Here you are.
- “as the world falls down”
A great overview of the messy world of sustainable fabric I’ve just dipped my toes in: “A World Consumed by Guilt” at the New York Times.
We all make compromises every day. Making them with your eyes open instead of arbitrarily is the best piece of advice I could give.
“Future Fashion White Papers” (via PSFK) may be a good resource for making compromises with your eyes open:
FutureFashion White Papers aims to educate all people interested in sustainable fashion and offers safe environmental practices for the industries and consumers. It is an invaluable and ground-breaking resource that proves how style and sustainability can coexist.
We shall see.
Today’s postsong: Trying to navigate the world of sustainable fabric is kind of like going to masquerade ball after eating a dosed apricot, and ending up dancing with David Bowie… Or not, but either way, today I bring you David Bowie, singing “as the world falls down” from the movie Labyrinth.
- Provenance
I’ve been blogging a lot about “locally grown” clothing, the “100 mile closet“, and other ways the apparel industry can mimic what’s been happening with food systems for several years. The provenance of our clothes—where they came from, through what processes and systems—is just as important as the provenance of our food.
Monocle magazine makes a good business case for why provenance is something businesses should pay attention to (via PSFK):
Provenance became a big issue for brands low, medium and high in 2007. A spate of scares involving Chinese-made products saw the world’s largest toy maker, Mattel, recall 21 million toys due to concern over lead paint. Gap was stung when it was found that children in India were employed to make garments for their Western peers. In the showrooms of many luxury brands, buyers were starting to question if the clothes and accessories were really made in the UK, France and Italy.
In 2008, provenance is going to become more important at luxury goods companies as CEOs decide whether to downgrade their brands (they wouldn’t call it this, but we would) by shutting workshops and moving the work to Asia to improve margins, or take a long-term view and keep investing in craftsmanship, education and maintaining manufacturing facilities above the shop.
The decision should be a simple one. The fake handbag might be made in China, but if 90 per cent of the real thing is made there as well, where’s the point of difference other than price? Against this backdrop, a growing movement for authenticity, craftsmanship and heritage is creating greater opportunities for artisinal companies.
When we start paying attention to ‘provenance’—where stuff comes from—what changes will we demand from the fashion industry? How will we vote with our dollars?
- [and clothing]
“‘In some cases transport is only 20% of the total energy budget of a food’s production’… [D]o not be fooled by the food miles (although they are certainly interesting and useful) and remember to keep the bigger life cycle picture in mind when choosing your food.”
But 20% is still a lot.
- (Local) Us vs. (Fair Trade) Them?
There may be tension between Free Trade and Fair Trade, and tension between Free Trade and Local Trade.
But between Local Trade and Fair Trade?
Worldchanging’s Erica Barnett, (who covers transportation and local politics for Seattle’s the Stranger) writes on the complex impacts of choosing to buy local, buy fresh, buy organic, and/or buy fair-trade food. A decision to buy local here could have impacts on third-world jobs—jobs that other consumers are trying to protect by buying fair trade.…[I]t turns out eating local can have unintended consequences as well. Recently proponents of strengthening fair trade markets in emerging economies have pointed out that the trend toward “eating local” may hurt farmers who depend heavily on overseas markets to make a living… Food miles, then, are not the single most important measure of responsible food consumption; how our food choices shape local economies (including those thousands of miles away) may be just as important.
Barnett links us to a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, by William G. Mosely, co-author of Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa. Mosely writes:
We’re getting a glimpse of the future of this debate in the United Kingdom, where the tension between the local food and fair trade movements is acute. Just recently, the U.K. Soil Association, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable and organic farming, called on the British government to restrict imports of organic produce brought in by air. In a concession to the fair trade movement, this group would allow for imports from countries actively seeking to promote organic and fair trade markets within their own borders. Despite this concession, British fair trade activists are worried.
Barnett and Mosely agree that the solution
…is to push for stronger regulations on working conditions and better assistance for farmers in developing economies. In the meantime, we would do well to eschew zealotry — organic, locavorean, or fair-trade — in exchange for a mix of all three. Throwing up our hands and buying out-of-season, conventionally grown and paid-for produce is far worse than choosing fair trade over local, or vice versa.
