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Eco fashion or sustainable fashion if you like, is a part of the increasingly growing design trend and philosophy of sustainability with the aim of creating a system that can fully support itself in terms of social and environmentalism responsibility. It can be defined as a sustainable design in the fashion and design industry where a product is created and made having considered the environmental and social impact it will have over its entire life span, not forgetting it environmental footprint.

In most cases as seen in the past, the environmentalism part in the fashion world comes through whereby the designers of environmentally friendly products donate a certain percentage of their sales to a charitable cause. However, today, fashion designers and stake holders in the fashion industry are re-introducing ecological conscious ways at the source of materials by using environmentally-friendly materials and applying safe and acceptable ways of production of the same.

Fashion statistics are quite shocking, to say the least. A non-profit organization known as Earth Pledge released figures that showed that around 8,000 chemicals will be used to turn a piece of raw material into textile. Further, over 25% of the total pesticide available in the world is used to grow non-organic cotton. Needless to mention, this will have an irreversible damage not only to the environment but to the people, and what is worse, once the final product is made and presented in the market, 2/3 of its environmental footprint will occur.

Materials Used

So many things come into play when considering how sustainable a material is. Such things may include the renewability as well as the source of fiber to be used, the entire process that takes to turn raw fiber into real textile, the working environment and conditions of the workforce that will be doing the work, and the total carbon footprint of the material.

Natural fibers

These are all natural, they aren’t petroleum-based hence occur naturally. There are two classifications of natural fiber – animal or protein fiber and plant or cellulose fiber.

Cellulose

Examples of cellulose fibers include cotton, banana, corn, soy, pineapple, bamboo, ramie, abaca, hemp, jute, and flax.

Protein

Examples of proteins include camel, angora, silk, wool, cashmere, lama, mohair, alpaca, and vicuna.

Because of the efforts taken to reduce the growth, production and shipping of natural products, these sustainable solutions explain the reason why sustainable fashion is quite expensive compared to clothing produced through other traditional methods. While cotton has a very large carbon footprint right from its cultivation to the process of its production, organic cotton is thought to be a sustainable solution for fabric because it is totally free of all harmful pesticides and any chemical fertilizers which are used to grow cotton. On the other hand, because bamboo, in its life cycle has proven that it can absorb a large percentage of greenhouse gasses, plus the mere fact that it grows very quickly, majority of the world designers have started experimenting their fashion escapades with bamboo.

*and what about that cell phone your are caring around so ‘fashionably’.  A great article on the importance of recycling your cell phone can be found at Cell Phone Plans.