Photo: wearechapterone / Flickr

Greenpeace has issued some great tips on how to reduce your fashion footprint. We shared some of them with you, including buying second hand, buying classics, focusing on quality, and buying environmentally friendly clothes, here. Read on for more ideas from Greenpeace in their series, beginning with saying no to child labour and saying no to sweatshops.

Buy Fairtrade

If you’ve decided to buy a new item of clothing, look at buying a Fairtrade product. Fairtrade guarantees good working conditions in poor countries, which means no child labour and a decent living wage. If you’d like to find what companies are linked to child labour and sweatshops, head across to cleanclothes.org and laborrights.org.

Consider production

Think about what’s going into the production of the piece of clothing. Take distressed denim, which often requires chemical treatments in order to get the distressed look. Greenpeace warns about other side-effects: ‘chemical use isn’t the only issue – killerjeans.org explains how the practice of distressing denim through sandblasting is causing the fatal lung disease silicosis in factory workers.’

Washing

The washing of clothes can be detrimental to the environment. Greenpeace advises to ‘minimise this by making sure you wash a full load. Also, most of the electricity used in washing comes from heating the machine, so turn it down.’ Thirty degrees Celsius should be all you really need to wash soiled laundry.

Pass them on

Instead of throwing out your old clothes, consider passing them on. Whether you pass them on to a friend or place them on eBay or Freecycle, you’ll be doing some good. Otherwise find out if it is possible to take the worn article back to the manufacturer. On that note, contact brands you like if they’re not up to scratch with their environmental policies or activities.

Finally, spread the word about reducing your fashion footprint! ‘Tell your friends about the pollution problems – spreading awareness of this issue helps us push for a toxics-free future for the textile industry.’

Tags: clothing, environmentally friendly, fashion