Jeans

I live in my jeans. I work from home and often wear jeans every day of the week.

So when all three pairs came through the same washing load recently with irredeemable holes it was a small-scale clothing crisis. I had mended and patched my jeans many times over, but they had gone beyond repair. 

I have been vaguely aware that jeans have many levels of ethical concern. I decided that as this is an item of clothing I rely on so heavily, it was time to research properly and find ethical jeans. 

According to the Shop Ethical website, there are at least six areas of potential concern around jeans: transparency in the supply chain, use of sweatshops overseas, use of underpaid Australian outworkers, forced child labour in cotton production, excessive pesticide and insecticide use in cotton production, and toxic sandblasting in preparing denim. It was quickly apparent that if I wanted to attempt an ethical purchase on all six fronts I would need to purchase from a small operator, almost certainly online. If I wanted to walk into a store and buy jeans over the counter my best option looked like being Jeanswest (pretty good on addressing labour and supply chain issues; not so good on the pesticides/insecticides/sandblasting issues). 

The options I found online that looked reasonably sound were: Kuyichi (from the Netherlands), Nudie Jeans (Sweden) and Monkee Genes (UK). Australian brands Denimsmith and Nobody Denim (both Melbourne) are each accredited with Ethical Clothing Australia. However, this considers workers pay and conditions but not broader environmental considerations.

The only problem was: none of the jeans available through these companies was a style I was prepared to wear. The trend at present is for super slim legs and I am not of a build that takes kindly to skinny styling. Where I could find some looser designs the fabric was artificially 'aged' with fake wear and tear. Having spent plenty of time patching worn or torn knees I can't come at buying clothes with holes in them, however stylishly arranged.

In the end I chose to visit an op shop. There I found jeans in a size and style that suited me. Perhaps they were originally made in sweatshops using cotton doused in pesticides and picked by child slaves, but my money did no support any of those things: it went to the St Vincent de Paul Society, who provide services for the poor. Further, by supporting op shops I am encouraging recycling of clothing, hopefully reducing the demand for the blood-sweat-and-poison soaked clothing of mainstream stores. (Is that too dramatic? Over 10% of the world's pesticides and nearly 25% of its insecticides are used in growing cotton, of which jeans are made; in Uzbekistan, the world's 5th largest cotton exporter, the government enlists children as forced labour to harvest the material; thirteen other cotton-producing countries also use child labour, with children reporting health issues as a result of exposure to pesticides; silicon used in sandblasting denim causes emphysema; in sweatshops throughout Asia underpaid workers are crowded into unsafe conditions to sew Western clothing and periodically these conditions kill them)

Initial Time: researching online took a couple of hours; visiting the op shop took about half an hour. I find the lack of choice liberating: there were only about seven pairs of jeans in my size in the store; three were acceptable so I bought them. Simple.

Initial Cost: Had I been able to find a style that suited me, the online ethical options had jeans from about $100, with a wide selection around the $120 mark. Buying at an op shop is of course a cost saving. However, as I can afford to pay more than $4 for my jeans, I also made a donation to the store above the shelf price. It was still a lot cheaper than buying jeans new.

Ongoing time or cost commitment:

 

It is now over three years since I committed to twelve months of buying only ethical clothing for myself. In that first year I bought one jumper and a couple of bras. In both instances I used the Shop Ethical Guide to check that my purchase wasn't from a company with terrible human rights records, but I didn't got out of my way to chase up the most ethical option. I had some worthwhile conversations with shop assistants about ethics in clothing, raising issues with them that they had never had customers ask before. Those conversations were probably more important than the impact of where my dollars were spent.

Taking action about jeans is an outworking of that earlier commitment and will hopefully lead to other related actions.

Since the first year I have bought a few items from op shops, a few rounds of unconsidered underwear, and some clothes from Kathmandu (a big chain doing pretty well on several fronts: workers' pay and conditions, source of materials, and reducing packaging) and Nomad Gnome Fremantle (a local store personally sourcing from ethical small producers in Nepal). All up my 2013 commitment has, as I anticipated at the time, meant I have spent far less time and money overall on buying clothes. Never a big clothes buyer anyway, my acquisition is down to a trickle. It makes me happy not to be overfilling my wardrobe.

