Ok so I've just listened to wiggly podcast 0158. In it, Heather talks to fellow nuffield scholar Louise Manning about water, water footprint (er, like a carbon footprint but y'know, for water) and so on. In it Louise points out that it takes 11,000 liters of water to make a pair of jeans. Heather muses over whether in the future we will go to wearing more locally produced wool for example. I'm not really sure what to think about wool. I do wear it (but wool next to ones skin is notoriously itchy) but should I? I am a vegetarian and have been for maaaaany years. But I only stopped wearing leather maybe 2 or 3 years ago. I still have leather items I've not chucked out, but I don't buy it. Bizarrely I now have a leather sofa - it was going for free, but free-ness aside I wouldn't have one. I actually fought off many very cheap offers from people for leather sofas but when it comes to free, I relented.
At this point you are probably wondering what the hell I am on about animals have to die for leather, but not for wool right? Well look any vegan literature and you'll see its not that simple, www.savethesheep.com is a place to start. Shearing Is not necessarily the nice 'haircut for sheep' that we tend to think of it being. Also this shorn wool is in contrast to the pulled wool, that is pulled form sheep in the slaughterhouse. It's virtually impossible when clothes shopping to discern the origin of the wool in these terms.
So cotton is too water hungry, and too far away, wool is local but potentially to cruel. So what is the answer? Hemp is often touted as a great alternative to cotton, and it has tons and tons of uses but I don't know if it can be grown locally (it might be - I just don't know), or the sort of environmental impact it has (i know is supposed to be low impact, but again, I just don't know!)
What are the answers? I have no clue!
While on podcasts though, Just wanted to say how great the Mitch Benn podcast is (in content anyway, the quality tends to be um, scratchy).
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6 years ago
Thank you for commenting on the podcast I thought I would try and answer your question regarding hemp.
ReplyDeleteFairly recent research (I will put the link on my blog)looked at the ecological footprint of cotton, hemp and polyester. Whilst polyester has virtually no water footprint it has higher carbon footprint because of the energy required to produce the material. This could be up to ten times the energy requirement of cotton and three times the energy requirement of hemp.
The Ecological Footprint (EF) of a material is determined in terms of global hectares (gha) to produce one tonne of spun fibre. The figures are much closer for the three textiles with hemp between 1.5 and 2.0, polyester 1.7 and 2.2 and cotton at between 2.2 and 3.6.
Whilst polyester has virtually no water footprint, in this study cotton was identified as having a water footprint of between 9,788 litres and 9,958 litres of water per kg of finished product (less than the 11,000 litres I quotes from a different study); hemp as 2,123 litres of water per finished product. It takes about 16,000 litres of water to produce one kg of leather if we use the same figures as those used for the meat and 6,100 litres per kg of finished product for wool if we use the same method.
This brings forward further questions .. how durable is the material and how long will a garment last and whether we can produce hemp on a large scale and whether people would buy hemp based products. I hope this answers your question.