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 Perhaps they were originally made in sweatshops using cotton doused in pesticides and picked by child slaves, but my money did no support any of those things: it went to the St Vincent de Paul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.

New winter carpet

Winter has again seen us working at staying warm without turning on heaters.

 

Our winter floor covering had been getting increasingly threadbare. Last year we insulated it with a layer of padding underneath, cut from the base of a single bed that was on its way out (having been with me for about 30 years). This layer did help, but it covered only part of the area, and didn't address the holes developing in the old rug. When friends offered us a replacement rug that they were disposing of we jumped at the chance to upgrade.

With a nice thick layer to catch morning sun warmth and insulate us from the cold of the tile floor, we have been enjoying playing on the lounge floor with no additional heating. 

We also added carpet offcuts under both the lego table (the central item in our living space) and the dining area, which have added to the winter floor insulation. The thick white one under the lego table also cries out for cubbies to be made under there - a call to which the children readily respond. 

A few years back we had a go at carpet offcuts under the dining table. After one season they got shabby and didn't return the next year. It is a challenge storing them through summer. Hopefully we can manage it this year, but if not it is possible we could just get a fresh round of carpet pieces each autumn, as they are destined for waste anyway.

Initial Time:  ten minutes of lifting furniture to lay the rugs/ carpet pieces

Initial Cost: zero - carpet offcuts are free behind the carpet store; the lounge rug was a second-hand gift.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: ten minutes when the weather warms to take up and store floor coverings. If satisfactory storage for the carpet offcuts can't be found, there will be time next year making a trip to pick up some more from the carpet store - no more than half an hour, as it is not a long way to go.

Impact: Our most recent electricity bill, for May and June, showed we had used an average of 6.2 units (kWh) of energy per day, down from 6.6 units per day for the same period last year and 8 units per day the year before (but the previous three years we were in the 5.8 to 6.1 range, so it has not been all improvement!). By comparison, the average household use in our neighbourhood is 11.9 units a day, and 'similar houses' record an average of 13.1 units.

We have turned on the heating (reverse cycle airconditioner) I think twice so far this winter, each time for about an hour to take the chill off. Carpets are just one of the range of measures we take to warm ourselves without using electricity (see also May and August 2014 posts)

He has mittens on because they were new and he was enjoying them, not because the room was freezing. He was also bare foot when I took this picture.

Special birthdays

When Tyson turned forty in June we wanted to celebrate him well, without massively increasing our footprint. 

The main agenda was to gather people together and enjoy each other, with good food. But here are a few things that also had an eye to our sustainability commitments:

We asked for gifts of sustainability actions in lieu of presents, and were touched by how many friends offered Tyson some idea of what they are doing to live within our earth's means. Some made new commitments; others reiterated choices already made. I was particularly moved by one (slightly) older friend who gifted to Tyson her decision to make more use of public transport, along with an invitation to ask her how it was going and an admission that the idea of using public transport scared her a bit. The traditional photo board included space for people to add notes about their sustainable choices.

Cooking one big roast dinner for sixty people used less energy than all those households cooking their own roast dinners at home (and was more fun!). We used about 15kWh of energy for cooking; a household roast dinner takes around 2kWh. The meat was free-range pork.

We borrowed cutlery and crockery from Tyson's parents to reduce our use of disposable items. We still have a pile of disposable plates, cups and cutlery in the cupboard from before we really got moving on this sustainability journey, some of which have been reused and returned to the cupboard several times, and these bumped up the numbers, along with some compostable plates. (I have my doubts about how they compost, though - I tore them into quarters and soaked them in water for a week and they were showing no signs of breaking down or being suitable for our compost any time soon!) Despite me encouraging guests to leave the dishes for us to run through the dishwasher in big loads the next day, a happy team got going in the kitchen and cleaned them all for us. They really did seem to be having a great time in there. Perhaps for some this was their sustainability 'gift', but most I think just enjoyed talking and laughing while working together.

We minimised our use of gladwrap and alfoil. So often at parties or events these are used to cover food for quite short periods of time. Instead, we used baking trays to cover salads.

We labelled our bins and encouraged people to separate out compost, recycling and genuine rubbish.