Nomad Gnome shirt with Op Shop jeans

It will be a few years before I need to buy jeans again, but I am committed to having another go next time at finding something ethical that I am also happy to wear, even if it means paying a little more (perhaps fashion will have changed by then). In the meantime I will tell my slender friends about the great online ethical jeans options they have available to them!

Impact: This has mostly been discussed above. I recommend the Shop Ethical Guide's discussion of ethical issues for denim (click arrows for detail on each issue) - this explains things clearly and concisely, so I have not repeated most of it here.

One area not mentioned is packaging. This is a concern of mine with online shopping, as everything seems to come packaged in plastic to ensure it arrives safely. Any store that is not producing on site is likely to use packaging in transporting goods - the more stages in the production, the more rounds of packaging. I put my unwrapped purchases in my bicycle basket to get them home: zero packaging.

And of course the carbon footprint of transporting from farm to fabric production to clothing production to warehouse (usually multiple stages of) to store is not insignificant either. Clothes at Vinnies may have been moved around the city a couple of times from donation bin to sorting centre to store, but its hardly comparable with the way new clothes criss-cross the globe, as raw materials, fabric and finished products. Opting for an op shop meant drastically reduced carbon footprint on transport and almost zero waste on packaging.

Children's birthdays

The world of school has brought us into the world of children's birthday parties.

How do we encourage our daughter to celebrate her friends without having to buy more and more stuff? How do we allow her to have her own birthday celebration without expecting mounds of loot as the main event?

Two years ago I wrote about celebrating birthdays when our children turned one and four. At the time, Eva's friends were still from families that we knew, who understand a little of our values around consumption and waste. Now she has many friends whose families we know only to wave to at school pick-up, and I feared we were opening ourselves to a pink plastic mountain of gifts.

Last year our birthday invitations asked people not to bring gifts, explaining that we were trying to help our children learn to value time with friends without receiving any material items. We took blankets, boxes, ropes, pegs, cushions etc to a local park and had a cubby-making afternoon and picnic.

(Of course if talking about Eva's 5th birthday we have to make mention of Grandad's amazing excavator birthday cake. Retired engineers...)

Saying 'no gifts' made last year's guests a bit uncomfortable, although they respected the request. One mum asked me a bit nervously if it was OK if her daughter made a card to give, which told me I'd come across a bit too hard-line about the gifts thing. 

So this year we opted instead to say:

We are trying to reduce our Global footprint and to help our children to ‘consume’ less, and encourage you to consider recycled, home-made or second-hand gifts, or no gift at all.

I was quite unsure about putting this on the invitations, as I did not know most of the families receiving them. However, the response was very positive. One parent thanked me for getting her thinking, and for freeing her up from needing to go and buy something. Another, who had responded by baking biscuits with her daughter as a home-made gift, thanked me for giving her a lovely activity to share with her daughter. Two families had put their heads together and coordinated gifts, so that one gave Eva some pre-loved jewellery and the other a second-hand jewellery box to keep it in.

The unexpected side effect was that there was hardly any packaging. Second hand items have already shed their useless plastic coatings! Although we had said nothing about gift wrapping, nearly everyone either presented gifts in a reusable bag, or with home-made paper. I can only assume they caught the 'vibe' and applied it to their choices for wrapping also. We continue to wrap our own gifts at home in fabric and ribbons, which we use over and over, or use hand-decorated paper (usually recycled, with random old printouts on the inside).

The actual events were mostly free play, without organised party games (which almost always involve buying prizes to distribute). Kids took home a slice of cake but no party bags. We had encouraged Eva to invite a small enough group of school friends so that she could actually enjoy her guests, and this went very well. There was much leaping on the trampoline. We split celebrations up into a number of smaller gatherings, for friends from different parts of our lives, rather than one big gathering. My experience is that bigger gatherings tend towards emphasising consumption rather than quality time, although I'm sure there are exceptions to that. As noted when I wrote about birthdays previously, we avoided single-use items like themed napkins, single-use decorations or disposable plates.

