Today my guest is Greta Eagan, eco ambassador, writer, stylist, conscious living expert, and author of Wear No Evil: How to Change the World with Your Wardrobe. We’re going to be talking about toxics in textiles and how to have “style + sustainability without sacrifice.” Shortly after graduating from the London College of Fashion, Greta founded fashionmegreen.com, a sustainable fashion awareness project- now a popular blog. Both the author and her blog have become leading sources for information on sustainable style, green beauty, and eco-chic decor. Greta has contributed to publications in print and online, including Glamour, Lucky and the Huffington Post, and has collaborated with brands such as Kate Spade, Eileen Fisher, The Outnet, Refinery29, and many more. She has made TV appearances for eco-fashion and beauty segments, hosted Aspen Fashion Week for Outdoor Television, and been both a panel and keynote speaker at conferences around the world including SXSW Eco. www.fashionmegreen.com | www.gretaeagan.com

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How To Dress Without Toxics and Still Have Style

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: GRETA EAGAN

Date of Broadcast: February 13, 2015

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. Today is Thursday, July 10th, 2014. We’re going to be talking about – I just heard a noise, goodness.

Anyway, we’re going to be talking about clothing today. We’re going to be talking about how to choose toxic-free clothing but also how to still look stylish when you’re wearing toxic-free and otherwise green clothing because there’s more to green clothing than just being toxic. Then we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. But mostly of course, on this show, we’re interested in our toxic exposures and how to remove them.

We’re going to talk a lot about fashion today too. I’m smiling to myself because I know earlier in my life, I used to be quite a fashionable aware person and always had to wear the latest thing, et cetera. Until I started thinking about what those clothes are made of and wanting to only wear natural fibers.

Now, I live in Florida. I used to live in the San Francisco Bay area, but now I live in Florida. And fashion goes out the window here because it’s so hot. And you’re just sweating all day long if you’re out and if you’re not in an air-conditioned building.

And so when I moved here, I totally changed everything I wore to things that were – everything had to be made out of cotton or linen because that’s the most comfortable thing to wear in the heat. And it also needed to just get thrown in the washing machine because I would literally have to change my clothes two or three times a day if was not in an air-conditioned environment. You just perspire and perspire and perspire.

Now, I spend a lot of time indoors in the air conditioning, but still my basic wardrobe is cotton tank tops and cotton Capri pants. I just have those two items in every color I can get them in. I just mix and match them in any possible way. And that’s about how other people dress here too. But we’re going to talk about all kinds of fashion style and toxic-free, how we can wear clothing that’s toxic-free.

My guest is Greta Eagan. She is the author of Wear No Evil: How to Change the World with Your Wardrobe. Shortly after graduating from the London College of Fashion, she founded FashionMeGreen.com. It’s a sustainable fashion awareness project that’s now a popular blog.

She and her blog have become leading sources for information on sustainable style, green beauty and eco-sheet décor. She’s contributed to publications in print and online including Glamour Magazine, Lucky and Huffington Post. She has collaborated with brands such as Kate Spade, Aileen Fisher, the Outnet, Refinery29 and many more.

Welcome to the show, Greta.

GRETA EAGAN: Hi. Thanks for having me.

DEBRA: Thanks for being on the show. So tell us – I just gave a little introduction, but tell us your story of how you went from being just a regular fashion-oriented person to being concerned about these issues.

GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. I always like to say that I was a fashionista before an environmentalist. That’s the truth.

Originally when I went to the London College of Fashion, I went to study Fashion Promotion and Marketing. I already had this innate passion and love of fashion, which I think a lot of people who are in the fashion industry have and what drives them to be in the industry itself.

And as I learned more – I mean it was literally through one of my first courses, which was the History of Fashion, I learned more about the democratization of fashion and the industrialization and how the Industrial Revolution really had an impact on fashion production and mass fashion production.

What we had originally was more limited resources and in the sense of what we had available. And you found that families would repair pieces of clothing and pass them down. They’d make them last as long as they could.

Then with the spinning jenny and different technologies that came out of the Industrial Revolution, obviously now we’ve just proliferated that more and more we really can produce fashion so much more quickly. It’s bred this thing that we’re all aware of now called fast fashion or even what people are calling throw-away fashion.