Are fair trade, free trade and local trade necessarily at odds? Can we limit barriers to trade, within structures that ensure fair prices are paid to independent farmers, both here and abroad? If consumers believe they are faced with a dilemma between a) supporting their local economy and limiting the carbon
footprint of their purchases by shopping locally or b) supporting developing economies on the other side of the world through fair/direct trade purchases, they very well may end up “throwing up their hands and buying out-of-season, conventionally grown and paid-for produce” and clothing.As movements, “local” and “fair trade” seem to have shared goals (robust economies, social equity, environmental and community health, etc.), so we are going to need policies and business models that favor both styles of “check-out activism” — not one at the expense of the other.
Local Fair Trade, for example, works “by applying the principles of Fair Trade to local food.” Nice enough. What about the inverse — applying principles of local food to Fair Trade? Direct Trade is close, bringing the intimacy and sense of responsibility of buying locally directly and fairly to the places that goods can actually grow (often without the CO2 benefits of sourcing locally, of course).
In the end, we have to understand what we’re getting into when we buy. There may be no truly guilt-free shopping. But the reasons we strive for a healthy “local-living” economy are just as applicable to people living in Mexico, Eastern Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. Likewise, fair trade and organic movements abroad can’t be ignored, for instance, here in the Pacific Northwest.
Says Mosely:
While the local food craze is all well and good, we should not be so quick to denounce organic and fair trade foods that are imported from the developing world. By shunning these products, we do not encourage local markets to flourish in these countries, but we condemn these farmers to the ills of conventional production for the global market (the only other real alternative at this time). We should remain open to such products in the short term, but also work for broad scale changes in the rules of the global market place to ensure that even conventional agricultural production is safe and fairly compensated.
(photo credits: Harry Wagner, hen power)
- Turning producers into sellers, and connecting them to buyers, and turning buyers into producers
Before the internet, efficiency meant globalization. With the internet, efficiency means localizing globally.
Etsy.com, for example, allows us to efficiently find buyers for our goods, and sellers of what we want to buy in our neighborhoods. It serves as a practical response to Ryan Avent’s article in Grist on why we need to be cautious about buying locally (see my previous post on the subject). Treehugger recently posted an interview from Wallstrip with Etsy’s founder Robert Kalin.
For those who don’t know, Etsy’s incredible on-line interface allows anyone to shop or sell handmade crafts. The site features multiple ways to shop, my favorite is to look at what people are making and selling in my own neighborhood. If Locavore is the word of the year for 2007, is losumer word of the year for 2008? I certainly hope to get crafty this holiday season, and Etsy makes this a lot easier than knitting those socks myself.
Check out the geolocater. It’s a little functionally awkward right now (you should be able to search for “shirts” in “seattle” made from “Lyocel”), but the idea is fantastic. Many of my friends are using Etsy to hawk their handmade wares (Deviant Design), and I’m sure Adapt Apparel will as well.
See also:
- Sock Puppets
Probably the greatest and worst thing about the U.S. sock industry is that it is open to anybody. You don’t need a high school degree or any work experience to get a sock job.
A last gasp for U.S. apparel manufacturing? Obviously, doing anything involving tariffs (imposing them, removing them or reimposing them) is bound to affect someone somewhere (From NPR via Mankiw). The same story repeats again and again: jobs move back and forth, workers shuffle around, and employment fluctuates.
…[T]he White House gave itself a self-imposed deadline of Dec.19, 2007, to put back tariffs on sock exports from Honduras…
…[M]ost of 4,000 recently laid-off sock workers quickly found new jobs. It’s an irony that reversing this tariff — fought for so hard by some in Fort Payne — will likely have its biggest impact thousands of miles away in Honduras…
- The Problem with the “100-mile Diet”…
…is that it has been framed as a dedicated lifestyle.
You either do it or you don’t. It’s puritanical, and is doomed to be an absurd farse of the 00’s unless it can be more widely embraced. “Carbon neutral” may be an even harder for the average person to reach, but it doesn’t sound like something your vegan brother in Seattle tries for a year before anemia consumes him. “Carbon neutral” is framed as a goal, not an ideology.
(photo: cookthinker)
It would be more useful if the “100-mile” label was seen as a way to be conscious of how far your food has traveled, or even better, how close the producers of your food are to you, and what little excuse you have for not knowing any of them personally. And maybe rather than calling it a diet (remember what happened to Atkins on his own diet?) we should use it to label our our products. 100-mile coffee is improbable where I live. Yet it should be hard to not buy a 100-mile apple. If we know what can be grown locally, we can seek it out.