Trail of evidence suggests someone finished off ALL the fairy bread.

When Eva has been invited to other birthday parties I have gone with the social obligation of sending a gift. I try to ensure I don't give any gifts I wouldn't want to receive, applying my own values to gift selection, such as: encouraging open-ended play; reducing consumption; avoiding plastics; reducing packaging. Several times this has been a kids recipe book. Another time we sent a pre-loved game (in good condition). Eva packaged up her dressing gown as birthday gift for her best friend, because she knew he really liked it.

Best friend arrives for Eva's birthday. Excitement levels are high.

Initial Time: Zero time in requesting low-impact gifts; a little time each birthday to think through gifts and other aspects.

Initial Cost: Zero. We save money by keeping birthday stuff small.

However, saving money is not the main intent and aiming to save money on kids birthdays can lead to less sustainable choices: For example, setting a $5 or $10 gift limit (for yourself, or for others coming to your party) is likely to increase the amount of cheap plastic you give (or receive). And it is hard to see how good quality gifts costing $5 could have been produced in ways that ensure everyone in the supply chain received appropriate pay and conditions for their part in the gift getting to us. For this reason I argued for our kindy 'gift from Santa' to the kids last year to not set a cost limit, but rather to ensure the kids were all given books. Its also a reason we didn't do 'party bags' for kids to take home - because they end up full of cheap trinkets that go almost straight into the bin (or just mounds of sugar).

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Its not so much a time or cost commitment, but by being just a little different we mark ourselves into the future with these school families, putting ourselves out there as 'that family'. I hope in a good way, but its impossible to be sure.

Impact: The greatest impact was probably the conversations we started. We also continue to hope that we are modelling for our children and their friends less consumption-oriented ways to live.

I can't find any data on how much waste is generated by birthday parties, or how many birthday presents get thrown in the bin. Australians generate around 44 million tonnes of rubbish each year (almost certainly much more, as these statistics are nine years old, and the amount had doubled in the ten years before that). Even at the 2006 figures, that is about 2 million tonnes of rubbish for each of us. Every single Australian. A little under one third of the total waste is household rubbish - such as birthday party debris and broken plastic toys.

Happy Birthday lovely girl. Our favourite six-year-old.

Links: If you found this helpful, you may also be interested in my past posts about Christmas: practical ideas; changing the questions; giving things away; Baking Day.

Some other people sharing ideas for sustainable kids birthday parties: one two three

A bit of a rant about how obscene the children's birthday party circuit can be.

If you are a Melbourne person, here's a firm that do zero-waste kids' birthday parties with Trash Puppet Making Workshops.

An idea for gifts: online donation organisation that sends half the money to a chosen charity and the other half to your child, for them to buy one meaningful gift. (Another blog I read described a Canadian tradition of having two donation jars at a party instead of gifts - a gold coin in one, going to a charity; a gold coin in the other, going to the child)

I say tomato

This month we finally bit the bullet and had a go at improving the ethics of our preserved tomato consumption.

I have known for quite a while that there are major ethical concerns about tinned and bottled tomatoes but doing anything about it just seemed too hard. Cheap preserved tomatoes are so easy to grab off the bargain shelf! But they are also almost always imported, with concerns about the working conditions of tomato pickers in other countries. It is ridiculous that we don't eat our own tomatoes: Australia has the ideal tomato-growing climate, with the things even surviving as weeds in abandoned gardens.

So after a week of unseasonal rain here in late January, Tyson was on the look-out at the farmers markets for over-ripe, excess or slightly damaged produce being sold off in bulk, and came home with a large box of very ripe tomatoes ready to bottle. (He also brought home peaches for jam, so it was a busy weekend!)

Our method was: Wash and quarter tomatoes (ends removed).

