A lot can happen in a year…except at Verizon.

One year ago, the telecom giant quietly released its first major commitment to clean energy. After years of using a feeble amount of renewable power in its massive network, Verizon had finally set a goal to reach 50 percent clean energy by 2025.

Unfortunately, Verizon hasn’t announced any progress, meanwhile its competitors have made strides in clean energy.

This year, T-Mobile announced new wind and solar purchases that will bring the company to 95 percent of its 100 percent clean energy goal. AT&T announced two new deals and stated that its clean energy usage is equal to removing 690,000 cars off the road each year. Sprint also announced its first clean energy project this year, which will provide 30 percent of the company’s energy.

Verizon has not announced any new clean energy contracts, despite obtaining a $1 billion Green Bond in February 2019. These funds could be used for renewable energy, energy efficiency, conservation efforts, and more.

But Verizon reported that renewables were a mere 1% of its total energy use in 2018. Since it hasn’t announced any new contracts, it doesn’t seem promising that Verizon will reach its goal anytime soon.

The clock is ticking to act on the climate crisis. Every year, impacts escalate and grow more intense, threatening communities worldwide. We need industries to take aggressive steps to address their impacts.

The four largest telecom companies collectively use over 30 million MWh of electric power annually, which could power all the households in New York City. That’s why we’re urging Verizon to Hang Up on Fossil Fuels and plug into clean energy. 

Join us by signing and sharing our petition today!

By Guest Blogger: Kurt Whitt, Green Business Network Member and Founder/Chief Visionary Architect of EcoPlanetMedia

As an earth-friendly creative agency, Eco Planet Media gets a firsthand look at the green trends occurring across business sectors. Concern about the environment continues unabated, but researchers and everyday citizens of the earth are waking up to new ideas and technologies to counter the growing problems with climate change and pollution. In 2019, these eco-friendly trends hit the front page of environmental consciousness and green living.

Youth Climate Change Movement - Youth Climate Activists Ramp Up the Pressure

From school strikes to the global stage, young climate activists are making their voices heard and are increasingly politically engaged. You can't browse social media without seeing the name Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist whose campaigning has gained international recognition. Businesses are responding by including younger generations in the conversation, ranging from messaging and marketing to product development and sponsoring young brilliant minds to come up with innovative technological or political solutions. 

An End to Plastic? Alternate Materials

As off-shore recycling takes a hit, companies looking for alternatives to plastic have a greater impetus to find a solution. Biodegradable packaging and products are the response to the tons of plastic dumped into the ocean every year. Companies are creating alternate materials from waste products like grape skins, natural polyesters, corn starches, and even fungi. Industries are restructuring their messaging to get consumers on board with these alternate materials and play a key role in educating the public on what is possible.

Renewable and Alternative Energy

Countries across the globe are going green with alternative energy. With more affordable options in solar and wind energy production, people are taking control of their own systems and local microgrids are gaining popularity. These pioneers in energy industries are up against monopolies and entrenched systems; they must have solid social media influence and powerful marketing to gain and maintain momentum that will change the energy marketplace in a meaningful way.

Minimalism and Anti-Consumerism Mindset

Excessive consumption leads to larger houses, latest model cars, trendier clothes, unnecessary new smartphone technology, and overfilled drawers. People are turning away from over-consumerism and toward a simpler and more environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Buying less, living in smaller homes, and generating less waste become the consumer’s goals. This expands into the desire for less packaging and support for companies that waste less. Companies and businesses are driving attention to these practices in an effort to raise awareness among consumers through smart marketing campaigns and meaningful and transparent business practices.

Smart Buildings and Construction

Smart homes and the Internet of Things continue to grow in popularity. Green construction materials and increased efficiency in HVAC and other systems means cleaner indoor air and less post-construction waste. To counter the ecological effect of increases in new electronics prevalent in smart homes, more construction companies and technology developers turn to ecologically sound building techniques, including developing new materials with fewer potential pollutants. This deviation from ‘business as usual’ requires educating the public about these eco-friendly innovative practices through strong marketing and social awareness.

Eco-Tourism and Low-Impact Travel

Besides vacationing in environmentally interesting areas, more travelers in 2019 took into account what impact their visits have on the local ecology. A recent survey found that 86% of respondents would adopt green protocols or even volunteer for eco-friendly activities while on vacation. Businesses in the tourist industry are increasing awareness amongst travelers through eco-friendly advertising and partnering with local environmental efforts to create such opportunities. 