That was at the height when I was studying in London. Fast fashion model was really coming into full steam. People were buying top and wearing it for a night out and not even bothering to wash it. They were done with it because it was such a cheap piece of fashion that it didn’t really warrant a wash and another wear. They were satisfied with the one-wear.

That was just really, really disturbing to me. And I had a real moral conflict. I had to sit myself down and have an honest thought. If I wanted to participate in the fashion industry, could I do it and still have my conscience and my morals upheld.

That’s what really led me down to the path of finding this alternative way of participating in fashion and what was pretty much termed corporate social responsibility for fashion. And then it led me down the rabbit hole of what we now call Eco Fashion, which is a more conscious production, new space and discarding of the clothing that we use and put next to our bodies.

DEBRA: So do you consider Eco Fashion to still be fashion in the sense that – if you were to ask me what is the definition of fashion, I would say that it – as you say the industry, the fashion industry, I think of it as being an industry.

But like any other industry, the idea is to get people to continue to buy the product whether they need it or not. So there’s always new fashion that comes in, something being in fashion or out of fashion. If you are – like I used to be, you had to be wearing the right thing at the right time that the fashion industry was telling you to wear.

I went through a period of time when I started being aware of toxics where I said, “Okay. So clothes don’t have to be about fashion. They should be about keeping my body warm and looking nice.”

So for me, part of the question about what I wear is “Is it appropriate?” Like I was saying in the introduction, I dress suitably for Florida. And here, we need to have clothes that we can throw in the washing machine as many times a day as we need to. I’m not concerned about what fashion is anymore because I’m dressing for my place.

And so how does eco fashion – does eco fashion as a movement include things like buying fewer clothing and considering things like timeless designs and those things, as well as what the materials are?

GRETA EAGAN: You brought up a couple of really good points. One is the definition of fashion.

Miuccia Prada, who’s the founder of Prada and a very visionary designer, tends to lead the way in the fashion industry a lot of what she puts out other designers follow. And she does perpetuate these new styles that you were saying that you changed.

She said that in a society that we’re in today, a global society where everything is moving so quickly, fashion and clothing are actually communication. It’s a visual language that we communicate to other people. What we wear is a reflection of how we feel, maybe how we feel comfortable in what we’re wearing or like you were saying, for dressing for the environment.

I think that the goal is to get to a place where you’re not really dressing for everyone else. Like you were saying, if you weren’t really wearing the right thing at the right time, maybe you felt differently.

If you’re living in New York and you’re working in the fashion industry, there certainly is the certain amount of pressure to wear certain fashionable pieces. But I think the goal as I’ve gotten older – and I’ve been working in the fashion industry for a number of years now – is to find the pieces that actually communicate to you just really intrinsically how you feel as your self-expression. I think that’s something that we get overtime.

And then from there, there might be an experimental phase where you’re trying different things out. When people move through that phase, I actually really suggest to my clients a lot of the time.

If you want to try a new trend – and fashion is cyclical. If you want to try a new trend, go to a consignment store. You can usually find some things that if that trend has been out for a little while, there’s something that you can buy or it’s likely something that’s come back around that’s already been out in the world at some point or another.

And you can then try that trend out. If you like it, you know what to invest and you know it works for your body. You know that the color way works for your skin tone, whatever it is. And then you can start to make investments into pieces that last longer that are higher quality and make up a wardrobe that really reflects who you are and the environment that you’re in.

DEBRA: Great. We need to go to break, but we’ll talk more about all these things when we come back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. We’re talking about everything having to do with clothing and fashion and how it affects our health and the environment.

Greta, you have so much information in your book. I think that this is a good workbook for somebody who is making a transition from having what is the common wardrobe that we have in the world today and wanting to take a look at the things that have health and environmental effects that you have processed, that you’ve outlined of how to go about doing that, which I think is a good one. It’s pretty much the process that I went through when I was making these changes myself.

You have something called the Integrity Index that you put together. And I’d like us to talk about some of those points that you have there.

First, I’d like to say, one of the – I want to talk about viewpoint for a minute because I think that everybody needs to have their own viewpoint about what is most important to them. I think that you said that in your book too. And I know that your book is written from an environment and ethical viewpoint.

I noticed one thing that I just wanted to mention. When I’m looking at your integrity index, the first thing that I would say for people to look is different than the first thing that you say. Neither one is wrong or right. It’s just a different viewpoint.

