Here you are.
- Clothes the Loop
4.5 percent of waste sent to municipal landfills - 4 million tons according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - is textiles ::source
The New York Times magazine has a few slides on handmade recycled clothes.
The recycled T-shirts that are at the core of the Rogues Gallery (of Portland, ME) men’s-wear line are sorted, processed, printed and reworked in a warehouse in Portland, Me., by a crew whose backgrounds have little to do with fashion.
“I’m as proud of this system as I am of the designs,” says Natalie Chanin, the woman behind Alabama Chanin, a line of richly embroidered recycled shirts and dresses that are cut, painted and sewn by hand in rural Florence, Ala. Her stitchers, some of whom quilted alongside her grandmothers, are part of a cottage-industry style of manufacturing in which people work out of their homes.
While difficult to do at a large scale, as far as I can tell, recycling old clothes into new styles can help close the loop on what is typically a wasteful industry. It slows the pull on virgin resources (and crops like cotton are very land and water intensive to grow) and we don’t have to forgo new fashions. We can keep our cake, and eat it again.
According to one source, “over 70% of the world’s population use second-hand clothes.” Indeed, to recycle clothes has become synonymous with donating them to a charity, which will rarely re-manufacture them. If we Americans start recycle our clothing at a larger scale, where will the rest of the world get theirs? Some would argue that this opens up opportunities for local producers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to sell the clothes they’re making for American and European markets locally.
Today I post for you “Indestructible Life!” by Olympia, WA’s Old Time Relijun. Enjoy!