Electric and Self-Driving Vehicles

Driverless cars consume less fuel, wear out more slowly, and decrease overall pollution. Combine them with electric or alternative fuel vehicles, and you have one of the great eco-friendly trends for 2019 and beyond. Businesses in this industry face the obstacle of educating a potentially reluctant public through strategic campaigns showcasing the benefits of turning over the wheel to a computer in order to save the planet. 

Organic Foods - The Certified Organic Label

Consumers are aware that organically raised produce or livestock have not been touched by growth hormones nor have they been genetically altered. The yield for the organic grower is much smaller than that of growers using conventional techniques, resulting in higher prices. But for many consumers, the expense is worth it. Brands are driving social awareness of the real health effects of conventional agricultural practices on our personal and collective ecosystems through powerful advertising and positioning

Buying Green

To sustain our natural resources, we need to consume less by thinking about what we buy and how we use the products we buy. The less consumers consume, the smaller their footprint. So, what is a green product? Simply, it is a product that has very little, if any, negative effect on the environment. Consumers can identify green products easily by the labels. And more and more green products are showing up on store shelves. Currently, it is these businesses that are responsible for bringing awareness of consumerism and footprints by changing the language consumers identify with when making purchases.

Buying Local

Produce at the local grocery store is sourced from all over the world; it has been picked unripe and has been sitting in trucks and ships for many days or weeks, and it’s impossible to ascertain if they’ve been grown in a healthy, sustainable environment. When we buy locally, we can be certain our food is fresh and lessens the carbon footprint of transportation and storage costs. Local producers require targeted marketing to make their presence known in their communities, by closely identifying with their specific populations and providing solutions to problems their neighbors have. 

Businesses and corporations are learning that globalization includes fair arrangements with their trading partners. Fair Trade Certified labels are becoming more visible. It is up to true, eco-friendly brands to think about every aspect of their business, including who they partner with to handle their marketing. The weight of informing the public of eco-friendly alternatives to traditional business practices rests on these pioneers. 

At Eco Planet Media, we do our part to ensure consumers know how these businesses are changing the world. We help innovative companies achieve their online potential through branding, website design, ecommerce and digital marketing. As partners with Green America, we donate a percentage of every client project to One Tree Planted towards reforestation projects around the world. 

Ultimately, if consumers make well-considered choices in their purchases, and adopt eco-friendly trends, we will have a healthier, happier world. 

Along with helping you live green, for over 40 years, Green America has been working for safe food, a healthy climate, fair labor, responsible finance, and social justice. 

As the world’s largest company, Amazon has a huge affect on the global economy. It also employs between 500,000 and 1 million individuals, and the way it treats those employees matters. Here are some of the worst human rights abuses that Amazon has either directly or indirectly contributed to.

