A sustainable wardrobe: the seasonal conundrum

The temperatures are dropping and families across America are rummaging in their basements to pull out the warmer clothing and store away the sundresses. Even those trying to shop less might suddenly realize they need to step up for winter and acquire some new pieces. For families with small children, it is an especially dreadful time: checking what still fits, and most often finding that nothing does.

Dressing children requires thought, patience, and spending in garments.

There are two main questions when it comes to choosing clothing for a sustainable life: quantity and quality. The first relates to how much our purchases of clothing have grown over the years. As products became cheaper, we became used to buying more of them.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys, in 1972 the average American bought 28 garments each year, which accounted for 7.8% of the family budget. By 2021, each person was buying an average of 69 new pieces yearly, but it only represented 2.6% of their expenditure. That is 17 new pieces each season, not counting shoes.

 Why are clothes so cheap now?

The availability of clothes has grown as the producers have developed synthetic fibers and blends that lowered the cost of production. A synthetic supply chain means that strands are woven from petroleum derivates, rather than the wool sheared from a sheep or the linen grown from flax. The Innovation in Textiles 2024 Textiles Intelligence report highlighted that human-made fibers have dominated the U.S. market every year since 2013. That is a complete decade marking the consolidation of cheaper plastic-based textiles.

And that is not the end. During the second half of the XX century, locally produced clothes rapidly disappeared, with manufacturers moving production to markets where cost of production is much lower. Today only an estimated 2% to 3% of clothes are produced in America. A market flooded with cheap clothing has developed all-encompassing marketing and microtrends that can go out of style within a couple of weeks, but in which you feel expected to partake.

In-store or online, possibilities feel endless and there are pieces for any budget.

We get it, it’s hard to escape this reality! We are not encouraging you to tell your kids they might not have pretty clothes, but rather to make the best choices for a healthy family and a nourishing environment. That is why we must address the issue of microplastics in clothing, too.

Microplastics everywhere

The notion of microplastics came into consumers’ minds from a Science article published in 2004. In it, Thompson and others first called the public’s attention about how larger plastics were degrading into tiny pieces, smaller than 5 mm, and that these were showing up concentrated in coastal sediments and even inside marine beings. All kinds of creatures were ingesting microplastics, and the scientists even traced them back to strands of plankton from the 60s; that is, specimens that had been alive back in the early days of plastic production.

The panic that grew in the subsequent years was justified. We don’t want to know that our water carries plastic; we want to be confident that we can enjoy fish without burdening ourselves with yet-to-be-discovered diseases that will likely come out of the accumulation of plastic in our guts.

The cosmetics and cleaning industries were the first to reckon with it, as the small pellets used for smell and scrubbing were pointed out as likely culprits. However, as those were reformulated to avoid outright plastic waste, the extent to which our daily activities produced microplastics became known. Soon scientists discovered that a large quantity of those marine traces were polyester and acrylic and came from gray waters from washing machines. Early experiments identified that a garment could shed more than 1900 fibers per wash, and that machines in the early 2010s were not equipped to filter them out.

Washing can feel endless in a household with small children.

Going around in search of safe clothing

It does sound bleak, if anything because any family with young kids knows washing is almost a daily affair. Are these fibers in our water, on our skin? Are we really damaging the planet just by getting dressed? Here are a few things you can do to provide a healthy environment for your loved ones.

• First, buy less. This is the main tenet of anyone trying to live more sustainably, and it will help both your finances and the planet. When it comes to clothing, buying less takes the form of adopting a strong sense of personal style and trying to buy things that don’t go out of fashion quickly.

  
  

• Second, whenever possible, go for natural fibers. Cotton, linen, hemp, wool, and silk are the most used. Nowadays they are certainly more expensive than synthetic blends, but they can also be more durable.

  
  

• When buying garments made from human-made fibers, avoid fast fashion companies. Their products are made to be discarded quickly, and thus deteriorate in a smaller number of washes, resulting in more shed.

  
  

• Take care of your clothes: most of the shed happens during the first few washes. However, there are good practices you can implement to avoid quick damage that breaks the fibers (resulting, of course, in more shed). Your washing machine can break the fibers if the conditions are harsh. High temperatures might damage the fibers, as some studies point out do long washing cycles. Washing powder seems to provoke more shedding than liquid detergent, while fabric softener appears to help reduce it (all of these cases relate to how much friction your clothes are subjected to!).

  
  

• And if you still can’t reduce your shopping (for example, if you have three kids outgrowing their outfits at a crazy speed), try to buy second hand or trade. Remember how you would get hand-me-downs from your older cousins? Try to revive the tradition within your social groups, making friends with other moms that would otherwise throw away the clothing their kids no longer wear. Or maybe the occasion already exists! Look out for Facebook groups announcing clothing swaps in your area and go find treasures.

We certainly can’t abstain from our daily dose of microplastics, as they are everywhere. But once you imagine your skin rubbing against microplastics shed as tiny fibers from most of your clothes, that becomes hard to unsee. We want better things for our families and by buying our clothes more consciously, we will rest easier at night.

Friends of Sustainable Agriculture is the sister organization of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN). SAN works with the food and fiber sectors globally, to support transparent supply chains and the quality of the products that reach our homes. We support them because there are many things that are common to us that are not grown in the United States. To learn more about SAN’s work in fibers, check out their member organization Cotton Connect, or listen to this podcast about wool production in Kenya and discover how it combines landscape conservation with improved livelihoods for farmers.