The first thing that I would say to people is to look for fabric finishes permanent press or no iron because that is made with the formaldehyde dressing. You’re just going to be breathing formaldehyde all day long if you wear a permanent press shirt.

The first thing that you talked about is to look at the dyes. So would you tell us about the impact of dyes? Even though, from my viewpoint because I’m looking at health effects first – from my viewpoint, I’m not so concerned about dyes.

But tell us about the environmental effects of dyes and why you put that first.

GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. Just to give an overview, like you said, a lot of people – it’s music to my ears to hear that this comes off as a work for people making a transition because there are a lot of people who are making changes and being very conscious in their purchases for food or even the transportation they take or even the cleaning products they bring into their home. But when you look at the fashion industry, a lot of people don’t know that it’s actually the second most polluting industry worldwide behind petroleum.

So the effects of the fashion industry are huge. And actually, the dye process, that cumulative effect of being such a polluting industry, about 20% to 25% of that comes from the dyeing process. That does actually tie in to what you are talking about with these different systems and treatments that they apply to fabrics and fibers to get them to be wrinkle-free or that sort of thing.

The same applies to retaining a color and the vibrant feel of that color. If you have a piece of clothing that’s hot orange, that’s not necessarily a natural color that exists and that would be sped fast wash after wash, unless there were some chemicals involved.

The EPA has actually identified some of those chemicals that are being used for fluorinated compounds or what they call PCS. And those PCS have actually been identified by the EPA as carcinogenic.

So it’s a really hard and murky place where there isn’t a lot of clean and clear information about what are these chemicals that we’re using and that we’re being exposed to. But the reality is that there are a lot of chemicals from the dyes that are used to the fixed things that we were talking about for certain properties of your fabrics, but also even the synthetic fabrics that are being produced.

So if it’s a polyester or a rayon or a viscose, all of those are synthetic materials that are made either from something like a petroleum or from a plant-based fiber that’s been chemically treated to become a fiber. And those are quite toxic, and they have been shown to off gas carbon and nitrogen and sulfur dioxide.

Like you said, you’re exposed to that, not only if it’s next to your skin and maybe some people are sensitive enough to have a rash where they can see that they’re sensitive to those chemicals. But we’re inhaling them. There are ones close to us, and we’re breathing them in.

DEBRA: Now to me, not having as much inside information as you have, as a consumer, all I can do is I can look at a dye and say, “I’m pretty sure that that’s a synthetic dye because it’s color fest,” or “I’m pretty sure it’s a natural dye because this was made in India. If I put it in the washer, everything is going to – and it’s red – everything is going to turn pink because the solvent will come out in the wash.”

So how can a consumer make a decision to have a more eco-friendly dye? How would they even know?

GRETA EAGAN: So there are three levels. There are the normal dyes that are quite toxic. They are what we first developed and started using when we started mass-producing fashion.

And then we started to look at it and say, “This feels really wasteful. Wow, we’re turning rivers of different colors, like you’re already alluded to something made in China that they’ve talked about.” You can always tell what season it is, the fashion season. The water coming out of the factories and running into the different streams and rivers actually changes that color of what they’re using.

So we started to pay more attention to the impact of that. So people, different companies and brands have actually gone towards using what they call low impact dyes. So you have normal dyes and then you have low impact dyes. And then you have natural dyes.

Natural dyes come from natural sources. They’re not synthetic, so they might come from minerals or vegetables. They’re the more – or even mud – the traditional ways that we would have dyed clothing back in the days when we didn’t have these chemicals cocktails.

But the good news about the low impact dyes – and they’re actually one of the more eco-friendly options that we have. They’re just the smarter dye. They use less water. They aren’t using those fixings and mordants that make the color stay.

So they’re smarter and more evolved to dye. They’re not as pure as natural dyes, but the unfortunate thing is that a natural dye actually still uses some of those mordants and quite a lot of water. So it’s a bit of a trade of and you have to decide what’s important to you.

DEBRA: Good. We need to take another break. We’ll be right back to talk more about fashion and clothing with Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. Her websites are FashionMeGreen.com and gretaeagan.com. So you can go there and find out more. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan. She is the author of Wear No Evil. She also has a blog called Fashion Me Green at FashionMeGreen.com.