 

Eva made her own decorations. We also re-used the cloth bunting made for us by a friend last year, and ran one string of LED fairy lights.

Cards were home-made. The two gifts we did purchase were wrapped in cloth, one from each of the children. (We are not scrooges; its important our kids experience both giving and receiving. We encouraged them to be involved in choosing gifts that suited Tyson, to help them learn to think of someone other than themselves) The cordless drill set in particular will be put to use to facilitate many future projects along our sustainability journey.

Two weeks later my dad turned eighty, on the opposite side of the country. We celebrated by all my siblings (five of us) gathering, along with spouses and children, to share a holiday in the Grampians with my parents. The emphasis, again, was good time together. Bushwalking. Eating. Talking. Cuppas. A visit to the farm where Dad grew up. Grandkids' shenanigans. Reading books. Spotting wildlife. My gift was to arrange for my sisters and I to sing a couple of songs for Dad.

However, as we don't live near each other (not even all in the same country) a very great amount of fuel was used to bring us together. Would we have had less environmental impact if we had all sent my dad expensive presents instead? Maybe. But we would not have celebrated him well, and we would not have modeled for our children that people are always, always more important than stuff. 

Happy birthday to two of the finest men in my life.  

Some of the sustainability actions Tyson was gifted:

And finally from our small man, a gift not of sustainable actions but of hope:

Reusable barrier bags

Do you know what a 'barrier bag' is?

You might not be familiar with the terminology, but chances are you are very familiar with the item: the single-use lightweight plastic bags that are available on rolls when you buy fruit and veg, or whole foods, so your apples and potatoes don't get in a muddle in the trolley.

I have for some years now tried not to use these bags, keeping items loose wherever practical. However, while it might be OK to have a few onions rolling around, soft things like stone fruit or small things like almonds really need something to contain them.

For my birthday last month, my caring and ever-thoughtful mother-in-law made me a set of cloth barrier bags. They are a simple rectangle, in various sizes, with a ribbon draw-string. The fabric is silk voile (lace curtaining) which means the checkout staff can see what is in each bag. 

So our May commitment is to remember to use them! We also intend to use paper bags to cover any excess need, to be added to compost when they become unusable. Fruit and veg shops generally provide paper bags for mushrooms, and they can easily be adapted for other uses. The wonderful Kakulus Sister in Fremantle provides them for their dry goods in general, which gave me the idea.

We also use these bags for storing some fruit and veg in the fridge, which so far seems to be working fine. There will be a few things that are very powdery for which we will have to use paper, as I think flour or the like would not quite be contained.

Initial Time: For me, zero. I'm not sure how long it took Tyson's mum to make them. She's very good at sewing, but even if you were less skilled it is a simple project. 

Initial Cost: For me, zero. To make yourself: simple ribbons generally cost $3-$5 a metre, although they also seem to turn up on all sorts of things, so if you are not picky about making them match you can probably find some around the house. Or use string. Wool. Old shoelaces. Whatever you can salvage. Fabric prices vary widely, but at say $10/metre your bags would cost about $1 each.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Remembering to take them and use them. They are stored with our cloth shopping bags, so in theory this is easy, but we are taking a while to get into the groove. Occasionally they need to be washed after use (mostly not). When empty, they need to be returned to their storage place rather than binned. 

Impact: 

Australians use approximately four billion single-use shopping bags a year. The average useful life of those bags is twelve minutes. Around 86% end up in landfill, where even if they are supposedly compostable they do not really break down, due to the highly compacted nature of landfill. Although most people report using plastic bags two or three times before disposing of them, ultimately they still end up in the bin. The remainder end up as litter, choking up our environment and particularly damaging waterways. Marine life is severely impacted by plastic waste. Once the bags begin to deteriorate, they contribute to 'micro plastics' - microscopic plastic fibres that are being found in sea creatures in increasing quantities. Including sea creatures we eat. 

At the other end of the process, producing plastic bags is a polluting process using non-renewable resources. China banned plastic bags in 2008 and it is reported to have saved 1.6 million tonnes of oil the following year.

