I consider myself a pretty intelligent and mildly sophisticated woman. But I do live in Jackson, WY. and I just looked down at the to-do list that I had been building on my hand all day and it says the following:
Buy chain lube
Make oatmeal cookies
Buy rifle ammo
Mom flowers
Dirt bike
Yeah…. I think we can throw the sophistication thing out the window.
Cotton, organic cotton and wool are all “natural fibers” but does that make them green? See the attached table with estimated energy and water usage for some common fibers. I’m hoping to find the same data on wool, bamboo, and PLA but even the cotton data is pretty surprising. Plus one of the largest footprints a garment will have in its life is the energy impact of washing and drying. Polyester and Polypropylene do not stain and dry almost immediately, so they require much less laundering and do not need to be dried. And polyester garments last for many, many years of hard use where others tend to wear out faster (in part due to heavy laundering).
There’s a place for every type of fiber (and sometimes nothing feels better than cotton), but just because polyester is oil based does not make it less green when you look at the whole picture (remember the ethanol hype). For full disclosure, I work with Polartec® which mainly uses polyester fibers, including an increasing amount of recycled-content polyester that saves significant energy compared to virgin polyester.
Cotton uses massive amounts of water.
I learned to ski as a kid at a little hill in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia called Wintergreen. It’s a classic East Coast ski resort where the lodge is on the top of the mountain and they hand out trash bags at the base of the lifts so you don’t get soaked by the snow makers on the way up.
In 1985, the height of ski fashion at Wintergreen was a CB Sports jacket, jeans and gaiters. And you better believe it, that’s the outfit I was rockin’ along with my prized chicken-heart Dynastars.
At about the same time, GORE-TEX hit the scene and and was quickly adopted by the ski industry with its unique claim of “waterproof” AND “breathable.” I especially remember coveting one of those sweet yellow and black TNF Steep Tech getups that Scott Schmidtt always wore. Of course, who could afford it?