She knows a lot about styles and clothing and has this wonderful book as a transition, a guide to how you can transition from the clothes you’re wearing now into things that are better for your health and the environment.

So another major thing that I want to talk about, Greta is the transition in looking at fabrics. I think that fabrics is a place where anybody can start – they can look on the label and see what fabric the garment is made from and then choose better fabrics.

So let’s talk about that for a bit. And then there’s so much more out of your book that I want to get to.

GRETA EAGAN: I know it can be overwhelming at times, but that’s why I wrote a book.

DEBRA: Right. Obviously, we can’t get to everything. But I want to get to the major points here.

So the way I look at it is that the worst fabrics are synthetics. And so we should be able to recognize what the synthetic fabrics are and avoid them. Then the next step is to just go to a natural fiber like cotton, linen, silk or wool. And then the next step is to go organic.

I think you would agree with those three steps.

GRETA EAGAN: Yes, I do. Absolutely.

DEBRA: Let me just jump to organic. Let’s talk about that because I think that for me, the biggest problem is just not being able to find organic clothes in the stores and that you can order things online. There are a lot of resources actually to order things online.

But I can’t try them on. And there’s also sometimes that – I think that things are changing, but for a long time, there wasn’t must style in those clothes that you could order online or that were colored or things like that.

So I remember wanting organic clothes. So I ordered unbleached and un-dyed sweat clothes. That was what I wanted to wear everyday.

Where are we now about organic and having organic becoming more mainstream?

GRETA EAGAN: We are in a good place, I’m happy to say. And eco fashion as a category, where maybe it’s this more conscious clothing, has a bad rep to live down. It used to be very beige and frumpy and like you said, not necessarily the style that you wanted to be wearing.

I was really true for a while. Part of the reason why that happened is that we had people, who were environmentalists or maybe more environmentally conscious, making the clothing rather than designers making the clothing.

The good news is that there’s been a huge shift. Even all the way down to the level of where these designers are coming out of their design schools. Sustainability and broader education about the impact of the fashion industry is part of the curriculum. So that’s where we’re headed, which is great.

And the immediate effect of where we are right now, we have bigger brands who are taking on the responsibility of offering different lines, maybe their little capsule collections that are made specifically from organic fibers.

A good example of this is H&M actually, which is a more affordable fashion brand, retailer. And they actually, for the past two years, have been the number one buyer of organic cotton. And they have made a pledge that by 2020, they will be producing all of their garments that will be using organic cotton. That’s huge.

When you see big retailers like that – I know Walmart also has their organic cotton for more work-out clothes that they’ve been doing. When you see big retailers like these getting on the game, they really move the needle because the supply and demand is so big that it really does incentivize these different farms and farmers who are producing cotton conventionally to switch to organic cotton because the need is there and the supply and demand is there.

So that’s the good news. I would also say that there are lots of brands. As I mentioned, designers who are now getting started in producing their lines – that’s part of their DNA. They don’t want to produce a fashion label or a collection without using more sustainable fabric.

We have some different brands. There’s a new one called Be Good Clothing. I think their website is just BeGoodClothing.com. And they’re essentially taking the Everlane model, which is to make this timeless basic T-shirts and button-downs and staples for your wardrobe. And they’re making them with organic cotton and more sustainable fibers.

They’re able to offer that in a more affordable price because there is no middle man. They’re selling direct to consumer.

And you mentioned that the problem with ordering online is that you don’t get to try it on. The good news is a lot of these brands now have amazing shipping policies where you can order a couple of sizes and send things back. And they don’t charge you shipping. So you can try and figure it out…

DEBRA: That’s very good. Yeah. That is very good. I look and I go, “This is going to fit meme. How is it going to look?” And I don’t want to be paid double shipping for something that I don’t want.

So I’m trying to figure out just quickly how I can – I’m 100% behind organic fabrics for clothing. Yet, I think in all the different areas of my life, the clothing is the area where I’m most behind.

For me, if I’m wearing my little tank tops and my little Capri pants, I’m not having a big toxic exposure myself. But I know that there’s a big environmental effect for these little clothings. But I’m not being affected by it directly.

So it makes it more difficult I think for people who are more health-oriented and environmentally oriented, even though I know that there’s a big environmental effect of me wearing these cotton clothes. It’s harder to spend that extra money or go through the extra effort when I can just go buy a T-shirt, a tank top for $8 as I’m walking down the mall that’s on sale.