10 Ways Amazon Violates Human Rights

1. Amazon risks the health of workers in US. During the pandemic, nearly 20,000 Amazon employees have contracted COVID-19. Additionally throughout the pandemic, warehouse workers have voiced concerns of Amazon not taking enough precautions, which was supported by lawmakers when they made a surprise visit to an Amazon facility. Additionally, injury records analyzed by Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting demonstrate that injury rates within Amazon warehouses are more than DOUBLE the industry average; this is attributed in part to high production quotas.
2. Amazon risks the health of workers in their supply chain. While Amazon does have a Restricted Substances List (RSL) of restricted or banned chemicals to protect consumers of some products from toxic exposures, it does not apply to electronics or apparel. Amazon does not share which harmful chemicals are and are not allowed in their electronics or apparel supply chain; this means workers and consumers could be exposed to harmful chemicals with potentially lasting negative health consequences. Amazon does not have an MRSL (a list of chemicals that are restricted or banned from the manufacturing process) for any product and is therefore failing to protect workers. 
3. Amazon is STILL selling dangerous electronics and electronics accessories to consumers. CNN reports: “Since 2016, at least 1,500 reviews, covering more than 70 items, have described products exploding, catching on fire, smoking, melting, causing electrical malfunctions or otherwise posing risks, according to an analysis of Amazon Basics electronics and appliances listed on its website.”
4. Amazon tries to silence workers. The National Labor Relations Board is accusing Amazon of illegally firing a warehouse worker who spoke out for safer working conditions. During the pandemic, Amazon has fired several other employees who were organizing for safer working condition. All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace – silencing and firing workers only makes the problem worse.
5. In some Amazon Ring call centers, workers have ‘no choice’ but to sleep at work. NBC News reported that in the Philippines, after speaking up about their terrible working conditions, such as having no choice but to sleep at work, the conditions got even worse afterwards. During the pandemic, requests to work from home have been denied, resulting in workers coming to the call center with flu-like symptoms. "People are scared because we don't know who has it and who doesn't have it," an Amazon Ring contractor said. "But people don't have a choice, because it's either you will be infected or you will die of starvation."
6. Amazon sells clothing from a factory blacklisted for its poor safety conditions. The Wall Street Journal found that sellers on Amazon have been listing clothing from a factory so dangerous that most other major retailers will not buy from it. This factory has no fire alarms and doors that lock from the outside to keep workers trapped inside.
7. Facilitates the human rights crisis on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian reported that Amazon Web Services hosts the Department of Homeland Security's databases which allows "the department and its agencies to track and apprehend immigrants.” Amazon also works with Palantir, which has over $150 million in contracts with US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE).
8. Fights unions, resisting workers' right to freedom of association. Amazon is known for pushing back against unionization. Amazon reportedly has Whole Foods managers watch anti-union training videos and has fired numerous workers who were organizing their coworkers during the time of firing. And Amazon doesn’t stop there – Vice reported that, along with surveilling worker and union organizing, “Amazon uses social media to track environmental activism and social movements in Europe—including Greenpeace and Fridays For Future, environmental activist Greta Thunberg's global climate strike movement—and perceives such groups as a threat to its operations.”
9. Amazon’s Ring allows police to access your video footage. Forbes reports that you can opt out of allowing police access to your data, but “they can request the footage directly from Amazon if it has been uploaded to the cloud and the request is sent within 60 days of recording - even if you deny police access to that footage.” Though a similar video doorbell service, Nest, has stated that it would not share footage directly with police, experts do have privacy concerns about both services.
10. Amazon is listening to your private conversations. Amazon hires thousands of people to listen to your conversations. CBS reported individuals that are hired to review recordings from Alexa and noted that sometimes they review private conversations.

Learn more about Amazon's worker's rights issues at home and abroad. If you're ready to make the switch, here are sustainable alternatives to Amazon. Amazon’s profits are only possible due to the work of individuals around the world, from apparel supply chains to delivery drivers – Join us in calling on Amazon to step it up on workers’ rights!

Badger is family-owned company in New Hampshire that produces self-care products that focus on health throughout the supply chain, benefiting soil and ingredient sources, the customer, and everything and everyone in between. 

The company’s origin story starts in 1994, when Bill Whyte created a balm made from organic beeswax and olive oil to soothe his rough carpenter hands. Bill had owned a small contracting business that built non-toxic houses. Like many other carpenters, the harsh winters were tough on his hands, and the average healing products were not strong enough to repair his damaged hands. This balm became the first Badger product.

“Since the beginning, Badger has been devoted to and built around the principles of kindness, compassion, and environmental stewardship. We have always been a mission-driven business that seeks to make healing products through a healthy business model in order to make a difference in the world” says Jess Baum, Badger’s sustainability manager.

Baum also mentions that “Badger became a B Corporation in 2011 to codify, increase, and verify the company’s social and environmental impact. In 2015, we wrote our mission into the DNA of our company by becoming a New Hampshire Benefit Corporation, which is a legal corporate status that shifts our purpose to include public benefit for people and planet.” 

In addition to their impressive certifications, Badger has been recognized as ‘Best For The World’ and ‘Best For The Environment’ by B Corporation several years in a row, an honor bestowed to only the top ten percent of companies that are significantly beneficial for the consumers and environment. Badger’s products are all certified gluten free and cruelty free, with many organic, fair trade, biodynamic, wild crafted, and ecologically harvested ingredients. 

Badger products are all about healing, both for their customers and the soils that produce their ingredients. And, they don’t see these as different goals. 

