Reflection Two

How do we get the apparel industry to be sustainable is the constantly asked question. This week especially has raised some questions in my mind about the way the apparel industry goes about making all of our clothing. It was disturbing learning about all of the chemicals that are extremely harmful to humans and to the environment, chemicals such as carcinogens that have been proven to cause cancer! Being that I have had numerous family members affected by cancer this was especially alarming to me. I learned that also that some types of color dyes are prohibited because they are so allergenic.

Now taking away all of these harmful chemicals that we use in the production of making clothing won’t do any good unless we make our products either biological nutrients or technical nutrients. Biological nutrients are nutrients that can be decomposed back into the earth, Technical nutrients are nutrients are nutrients that are kept in a closed loop within the industries and a just reused to make new products. These are both a key factor in becoming sustainable, but the most important this is that these two nutrients must be kept separately within the product otherwise they are useless.

There are numerous retailers that I learned about that practice reusing clothing and making them into something new! For example that was cut into a skirt, that’s genius. If we can all practice this to some extent I think we could help a great deal while we’re waiting on the big companies to make their move into the right direction.