Squash tomatoes into oven-sterilised bottles with wooden spoon, removed air bubbles. Add a teaspoon of lemon juice to cover the top of each bottle before putting the lid on.

water level was much closer to the lid prior to boiling

Place bottles in water not quite up to their lids and boil for about an hour.

The bottles seal themselves as they cool. It was a very hot weekend, so we boiled them fairly late in the evening and sat them outside to cool so their heat wasn't added to our house.

We forgot to weigh the tomatoes, but think it was about 12-14kg of fruit. We ended up with 23 bottles of tomatoes. This should see us through about six months (although as Australians each consume on average 25kg of processed tomatoes a year, perhaps I have over-estimated how long they will last us!). 

The second part of our tomato commitment, therefore, is to buy Australian when our home-processed stores run out.

Initial Time: two hours

Initial Cost: $14 for one large box of tomatoes

Ongoing time or cost commitment: approximately the same again, once a year; about 50c more per tin of tomatoes once our home supplies run out and we are buying Australian (perhaps $26 more in a year?)

Impact: 

Almost 80% of processed tomatoes purchased in Australia are imported, mostly from Italy. Italy is a journey of around 9,200 nautical miles from Perth (17,000km), taking 39 days at sea. That is a lot of food miles. Despite apparent improvements in recent years, workers' conditions are not as well protected in Italy as in Australia and there are many documented instances of tomato workers, many of whom are African migrants and often without valid work visas, being treated not much better than slaves. Quality standards for farms and processing plants are also less rigorous in Italy than in Australia. 

The import from Italy has over the last decade nearly destroyed the Australian tomato industry. Several processing plants have closed (eg Heinz, Rosella). Due to the high Australian dollar, oversupply in Italy, and European Union subsidies to tomato farmers, it was possible for Italian growers to sell tomatoes to Australia at less than their own production cost. This is called 'dumping' and is actually illegal. About 18 months ago an inquiry finally blew the whistle on the practice, and last year the government established tariffs to stop it. As a result we are probably not going see as many 59c tins of tomatoes in the grocery aisles (and should be grateful, not grumpy, about this). Woolworths responded in August 2014 by signing a five-year deal with SPC Ardmona to source Australian tomatoes for their store-brand tomato lines. SPC is now looking to double the size of its tomato processing plant, which two years ago was under threat of closure. But for this hopeful news to become a good outcome, Australians need to abandon our baseless infatuation with 'Italian tomatoes' as a synonym for value and quality, and support Australian growers and producers.

Supporting Australian food producers is not charity. It is in MY best interests to have a robust domestic food industry. It is in MY best interests to have a healthy local economy with plenty of rural and manufacturing employment opportunities. For the reasons outlined above, and drought in tomato-growing regions of Australia for most of the years of this century, Australian tomatoes are generally more expensive. This is despite Australian growers being literally twice as efficient as their Italian competitors in how many tonnes of tomatoes they produce per hectare (150 tonnes compared with 74 tonnes). I am prepared to pay a little more for my tomatoes to support food security and Australian economies. Tomato farmers at present make about 4-5c profit on each 400g tin of tomatoes sold ($100-$125 per tonne after production costs) which is a pretty slight margin to be living on. At the bottom of this post is a bit more information about how to identify Australian tomato products.

So after all those reasons to support Australian producers, why are we bottling our own? Several reasons:

- 'Local' is a bit of a stretch for us here in Perth. The three surviving Australian tomato processing plants are in Echuca and Shepparton Victoria and Jerilderie NSW - at least 3,300km from me (Echuca). West Australians grow tomatoes too, and I would like to buy their produce when I can, which means buying it fresh from our local farmers' markets. (Supermarket tomatoes are not necessarily fresh or local: check out this short video from Local Harvest).

- The biggest Australian producer, and the one it is easiest to find on supermarket shelves, is SPC-Ardmona (based at Shepparton - the 'S' of 'SPC'). SPC-Ardmona is owned by Coca Cola, a company with boycott calls on it due to its involvement in torture and murder of union leaders in Latin America (who were protesting terrible Coca Cola work conditions) and destruction of water supplies for communities in India, as well as varied complaints in many other countries. I want to support Australian producers but I don't want to support Coca Cola, so I am balancing out buying some SPC with doing my own bottling.

