At a middle school reunion we were passing around pictures, when I saw one of me wearing a vest I had made out of an outgrown skirt. For a time, the landfill was spared. Schools where students wear uniforms spare landfills and parents' expenses by hosting back-to-school exchanges to recycle outgrown uniforms to younger classmates. Besides outgrowing clothes and shoes, there are plenty of reasons to get rid of old clothes. Styles change, moths eat sweaters, washing at the wrong heat setting shrinks pants.
In addition to recycling clothes at yard sales or donating them to thrift stores, retailers, such as H&M, are offering new options. Stores have bins and exchange discount coupons for used clothing customers bring in for donations to charities. Some Nike and Converse stores have Reuse-A-Shoe programs that collect any brand of athletic shoes (none with spikes or cleats and no sandals, flip-flops, dress shoes, or boots, however). At facilities in Memphis, Tennessee, or Meerhout, Belgium (whichever is closest), shoes are ground into raw material and used for sport and playground surfaces, apparel, and new footwear. More information about Nike's recycling program is available at nikegrind.com.
There are efforts to keep discarded clothing out of landfills by unraveling sweaters to reuse wool and by turning cotton items into cleaning cloths, insulation, bedding, and home furnishings.
Synthetic fibers are a worse problem, since washing clothes made from textiles, such as polyester and acrylic, with detergents releases micro plastic fibers that slip through wastewater treatment plants and into waterways, where they become "food" for aquatic organisms, such as plankton, and fish. A single fleece jacket can release as many as a million synthetic fibers in a single washing, especially if washed with powdered, rather than liquid, detergent. Fabric softener has been shown to reduce shedding, as does using a short, gentle wash cycle and cool water. Research also has shown coatings like chitosan, a finish derived from crustacean shells, have helped reduce fiber loss. Washing machine devices that trap the synthetic fibers from clothes held in mesh bags and balls that attract fibers also are being tried. When synthetic materials end up in landfills, they can take from 20 to 200 years to decompose.
Overall, the subject of fabric pollution has been slow to attract financing for research and development of recycling processes and ways to reduce fabric pollution. Reducing clothing purchases is one way consumers can instantly help solve the problem.
Showing posts with label cotton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cotton. Show all posts
Sunday, May 28, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Meet the Farmer Behind the Produce Label
A label on your banana tells its country of origin, but the UK's Fairtrade Foundation (fairtrade.org) site tells you about the farmers who grow and harvest your bananas, what benefits they receive, and where you can buy Fairtrade certified bananas.
The Fairtrade site also provides the background of other produce: cocoa, coffee, cotton, flowers, sugar, and tea. Something to read while enjoying your banana.
The Fairtrade site also provides the background of other produce: cocoa, coffee, cotton, flowers, sugar, and tea. Something to read while enjoying your banana.
Monday, March 30, 2015
World (Food) Expo, Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices
Participants from 145 countries will interpret the theme, "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life," at the 2015 World Expo (expo2015.org), which is about to open May 1 and run through October 31 in Milan, Italy. At the fair, visitors will see technological advances aimed at making the food chain healthy, safe, and sufficient.
When we were much younger, my sister and I used to collect and dry seeds from our cosmos and zinnia flowers at the end of the growing season. The next spring we planted them, just as farmers do with non-hybrid seeds for their crops. Farming with hybrid seeds is different. Developed to permit machines to harvest and husk corn, for example, hybrid seeds produce plants that are all the same height and yellow ears that are the same size with the same number of kernels per row.
There are two reasons why hybrid seeds cannot be saved and planted again the next growing season. First, they produce variable plants with characteristics of only one parent or something entirely different from the crop from hybrid seeds. Second, since the major seed producing corporations that control over half of the global market, such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, make a major investment of time and money to produce hybrid seeds, they patent and license their seeds, sue unauthorized users for patent infringement, and, of course, charge farmers who have to purchase new seeds every year.
The increased worldwide corporate control of soybean, corn, cotton, and other hybrid seeds has led to several developments. An Open Source Seed Initiative has been formed to make sure some unpatented seeds are available to home, organic, and other farmers who are unconcerned about, for example, a variable corn crop that has pink and yellow tassels, plants that grow to different heights, and ears that have white, red, or yellow kernels. At the same time, agonomy scientists and farmers interested in seed breeding are working to develop new varieties of unpatented, non-hybrid seeds that are well adapted to different growing conditions. To discover the best seeds to save for planting from year to year, individual farmers, on a smaller scale, might try to imitate what the University of Wisconsin's agricultural department did under the direction of Professor Bill Tracy. Students planted 200 rows of seeds from 200 different varieties of corn. After they tried bites of the crop from each row, they stored seeds from plants in the row they liked best, sent the seeds to another country with similar growing conditions, and repeated the sampling process until they found the variety that grew reasonably well, tasted the best, and had good disease resistance.
Local soil, water, and climate conditions have a major impact on farming. When English settlers came to North America, the Indians introduced them to new crops like corn, beans, and squash and new methods of fertilizing the soil by planting seeds with fish. As water shortages escalate, in part because of climate change, there may be a need to rethink age-old farming practices. In India, where the World Resources Institute figures demand for water will outstrip supply by 50% as early as 2030, the Water Footprint Network expressed concern that the water India used to grow the cotton it exported in 2013 would have supplied 1.24 billion people (85% of India's population) with 100 liters of water every day for a year. Traditionally, India grows cotton and cereals in the drier northwestern parts of the country, where the government subsidizes the cost of electric pumps farmers use to deplete groundwater reserves. Consequently, there is no incentive for farmers to shift plantings to wetter parts of India where less evaporation would occur, to use water efficiently with irrigation, or to grow organic cotton and reduce the contamination of water by pesticides.
