

Comments

[kotturinn]

So glad to find someone else who washes and reuses plastic bags! For me the final use is as a bin/waste basket bag - can honestly say I've never bought rubbish bags in my life. I have enough, of all sizes, to see me out as after my parents died I snarfed their bag of bags to go with my own, and the occasional ones I still get

[ranunculus]

We have been washing plastic bags for many years.
When I was growing up in the 1960's and early 1970's my parents were reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Mom was helping out in the Family Planning clinic with the idea that the world didn't need any more people in it, especially unplanned ones.
We moved into a home they built in 1966. It had a solar hot water set set up, a water bath cookstove that heated water inside in the winter and so on. We composted, had a garden, canned, made some of our own clothes, butchered our own chickens and sheep and so on. I remember Mom made me a wool plaid, pleated skirt when I was in first grade. It was extra large and held up by suspenders. Over the years the suspenders went away the hem was let down and the waistband altered. I wore that skirt through forth grade. Its final outing was as a swim suit in Mexico when I didn't have one! So I had a head start on thinking about being environmentally aware.
By the time I was in late high school I was refusing to take bags at the store, especially if it were only for one or two items. Several years ago I purchased a bottle of wine at a shop. The shop-keeper said I had to take a bag. I asked him if he wanted to make the sale or not. Apparently he did.
I have purchased trash bags, but exclusively for our mountain trips where we haul trash out in the boat. I should figure out if I can do anything differently there - it is tricky because we are also being aware of bears.

[kotturinn]

Silent Spring seems to have had an effect on more than one of us commenting on one or more of watervole's sustainable living posts. In my case it was reading it myself at an impressionable age (late 60s/early 70s - can't precisely recall) coupled with various other things in which I was interested.

I am impressed with the approach your parents took as long ago as that. The reasons for my family's approach to more sustainable living is somewhat more complex but does include when (before and during WW1), where (Yorkshire, South West London) and how (they weren't poor, said my mother about her family, as they all had shoes) my parents were born and brought up - in summary, take care of the pennies and not get into debt. Their attitude towards the increasingly 'disposable' consumer society was wary so, for example, while we had central heating installed before many of the houses in our road there was a reason (my health), we were always careful with use of resources such as water, electricity, gas as they knew these were not limitless etc.. They'd also seen marked changes in e.g. agriculture, landscape and use, in their lifetimes and again didn't consider all to be necessarily positive. We always took our own bags when shopping but they were brought up in an age when not making a 'fuss' was encouraged and so were never as 'stroppy' as me about refusing plastic bags in the days when shops automatically put purchases in a branded plastic bag.

[ranunculus]

The definition of "poor" is very interesting. My parents came from "good" families, and graduated UC Berkly (in the 30's). When I was growing up everyone I knew had shoes, even though there were some very poor children in my school. For a couple of years Mom considered us to be poor since she could not afford 5 cents a day for my school provided lunch. She had to accept food assistance for that. We weren't exactly "poor" though, we were "land-poor" and eventually sold enough land to afford to build the house and a vineyard. Still, over all, they were generally frugal, just as you describe.

When they built the house my folks were very influenced by the ideas of Frank Loyd Wright and incorporated a lot of them in our house; the right depth eves for solar gain, extra insulation in the walls and ceiling (laughable compared to today's standards, but twice the requirements then), and an otherwise all electric house. Here in California there is a big move to eliminate gas cooking stoves in preference to electric ones as they are supposed to be more environmentally friendly.

[kotturinn]

1920s East Riding of Yorkshire. One winter she (eldest child) and her mother shared a coat between them. I know they also, at one point, nursed the youngest child through whooping cough by themselves because they couldn't afford the rent and the doctor's fee (and some people wonder why I'm very pro the NHS, well, that and the fact that I wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for the NHS!). There were twins in her class at school who only had one pair of shoes between them and took it in turns to come to school. The kids knew, she knew at least one of the teachers knew and made allowances etc.. She left school at 14 - to stay beyond then would have involved fees as her parents moved from one area to another before the scholarship exams in their original area but after they'd occurred in the area they moved to (and people wonder why I believe in a nation-wide education system!). Her younger siblings were both scholarship children, as was my father (London) and all stayed at school until they were 18. Both parents had fathers who, while they survived WWI, were not exactly unscarred. My father's father died when he was 20, leaving him with his mother and three younger brothers to look after and little or no savings - he never lost the feeling he was responsible for everything. Both my parents were very keen on having sufficient savings to cope in case of emergency and also in spending on education. People have noted before now that I have a slightly unusual take on the 20th century amongst my contemporaries - but most had parents a good half generation younger than mine (40 and 42 when I was born)...

[ranunculus]

My reply got very long. I'm posting it in my journal instead of leaving this thread on Watervole's journal.

[igenlode]

My parents weren't poor by the time I was growing up (my father was in a white-collar job and kept getting steadily promoted until he was head of the department, so we ended up with a lot of savings in the bank as his salary rose and our expenditure remained minimal) but they didn't believe in wasting anything. They had insulation put into the house very early, and a first-generation solar water heating system. But basically they never really formed part of the post-war consumer society; they went on living as they had been brought up, never buying a car, taking a trolley basket to the shops (my father always carried a folded bag in his inside jacket pocket, just in case he might want to buy something), carrying a Thermos of tea, a tin of sandwiches and a camping bottle full of squash on all-day expeditions instead of purchasing snack food, taking self-catering holidays in England rather than flying off to seek the sun (I'd never in my life stayed in a hotel until I went to Russia), buying clothes, gifts, books and records second hand (I was a charity shop expert by the time I was twelve, and could run my hand along the rails and identify the garments in a fabric I might actually want to wear), and never throwing anything -- from screws to pieces of fabric -- away if it could be stored for re-use. We picked fruit and made our own jam using our vast stack of second-hand glass jars. We baked our own chutney, bread and cakes ('shop cake' was a subject for derision, and generally rather nasty). We mended our clothes until they were only fit for rag, and then we used them as rags. We didn't have a TV until I was in my teens, so I spent my childhod reading voraciously (but generally a generation or two behind the latest literature).

Basically, we lived all our lives as if it was still the 1940s, which has been very handy since I've never had any money of my own and have never needed to sacrifice any part of my 'lifestyle' to compensate. The only thing we didn't do was the family camping holidays, since the railways no longer offered the advanced luggage service that was essential to transport heavy canvas tents and cooking equipment without a car...

It's rather scary how, like religion, this sort of thing is so very largely dependent on upbringing. I'm not frugal because I've Seen the Light; I'm frugal out of habit, because I was brought up to frown on waste. I don't drive because I was brought up without a car (and indeed, brought up to look down on 'car children' who couldn't walk so much as a mile). I don't take holidays abroad because my parents didn't take holidays abroad, so all my childhood memories are associated with long train journeys and not aeroplanes.

None of that is anything to do with me. It's pure chance.