So I think that it’s – let’s go ahead and talk about your book because you do have a very good process here. So you have something – after the integrity index, you talked about the Diamond Diagram and your Wear No Evil System.

You talked about going through your closet. That’s exactly what I did. I went to my closet and I put everything that was a natural fiber – this was 35 years ago. I put everything that was a natural fiber in one pile and everything that was a synthetic fiber in another pile, and I had no clothes left to wear.

And at that time, in 1978, we were in the midst of leisure seats and polyester. It was very difficult to find anything, like a T-shirt and jeans to wear, that was not synthetic. But that’s not the case now. That’s not the case now.

So tell us about your process that you described on the book after the break. Oh my god. Here we are…

GRETA EAGAN: Okay, sure.

DEBRA: Okay. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my we’re talking today with Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Great Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. Her website is FashionMeGreen.com and GretaEagan.com.

Okay, Greta. So tell us about making these decisions about your diamond – how you make decisions about choosing products.

GRETA EAGAN: Sure. And just to follow up from what we were saying right before we went to break, I just want to say that I know that it can be challenging to make the commitment to buy a certain way, in your case, maybe organic.

But I just want to remind everyone that every time we buy something, we bought with our dollars. And we tell those manufacturers and retailers and brands that that’s what we want. So it adds up, and it does have an impact.

DEBRA: I totally agree.

GRETA EAGAN: So it’s worth the effort.

DEBRA: Yes, it is. It really is. My point was in the past when I’ve attempted to do that, I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to wear that I could wear. Part of it had to do with size and part of it had to do just with – sometimes I need to wear things other than T-shirts.

GRETA EAGAN: Right. That’s part of what I actually outlined in my book. You’ve mentioned already that there are these kinds of pieces to this Wear No Evil System.

The first being the integrity index, which I outlined 16 different ways that you can look at a piece of fashion and decide on its eco credentials, as I call them. And it might be ethical or it might be that it’s non-toxic or sustainable or socially linked. There are all these different ways of participating.

And what we do is you get an overview of all those different ways than what you’ve already alluded to. Some of them are more important to you that might be different, that are important to me. That’s where we are. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it, but it’s about the individual. So in that exposure to these different eco credentials, you, as a consumer and an individual, get to decide what’s important to you.

What I do is I take those four or five top eco factors that we’ve looked at. And you then put them into play in the diamond diagram, which is a flexible model, a way for you to navigate through life and navigate through shopping, to still uphold your values while you are getting these pieces of clothing that you need for your wardrobe.

And one of those would be style. We really cannot sacrifice on the style because it doesn’t make for a sustainable piece of fashion. If it’s not stylish, if you don’t want to wear it, if it doesn’t uphold your sense of identity, then it’s probably not going to get worn. It will just sit in the back of your closet.

DEBRA: That is so, so, so true. I was actually a co-founder of a corporation that was making sustainable products. We were trying to figure out what actually is green. We looked around. It does fit in various ways.

What we discovered was that you can’t sell a green product unless number one, it appeals to the consumer. And so it has to be something that they want to use or they’re not going to buy it. It applies right here just as you said. The first thing that someone’s going to look for is “Do I feel beautiful when I wear this?” or “Do I feel handsome?” or “Does it express my self-expression?” So it’s not just about whether it’s non-toxic or not, although that’s my number one thing.

They can be the perfect pieces of clothing for me. I will not buy it if it’s toxic. But at the same time, I won’t buy something non-toxic if it’s not right for me to wear. So you’re absolutely right.

GRETA EAGAN: What you were saying, that’s part of the Wear No Evil System. If you’re going to subscribe to the Wear No Evil movement and be part of this more conscious consumption, it’s not enough to buy something just because it’s pretty.

You have to have the style factor and then at least one other factor. That’s where the Diamond Diagram comes into play and helps people navigate the spaces. At the very least, it has to have style and then one other factor. And in your case, it might be that it’s organic or that it uses a low-impact dye.

If it uses two of those or it uses both of those and it’s stylish, then you’re operating on a whole different level of conscious consumption. And you keep operating on that level as we were talking about before. It really sends a message about what the consumer wants.

I do think that as the population is becoming more educated. These things are becoming more important and also becoming more transparent on the side of the brand.