Farming is changing in other places and ways. A former factory site has become a 1.5-acre micro-farm that provides job training and produces lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers for local restaurants and farmers markets. The storm-water management system the farm installed both reduced flooding and provided irrigation. Contaminated soil was covered with a layer of gravel and two feet of clean soil. By adding a greenhouse, the micro-farm could produce vegetables all year.
To ensure a market for organic farmers, there are places where local folk sort of become shareholders who purchase a share of a farm's products when farmers need money before the planting season each spring. These shareholders receive a box of food from the farm during a 20-week growing season. In the U.S. the first box might arrive with asparagus, broccoli, and radishes in the spring and early summer; tomatoes, beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons in summer; and pumpkins, squash, and sweet potatoes in the fall. Some farms also offer add-ons, such as eggs, honey, bread, cheese, wool, and meat, and there are farm events like potluck dinners and opportunities to work on a farm.
To grow, I once learned that vegetables need a soil temperature of 45F degrees and overnight the temperature should not fall below 45F degrees either. In the U.S. Midwest, it is time to begin planting the crops.
(For more about farming, see the earlier blog post, "Back to the Land.")
When we were much younger, my sister and I used to collect and dry seeds from our cosmos and zinnia flowers at the end of the growing season. The next spring we planted them, just as farmers do with non-hybrid seeds for their crops. Farming with hybrid seeds is different. Developed to permit machines to harvest and husk corn, for example, hybrid seeds produce plants that are all the same height and yellow ears that are the same size with the same number of kernels per row.There are two reasons why hybrid seeds cannot be saved and planted again the next growing season. First, they produce variable plants with characteristics of only one parent or something entirely different from the crop from hybrid seeds. Second, since the major seed producing corporations that control over half of the global market, such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, make a major investment of time and money to produce hybrid seeds, they patent and license their seeds, sue unauthorized users for patent infringement, and, of course, charge farmers who have to purchase new seeds every year.
The increased worldwide corporate control of soybean, corn, cotton, and other hybrid seeds has led to several developments. An Open Source Seed Initiative has been formed to make sure some unpatented seeds are available to home, organic, and other farmers who are unconcerned about, for example, a variable corn crop that has pink and yellow tassels, plants that grow to different heights, and ears that have white, red, or yellow kernels. At the same time, agonomy scientists and farmers interested in seed breeding are working to develop new varieties of unpatented, non-hybrid seeds that are well adapted to different growing conditions. To discover the best seeds to save for planting from year to year, individual farmers, on a smaller scale, might try to imitate what the University of Wisconsin's agricultural department did under the direction of Professor Bill Tracy. Students planted 200 rows of seeds from 200 different varieties of corn. After they tried bites of the crop from each row, they stored seeds from plants in the row they liked best, sent the seeds to another country with similar growing conditions, and repeated the sampling process until they found the variety that grew reasonably well, tasted the best, and had good disease resistance.
Local soil, water, and climate conditions have a major impact on farming. When English settlers came to North America, the Indians introduced them to new crops like corn, beans, and squash and new methods of fertilizing the soil by planting seeds with fish. As water shortages escalate, in part because of climate change, there may be a need to rethink age-old farming practices. In India, where the World Resources Institute figures demand for water will outstrip supply by 50% as early as 2030, the Water Footprint Network expressed concern that the water India used to grow the cotton it exported in 2013 would have supplied 1.24 billion people (85% of India's population) with 100 liters of water every day for a year. Traditionally, India grows cotton and cereals in the drier northwestern parts of the country, where the government subsidizes the cost of electric pumps farmers use to deplete groundwater reserves. Consequently, there is no incentive for farmers to shift plantings to wetter parts of India where less evaporation would occur, to use water efficiently with irrigation, or to grow organic cotton and reduce the contamination of water by pesticides.
Farming is changing in other places and ways. A former factory site has become a 1.5-acre micro-farm that provides job training and produces lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers for local restaurants and farmers markets. The storm-water management system the farm installed both reduced flooding and provided irrigation. Contaminated soil was covered with a layer of gravel and two feet of clean soil. By adding a greenhouse, the micro-farm could produce vegetables all year.
To ensure a market for organic farmers, there are places where local folk sort of become shareholders who purchase a share of a farm's products when farmers need money before the planting season each spring. These shareholders receive a box of food from the farm during a 20-week growing season. In the U.S. the first box might arrive with asparagus, broccoli, and radishes in the spring and early summer; tomatoes, beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons in summer; and pumpkins, squash, and sweet potatoes in the fall. Some farms also offer add-ons, such as eggs, honey, bread, cheese, wool, and meat, and there are farm events like potluck dinners and opportunities to work on a farm.
To grow, I once learned that vegetables need a soil temperature of 45F degrees and overnight the temperature should not fall below 45F degrees either. In the U.S. Midwest, it is time to begin planting the crops.
(For more about farming, see the earlier blog post, "Back to the Land.")
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