Buy Less. Wash Less. Waste Less.

Reports estimate that as much as 60% of the clothes we wear today are made of plastic. Fibers such as nylon, spandex, and polyester are derived from fossil fuels and, like all plastics, don’t break down in the environment. Low-quality fast fashion items are dumped in countries that can’t properly manage the waste, while tiny microfibers constantly shed from our clothing and make their way into our air, oceans, food, and bodies. What can we do? . . . It starts with doing less.

Join your local Commons or (as much as we loathe Facebook), your local Buy Nothing community. Trade and Barter with your neighbors and friends.

Grow food in your yard, on your balcony, in a window box. Plant herbs and fruits and vegetables you can eat, also use for natural dyestuffs. Forage - where legal and where appropriate.

Support community gardens, support local efforts to reduce and eliminate residential pesticide use, remove lawns and grow native plants instead.

Hilary Jochmans is the Founder of PoliticallyInFashion, a community for all those in fashion – designers, manufacturers, artisans, retailers, models, lawyers, reporters, consumers – to learn about legislative and regulatory issues of key importance to the industry. 

The mission is to educate individuals on public policy; and empower them with this knowledge; to then engage with elected representatives on how these issues impact companies and consumers.  

Some of us may be inclined to get more involved in local politics by running for office or attending city council meetings.

We can also get in the habit of calling and writing our local, state, and federal representatives.

Leading the textile industry in reducing microfibre release to protect our environment

Fibre fragmentation from textiles is intrinsically connected to biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and climate change 🌍.

🐠  Biodiversity Loss: Microfibres can be ingested from water, food or air and have effects such as tissue damage, reduced food intake, reduced growth and increased mortality.

🌿 Environmental Pollution: Microfibres cause pollution to the environment through water, air and land. Millions of microfibres are generated from laundry cycles. Although wastewater treatment plants are built to mitigate this pollution, only around 20% of wastewater globally is treated by wastewater treatment plants.

🌍  Climate Change: At least 30% of all microplastics are microfibres from textiles. Recent research has uncovered links with microplastics altering carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric cooling.

In a potentially-monumental step for our health and our future, the The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has unanimously decided to commission a study on the implications of plastic pollution on human rights. 🌱 Titled ‘Plastic pollution implications on the full enjoyment of human rights’ the report will be published in 2027.

Back in 2022, the UN General Assembly declared access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment a human right. Plastic pollution poses a material risk to this right, along with numerous others associated with health, gender equality, working conditions and more.

Taking on current climate challenges requires that we ask some big—and unsettling—questions. What will be lost—economically, culturally, psychologically, physically—should the climate crisis continue unabated?

How can we come together around a response to the crisis that will reshape how and where we live? How can we begin to think about investments in the built environment as a catalyst for the broader aims of decarbonization, adaptation, and social justice at a meaningful scale?

The Green New Deal does not pretend to have all the answers, but it’s a bold and necessary start. Because it connects social change with environmental change, and because it recalls the ambitious spirit of the original New Deal, the Green New Deal is the only set of ideas on the table that is scaled to the challenges we face.

If realized, the Green New Deal would revolutionize our systems of production, our ways of life, and the places we inhabit, enabling us not only to adapt to the climate crisis, but to address its root causes.