DEBRA: I just want to throw this and there’s so much we can talk about on this subject. I want to say that in my life for the past 35 years, I really have been committed to natural fibers. I will not wear a synthetic fiber and I will not wear something that has a permanent pressed finish. That’s my line.

I will wear natural fibers that are not organic, but my preference would be – anytime I have the option to do this. I take it. My preference would be to have everything organic, everything low-impact dye. The only reason that doesn’t happen for me is accessibility and affordability.

But I want to just make an example of how far I will go in another option for people. Once I needed to wear an evening gown to an event and I could not find anything down that wasn’t synthetic. I just couldn’t find one at all.

So I made my own. I made just cotton – I took cotton material. It’s just plain color. I just made it a strapless sheet dress. And then I took 100% cotton’s cream material for curtains.

And I made just a thing that went on top, a flowing – what’s it called when you just…

GRETA EAGAN: Like a shawl or a wrap?

DEBRA: Yeah, but all the way down the whole length of the dress. So it was just very beautiful. It was 100% cotton. It cost less than $100 for me to buy this fabric. And I had the most beautiful evening gown. I bought a beautiful necklace to go with it. It was very fashionable. I thought I was the most fashionable person there.

So just because you don’t – I just want to tell people that just because you don’t find something off the rack, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make something that reflects your integrity and your style.

GRETA EAGAN: And there are – I would also say where we are right now in the industry and in this kind of movement towards more conscious living. There are a lot of resources that are coming up. So I’ll just name a few and there are more listed in my book.

I’m always on my website where I’m talking about brands continuously because they keep coming. If you want to shop, you can shop and you can filter by these different eco credentials that are important to you. You can shop at Modavanti.com. You can shop at Zadie.com or ShopEthica.com. There are number of these online eco boutiques that are popping up.

Also take a look in your local area because I know, especially in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are different eco boutiques and more stores that are popping up that are really subscribing to this conscious consumption.

DEBRA: Yes, excellent. We have about three minutes left. So what would you like to say that you haven’t said yet?

GRETA EAGAN: Oh gosh. It’s a journey, but I really commend anyone who takes this on. I did it based out of my research. Once, I dedicated my dissertation to sustainability in fashion. When I came out, I just knew too much and I couldn’t go back.

For a little while there, I really struggled. You said when you sorted your clothing and then all of a sudden, you had nothing to wear but your birthday suit. And I can really relate to that.

I really struggled for a little while and I felt like I lost my sense of style and my sense of self because I was really trying to fit within these confines of 100% sustainable, 100% environmentally friendly or ethical.

I think the truth is just we have to meet the industry where it’s at. It’s great to support brands that are doing these things, producing the products in the ways that we want them to. But I also think it’s important for us to know that nothing is 100% right now. That’s okay. Some is better than none.

DEBRA: It’s a very important thing to recognize that the whole industry is in transition, the whole world is in transition, each of us are in transition. Everything that we can do that’s a step in the right direction is worth doing.

GRETA EAGAN: Exactly.

DEBRA: We can get very idealistic about things needing to be 100%. I know that there are some people who need to have clothing that is just the purest of the pure. That clothing needs to be available in order for people who need that to have that.

I also know that any step that we take is worth taking. Taking each step than – I’ve been watching this for 35 years now. So I can see as we take steps as consumers.

When I started, there was no organic cotton and anything. There was hardly any cotton or anything. As people started buying cotton, then there are organic cottons started to be grown.

And then as people started making things out of organic cotton, then now we have things that are more stylish out of organic cotton. And we just need to keep moving things forward. Just keep moving forward.

GRETA EAGAN: It’s true. Just one other thing, we’ve talked a lot about organic cotton which is a great fiber and fabric. It’s a little thirsty. So there are some other fibers that I’ve just loved to mention.

DEBRA: Please.

GRETA EAGAN: There’s peace silk, which doesn’t actually harm the insects. So it’s peace as in world peace, peace silk that you can look for. Like you mentioned, there’s linen. There’s chute.

There’s hemp now, but we weren’t able to produce right in this country. We’re seeing some movement there. It’s a really great fiber that doesn’t take a lot of water.

DEBRA: I have to interrupt you only because if I don’t, the end of the show is going to come on and interrupt you anyways. So thank you so much, Greta.

GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. Thank you so much. Good luck.

DEBRA: Thank you. You too. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.