I estimate that our family uses around 260 barrier bags in a year. There is some environmental cost in producing the cloth bags. Choice has calculated that a green shopping bag needs to be used 23 times before its production footprint is less than the equivalent in plastic. Given that our bags are of polyester fabric, I imagine we need to use them at least 23 times and probably a few more, so we pull ahead after about one year of use. 

While researching to write this post I discovered that a government campaign in 2003-2007 to phase out plastic shopping bags, which I had thought was ongoing, ceased in 2008. Plastic bag use leapt 17% the same year. Some States have gone on alone to regulate against single-use plastic, but not Western Australia. After this election I think I will write to whoever forms government to remind them that quite a lot of people would like those bags banned. If China, Rwanda and Bangladesh can do it, surely we can manage here?

Links/ References:

Discussion paper on phasing out plastic bags in Western Australia (2014)

Choice article discussing options for sustainable shopping bags (2014)

NSW EPA discussion paper on plastic bags (2016)

Using construction waste

In our neighbourhood demolition of old homes and construction of new is a part of the streetscape.

Both our children can pick the sound of an excavator munching into a house from blocks away. Skip bins seem to decorate every street. 

 

We are neither demolishing nor building, but we try to do our small bit to put at least some construction waste to better use. 

One recent project was the guinea pig cage - aka The Piggie Palace. 

 

The Piggie Palace is made largely from old floorboards, salvaged (by a friend) from a house under demolition.

Timber from the bin in front of the construction site two doors up has partly been stockpiled, and partly used to construct shelves and bench in Tyson's teeny shed. 

Meanwhile I used bricks salavaged from the same site to make a new sandpit. 

 

After setting my team to work emptying out the patch of garden that had become known as 'the digging hole', I gave it brick walls. 

Tyson later added a black plastic lining to the bottom and new clean sand completed the transformation.

Initial Time: Collecting and storing waste materials took varying amounts of time, from about twenty minutes to collect and stack some bricks to a half day expedition to retrieve and store salvaged floorboards and other timber from the shed of a friend who was moving into a smaller place. Using salvaged materials added a little time to the Piggie Palace, as floorboards had to be ripped to the right width, but generally 'waste' takes no more time to use than new stuff.

Initial Cost: zero for waste materials; most projects have required some additional purchases (eg. sand for the sandpit, fastenings for the Piggie Palace)

  

Ongoing time or cost commitment: For these projects, zero. The ongoing commitment is to use materials we have salvaged and stored (mostly timber). Some of this timber (that which is not treated) will be burnt in our fire drum through the cooler months.

 

Impact: According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over 40% of the waste generated in Australia is construction and demolition waste. Most of it (over 80%) is concrete and bricks. Fortunately, there are efforts to recycle construction and demolition waste. In 2003 (the most recent statistics), 57% of this waste was recycled, compared with only 46% of total waste, meaning that 'only' 34% of landfill across the country was comprised of construction and demolition waste. Here in Perth, however, things are much worse, with only 21% of this form of waste recycled, making it 57% of our landfill (approximately 1.5 million of an annual 2.7 million tonnes of landfill). And even the national figures are not great when you consider that around 75% of this waste is 'clean excavated material, concrete, bricks and timber'. In New South Wales, this 75% is largely saved from landfill. The rest of us need to lift our game. (And perhaps we are. These are quite old figures. Something from 2012 apparently says WA has upped its recycling in this sector to 30-40%).

Bricks and concrete are supposedly easy and cost-effective to recycle, by grinding down for aggregate, which is used in things like low-grade roads and non-structural sub-bases. Timber is a little more difficult, as it requires manual labour to salvage good pieces, and for economic reasons most demolitions are heavily mechanised operations.

We did make sure to ask before skiving off home with a barrow of construction materials, as these could be a valuable resource, but in each case they were destined for landfill and no-one minded our salvage operations. The bits and pieces we have reused are a miniscule portion of what is being disposed of. But perhaps if more people started eying construction or demolition site skip bins as resources rather than waste gathering receptacles we could chip into the mountains of waste we are building up for our children.

