“Going green”. No, this phrase is not related to the incredible hulk or even some kind of weird liquid diet trend. To most people today, going green means recycling bottles and cans and reducing the amount of time they spend singing in the shower. Even with these efforts, people are still missing a very important item to reduce reuse and recycle, and that item is hanging right in your closet.
The t-shirts! The old, abandoned, last season, out-dated, and torn apart pieces of fabric that you throw out are killing our planet. You may be thinking, “There's no way? Its just cotton right?” Wrong. The little known fact is that our clothes actually do pollute the Earth. Take it from Mattias Wallander of the Huffington Post who writes, “The production of cotton-textiles use of large amounts of resources, such as water and energy, as well as releasing by-products of starch, paraffin, dyes, pesticides, and other harmful pollutants into the air and soil.” Crazy thought isn't it?
Fortunately there is a way to counter the attack of our hand-me-downs. It's an idea called “up-cycling”. Basically, up-cycling is taking old clothes and transforming them into new fashion or even just altering them to make them wearable again. Whether its adding a trendy rhinestone design to the collar of a boring shirt, turning your Dad's XL t-shirt into a casual dress, or simply donating old clothes to a local up-cycling company, these efforts keep clothes out of wastelands and help our planet breath just a little more. Up-cycling gives new life to fashion, or even better, it's a resurrection of fashion.
So sure, it's important to keep in mind the 3 golden rules, reduce, reuse, and recycle. But maybe there needs to be another word added to the end of our golden phrase.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Fashion!