- The amount of packaging used in commercial products leads me to want to do my own processing at home - even if much of the packaging for tomatoes is recyclable, not all of it is, and it still carries the energy use of producing and transporting that packaging. The jars we uses were saved from shop-bought tomato products and will be used many times over.

- Although tomato farmers pay their picking contractors appropriate wages, it is not always clear that the contractors pass a fair wage on to the individual pickers who, in Australia as overseas, are often migrants, minorities, non-English speakers, etc, who don't always have the ability to speak out if they are not being treated fairly.

total waste from our box of tomatoes: approx 1kg of ends and two bad fruit

- Buying bulk over-ripe fruit saves food from going to waste. It also means we are bottling the tomatoes in season, at the peak of their flavour, which is not always the case for commercial products. We have the option to use organic produce (although on this occasion we did not) and we know exactly what goes into the jars and don't put any chemicals or additives in (like the mysterious 'thickening agent' in one brand of tinned tomatoes on our shelf).

- Its fun! Really. Eva and I had a lovely afternoon together working on the tomatoes. She insisted on being involved for the entire process, long after I expected she would get bored. She loved getting thoroughly tactile with juicy, squashy fruit. She enjoyed the challenge of getting as many chunks of tomato into each jar as possible, and removing all the air bubbles. She is learning kitchen skills, like handling a sharp knife, as well as a sense that all manner of challenges are very possible to achieve. Being involved in processing our own food also teaches our children where their food comes from and, in my opinion, gives them a greater appreciation of what comes out of packages.

Links: 

The best article I read on the tomato industry (although note this is from May 2012, before the inquiry into dumping and the Woolworths deal, so things were looking very grim at the time)

Findings of the inquiry into Dumping  (Dec 2013 draft; April 2014 final)

A more readable analysis of these findings

About Woolworth's deal with SCP-Ardmona (August 2014)

Local Harvest - Melbourne-based group allowing you to enter your postcode and find 'local food' options near to you

A current social media campaign called 'No farmers No food' captures something of my reasons for trying to support Australian food growers and producers. (They also have plenty of catchy, shareable graphics to pass around)

How to identify Australian tomatoes:

Australia's three tomato processors are:

SPC-Ardmona, based at Shepparton Victoria; owned by Coca Coal Amartil. Tomato products are mostly branded 'SPC', but SPC also supplies to some other companies, such as Woolworths (but not all Woolworths tomatoes are guaranteed to be from SPC).

Kagome, at Echuca Victoria; a subsidiary of the Japanese tomato company of the same name. Kagome claims to be 'Australia's largest grower, harvester and processor of tomatoes'. They only sell wholesale to other producers, so you won't find anything on the shelf labelled 'Kagome'. Their website http://kagomeechuca.com/ has a graphic at the bottom showing specific products that are 100% Australian tomatoes.

Billabong from Jerilderie NSW, a family business who claim to be 'Australia's ONLY wholly owned, made, and grown cannery'. Their products are branded 'Billabong Produce'. I am investigating whether they can be obtained in Western Australia (check comments for updates).

Brands that are using 100% Austalian tomatoes (mostly supplied by Kagome):

MON

SPC

Beerenberg

Maggie Beer

Sabrands (Rosella)

HJ Chapmans (POPs Sauce)

Edlyn (Wood relishes)

Della Rosa Foods (pizza manufacturer)
Masterfoods 100% Australian Grown Ketchup
Dolmio Pasta Sauce from 100% Australian Tomatoes

Brands that use Australian tomatoes but sometimes blend with imported stock (depending on availability):

Simplot (Leggos)

Mars (Masterfoods Ketchup, Dolmio)

Symingtons (5 Brothers, Raguletto)

General Mills (Latina Fresh Pasta, Old El Paso)

Cerebos (White Crow, Fountain)

Campbells

Vesco 
Heinz

There may be others this list has missed, so its always worth checking with the supplier. Enjoy your tomatoes!