An article from the UK newspaper The Guardian last week reported on a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) , the world’s largest conservation organization, and an London-based fashion community AwaytoMars to create “the world’s first 100% sustainable clothing line.”
The clothes will be made of a “newly designed” cotton fibre called Infinifed Fiber “that can be recycled an infinite number of times and which won’t, in theory, wear out.”
I couldn’t find more than that one page about this fiber, and no photos whatsoever, so I’m not sure if this is real or theoretical.
But I do know something about recycling paper, which is a similar process since it is recycling a natural cellulose material. You can’t infinitely recycle the same paper. You use a little material every time you recycle it. You have to keep adding new paper to mix with the old paper. Here’s a whole article about Why cotton is so difficult to recycle—and how clothing retailers hope to change that.
And I know something about making new fibers from cellulose. This is done every day. It’s called “rayon.” And you can’t recycle cellulose into fiber without a lot of chemicals. (Here’s another company also attempting to do this: Evrnu.
But here’s the bigger problem with this: it’s not sustainability.
Sustainability is about sustaining the life systems of planet Earth.
It’s about using the renewable resources that have been designed by Nature, in amounts that can be sustained by the system. Organic cotton is a perfect example of sustainability. You grow the cotton organically, and theoretically you could put that cotton right back into the field at the end of it’s useful life and it would regenerate the soil. That’s what a tree does. It pulls from the environment to make leaves, then drops it’s leaves back into the environment to restore the environment.
We should be supporting organic agriculture, not inventing new manmade processes.
Sustainability is also about not poisoning the system with toxic chemicals. Every time each one of us make a toxic-free choice, we are not only protecting our own health, we are also helping the environment.