Same goes for the 100-mile wardrobe. I may never wear 100-mile cotton in Seattle, but how ’bout 100-mile bamboo? 100-mile hemp can’t be that far off either.
(photo: franciscoantunes)
If we are educated about the things we buy, we will want better things. All of this gets more of us asking important questions. How many 100’s of miles did your clothing travel to be woven? How far then to be dyed? How far then to be sewn? How far then to reach the fantastic machine that makes you jeans look old and worn? How far then to the store where you bought it? How far then to store where you will sell it? How far then to the recycling station, where I will get it for free and turn it into something beautiful? How much money changed hands at each of these steps anyway?
I don’t know anyone who made any of the clothes I wear. I know people that printed some of it (6 or 7 items). I know someone who knows someone who made one piece. Is connecting to the sources of your food, clothing and housing just a kitschy dream?
- “Navigating the Falling Dollar”
From 2004:
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2984480718427930625[/googlevideo]
- Paul Hawken on Re-imagining Civilization
Full video, well worth a watch, here. I used audio hijack to strip the audio of just the plenary (w/ intro), in case you wanna download it.
- Connecting Buyers and Sellers Locally = Protectionism?
David Hsu at Complexcities recently pointed me to a dialog happening over on Grist on the whole “local” thing. It (along with its long trail of attendant comments) deserves some attention.
Doing this would leave America and the world desperately poor.
I’m not going to go too deep into analyzing Avent’s arguments, which are fairly well-reasoned but seem to miss the point.
First, few people are saying we must produce absolutely everything locally.
Second, there is a world of difference between putting barriers on trade and catering to consumer demand for locally produced goods while reaping the benefits of local production. While Avent admits the issues are “complex”, he conflates the very idea of “free trade” (which in our already very-planned economy means as few as barriers to trade as possible, but enough as necessary) with a style of production that is an intentionally myopic, globalized race-to-the-bottom. He implies we can’t have one without the other. . . If we’re “buying locally”, then we’re supporting “a world of regional trade blocs,” he implies, and giving up specialization of labor entirely.
Here: If consumers demand local stuff, so be it. Producers will then produce locally. But consumers can’t afford to buy local stuff if no one is working on ways of producing local stuff cheaply. But producers won’t work on ways of producing locally cheaply if consumers don’t demand it.
Demand = willingness + ability to pay. Businesses should say to their customers, “You work on the ability to pay part, I will try to make something you’re willing to pay for. I will devote myself to this place and time and do my damnedest to make something of lasting value.”
PSFK.com’s Guy Brighton puts it reasonably from a consumer’s perspective:
Maybe what we need to do is apply a level of common sense: ensure that we import enough to maintain a decent diet, avoid foods that would be out of season locally and choose local when offered the choice. ::link
The question is, then, is there inherent value in local production and local buying/selling. In other words, does it help your business do what it set out to do in the world to make, sell and buy locally? If your
business exist to serve a place and its people (financially and otherwise), then yes. You will have a deeper connection to your customers, grow their trust and loyalty, know their wants, and be able to respond more agilely to market changes (before your distant competition can bring something to market). You will know the cities and the lands around them, what is good or bad for them, and how it affects the people.
You will be the first company in your industry to go carbon neutral, and it will be cheaper because you don’t have to buy offsets for shipping. You will take advantage of the urban landscape, you will commute less, your designers, engineers, and manufacturers will know each other and communicate better, face-to-face. You will know where your materials come from, where they are taken and who assembles them into value-added goods. You will never accidentally have a sweatshop in your value-stream.Businesses serve their workers and their communities by serving their customers. They do a better job if all their workers and all their customers are in their communities.
Which leads me an open-ended question, posed by Avent:
If the world would be better off, if production would be more efficient, with more localized industry, then why aren’t companies already doing it?
American Apparel almost fits the bill, but they just have half the equation (in that they manufacture in the U.S. but ship worldwide). I’m going hunting for other success stories.
In summary: I’m definitely not saying we shouldn’t buy things from other countries. We will. And if we can make money making it better here, we will do that too.
(painting: Soutine)