 

Links: 

Four-minute video of construction waste recycling plant in Perth. You can also book a tour of the plant. (Thanks for the link M, for some reason your comment doesn't seem to be showing up)

House in Brighton UK made entirely out of waste materials. 

An episode of 'Josh's House' that particularly looks at construction and demolition waste, including a visit to a recycling plant for this material. (The program in general is all about Josh Byrne building two sustainable homes here in Perth in 2012-2013)

ABS article on waste in Australia, recycling trends, causes and impacts, and lots of statistics (of course, because its the ABS) 

Australian government publication with lots of information and case studies on recycling and reuse of construction and demolition waste 'across the supply chain'.

WA Waste Authority: oh so many information documents about construction and demolition waste.

Sustainabilty Victoria: 'How to minimise construction and demolition waste' with linked info articles

Environmental Protection Authority NSW: 'Disposing of household building waste' with documents for the beautifully named process of 'house deconstruction'.

Keep calm and shade everything

We are setting records for hot weather again in Perth this week, so it seems a good time to share this summer's improvements to our shading.

Externally, our home is shaded by vegetation where possible, shade cloth protecting most glass areas, and an ad hoc combination including: foam mats in a window, a shed against a western wall, folded trestle table leaning against another wall and an assortment of things hanging on the clothesline. Internally, we have experimented with many ways to create an insulating layer in our windows, to keep the day's heat out. Most of these I have previously discussed here or here: towels, old painting canvas, mattress, cardboard boxes, cushions, styrofoam cooler boxes... All of these are good, but this year we are onto something I think is easier and potentially more effective: corflute board.

For those unfamiliar, corflute is a 'twin wall polypropylene sheet'. Because it has a ripple between its two surfaces it creates a layer of trapped air - exactly what you want for insulation. However, corflute allows some light through (more than, say, a mattress or cardboard box in the window), meaning the house can be not quite such a cave on hot days - although, as most of our recycled corflute came coloured black on one side, we are not benefitting quite so much from this property.

We now put corflute up inside five windows on hot days, and have installed a 'permanent' summer panel of corflute across half of the over-exposed glass sliding doors to the southwest facing laundry. The loungeroom window panels, being about two-thirds window height, leave a 'clerestory' window space, shaded by the small eaves, which allows a bright naturally-lit room.

Initial Time: There was no set-up time besides sourcing the corflute, which we did within other activities. We did make a kids' art activity out of decorating the panels for the lounge window, as I didn't want to live with the brand names from their previous life, but that was optional and fun.  

Initial Cost: Zero. We picked up our first panel of corflute at REmida, the wonderful centre in West Perth that recycles industrial discards for use by schools, community groups, artists and individuals. The rest came via Tyson's dad, a retired engineer, who had a bunch lying around from disused signage picked up on construction sites. If you have to buy them, corflute panels roughly this size cost about $4-$5 each.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Every day, a few minutes at each end of the day to put the shades up and take them down. 

Impact: A southwest facing vertical surface in Perth in summer receives approximately 3kWh of energy per square metre per day. Its best to shade on the outside, so the heat doesn't get in at all, but providing an insulating layer inside windows slows the rate that heat energy gets into the room, and reflects quite a lot of it back through the glass. Once the heat is inside your house, you have to either live with it or remove it. The latter requires electricity, and lots of it.

As I write, well after dark, it is hot and still, the end of our fourth consecutive day over 40°C (104°F). We've equalled the record for days-over-forty (set in 1933) and if it hits 40°C again tomorrow we will have a new record. Perth is a funny place - although we are all wilting, there is also a slightly defiant 'bring it on' mentality. We wouldn't mind one more extreme day if it meant we got to Break A Record. 

Here at our house, we are feeling pretty good about how little we have used the aircon in the past four days: so far only for three or four hours total. We've done most of the things I talked about last time we had a record hot week, in addition to all our passive cooling measures. The corflute board has been up each day and is working a treat to keep out much of the 3+kWh we've been receiving. We also replaced our big rear shadecloth at the start of summer (the eight-year-old one finally perished) and the new shade has a higher block-out rating (90%). If it wasn't for the hot nights and lack of overnight breezes to refresh the house we probably wouldn't have needed the aircon at all.