Fashion and Entertainment

How green living extends to fashion and entertainment, including eco-friendly fashion and entertainment issues that affect the environment.

Why Is Organic Cotton Clothing So Cool

Eco-friendly designers increase demand for organic cotton

Increased environmental concerns worldwide have not escaped the notice of the fashion industry, which has been fast incorporating organic materials into its designs. Materials like hemp and bamboo are coming on strong, but organic cotton is by far the fabric of choice for most green clothing designers.

According to Organic Exchange, a nonprofit committed to expanding the use of organically grown fibers, global retail sales of organic cotton products increased from $245 million in 2001 to $583 million in 2005.

Organic Cotton is the Healthier Choice

The problem with traditional cotton--by far the most used clothing fabric in the world, constituting a $300 billion global market--is that producers use liberal amounts of insecticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers to grow it.

Analysts estimate that cotton crops use about one quarter of all the agricultural insecticides applied globally each year.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seven of the top 15 pesticides used on U.S. cotton crops are potential or known human carcinogens.

Given such problems, choosing organically grown alternatives may be one of the best things consumers can do to help the environment.

Hip Clothing Designers Offer Organic Cotton

Luckily, many designers are using organic cotton to great effect in their newest lines. Examples include Xylem, Turk+Taylor, Blue Canoe, Stewart+Brown, Armour Sans Anguish, Ecoganik, NatureVsFuture, EcoDragon, Gypsy Rose, Maggie’s Organic, Two Star Dog and Enamore, all which are making waves in fashion circles with their cutting edge clothing designs crafted from materials like organic cotton, grown without harmful synthetic chemicals.

Big players like Levi Strauss, Victoria’s Secret, Esprit, Patagonia and Timberland are also increasingly offering organic cotton products.

Singer Bono, along with his wife Ali Hewson and designer Rogan Gregory, launched their Edun brand in 2005, offering organic cotton t-shirts and sweatshirts made in Tunisia and Peru. A key part of Edun’s mission involves fair wages and healthy working conditions for garment workers in developing countries.

Some online retailers featuring hip clothing made from organic materials include upstarts like ShopEnvi, Bamboo Styles, Grassroots Natural Goods, and better-known outlets like Gaiam. Even Wal-Mart and Target are now stocking a wide range of organic cotton clothing.

Where to Look for Organic Products, Including Organic Cotton Clothing

To find other organic clothing retailers, the online repository of all things green, EcoMall, offers an impressive listing of sources for a wide range of cool, green-friendly garments on its clothing page.

Meanwhile, the non-profit Organic Consumers Association has launched “Clothes for a Change,” a campaign to pressure major clothing retailers and manufacturers to wean themselves off of traditional cotton and petroleum-derived polyesters and to start using more organic materials. Another key element of the campaign is to educate consumers about the benefits of clothing made from organic materials.

Are Music CDs or Downloads Better for the Environment?

The advent of digital music and other forms of entertainment downloaded over the Internet has staggering repercussions for not only the music industry and the consumer experience, but also for the environment.

Analysts estimate that American consumers buy about a billion compact discs (CDs) every year, most which eventually end up in landfills or incinerators. Since CDs are a mix of polycarbonate, plastic and aluminium, they don’t easily break down and are not easily recycled. They are also not biodegradable, so they won’t break down in landfills. And when incinerated they release toxic fumes into the air.

In contrast, songs downloaded from the Internet consume only hard drive space, and don’t contribute directly to the waste stream. To get rid of downloaded music, one need only drag it to the trash symbol on the desktop. As of January 2006, consumers have downloaded more than 850 million songs via Apple’s iTunes service alone. If all this music had been copied to CDs it would have filled up 85 million disks.

i-Pods and E-Waste

That’s not the whole story, of course. Downloaded music has to be played, and a large amount of “e-waste” (electronic waste) is already clogging landfills in every community. Consumer electronics contain large amounts of nasty toxins such as lead, mercury and cadmium, so when computers, monitors and MP3 players end up in landfills, they can contaminate the surroundings and become a serious health issue.

iPod-maker Apple has come under fire from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a group advocating for clean computer production and disposal. The group charges that Apple’s hardware recycling program, which accepted 1,500 tons of old equipment last year from consumers, is woefully inadequate, and that Apple has been lobbying against legislation that sets up such “takeback” programs. They also claim that iPod batteries wear out too soon, prompting consumers to junk the gadgets prematurely. Apple disputes the charges, claiming it is one of the most environmentally responsible businesses in the industry.

But music aficionados need to hear the sounds they love, so digitally downloaded music seems to be the more environmentally friendly choice, especially if consumers make efforts to recycle as much of their e-waste as possible. Apple, Dell, HP and IBM all offer low-cost ways to recycle hardware directly.

New Technology Holds Promise of Eco-Friendly Music

Meanwhile, some groundbreaking new CDs, one made from corn and another partly from paper, are on the horizon. Sanyo has teamed up with NatureWorks (formerly Cargill Dow) in the production of “MildDiscs” made from corn (one ear of corn can make 10 CDs). And Sony has developed the “Blue-Ray” disc that is 51 percent paper. It can be cut with scissors and can hold about half the data of a computer hard drive.

But until such innovations become de rigueur, environmentally conscious CD buyers will have to be content passing on their old CDs to friends, selling them to used record stores, or sending them out to recycling centers set up specifically for e-waste, such as the Washington-based GreenDisk.