“Soil is inextricably linked to human and ecological health” says Baum. Badger gathers their healthy organic ingredients from farms all over the world. Two popular ingredients used are: 

• Olive oil: Grown in Andalusia, Spain on the Soler Romero orchard, where they use cover cropping, conservation tillage, compost, and intercropping to regenerate soil health and resilience.
• Sunflower oil: Made with organic and Demeter-certified biodynamic sunflower oil on farms that manage for soil fertility and treat farms as living organisms, with practices like crop rotation and cover cropping to increase carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and overall soil health.

Badger recently began a project to regenerate and draw down carbon at their own headquarters. Here, Badger employees gain first-hand regenerative agriculture experience. The company hopes to restore healthier soils through cover cropping and composting with their new on-site Climate Victory Garden and Johnson-Su composting bioreactor.

Baum states that “While there is no ‘silver bullet’ for swiftly resolving the global catastrophes we find ourselves in, we believe in the power of soil management to reverse some of the most pressing threats to humanity. We believe it is essential to broaden the climate crisis conversation far beyond mitigating harm and reducing negative impacts to look to a holistic, broad-reaching solution that actively heals harms done.”

A multitude of concerns around devices like Alexa or Ring might make you reconsider purchasing Amazon electronics. Check out Green America’s five reasons to skip Amazon electronics before letting Amazon into your home.

1. In some Amazon Ring call centers, workers have ‘no choice’ but to sleep at work. NBC News reported that in the Philippines, after speaking up about their terrible working conditions, such as having no choice but to sleep at work, the conditions getting even worse afterwards. During the pandemic, requests to work from home have been denied, resulting in workers coming to the call center with flu-like symptoms. "People are scared because we don't know who has it and who doesn't have it," an Amazon Ring contractor said. "But people don't have a choice, because it's either you will be infected or you will die of starvation."
2. Amazon’s Ring allows police to access your video footage. Forbes reports that you can opt out of allowing police access to your data, but “they can request the footage directly from Amazon if it has been uploaded to the cloud and the request is sent within 60 days of recording - even if you deny police access to that footage.” Though a similar video doorbell service, Nest, has stated that it would not share footage directly with police, experts do have privacy concerns about both services.
   
   While Amazon was trying to generate positive PR with its statement on police brutality and “standing with the Black community”, it was busy firming up 29 new partnerships with police departments for the use of Ring as a tool of surveillance, which includes a police department just miles away from where George Floyd was murdered.
3. Amazon has no public Restricted Substance List (RSL) or Manufacturing Restricted Substances List (MRSL) for electronics. Amazon does not share which harmful chemicals are and are not allowed in their supply chain; this means workers and consumers could be exposed to harmful chemicals with potentially lasting negative health consequences, and if the chemicals are improperly disposed of, it poses a big risk for communities surrounding production facilities and to our environment.  
   
   An RSL is a list of chemicals that are restricted or banned from the final consumer product, and an MRSL is a list of chemicals that are restricted or banned from the manufacturing process. Amazon has neither a public RSL or MRSL.
4. Amazon hires thousands of people to listen to your conversations. Bloomberg reported individuals that are hired to review recordings from Alexa noted that sometimes they review “everything the speaker (Alexa) picks up, including background conversations—even when children are speaking. Sometimes listeners hear users discussing private details such as names or bank details…”
5. Amazon is a huge polluter! This year, Amazon’s carbon emissions increased by 15%. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that “Amazon’s emissions exceed the reported totals of United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. as well as Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company), Microsoft Corp. and Target Corp. Learn more and take Green America’s action here.

Bonus: Amazon is STILL selling dangerous electronics and electronics accessories to consumers! CNN reports: “Since 2016, at least 1,500 reviews, covering more than 70 items, have described products exploding, catching on fire, smoking, melting, causing electrical malfunctions or otherwise posing risks, according to an analysis of Amazon Basics electronics and appliances listed on its website.”

It’s official: Amazon is mammoth, at over 750,000 employees, and growing swiftly. Nearly 100,000 workers were hired in the third quarter alone. For comparison, fellow behemoths Google, Apple, and Microsoft all employ 100,000 to 145,000 workers.

Now a resistance is forming. “We are joining together to stop Amazon’s growing, powerful grip over our society and economy,” says the website of Athena, a broad new coalition of activist, pro-labor, and social-justice groups aimed at ensuring that “no corporation is above the law or too big to govern.”

Their concerns are backed by the release of a new report from the Economic Roundtable, which is coincidentally titled “Too Big To Govern.” It outlines Amazon’s many negative impacts on communities, workers, and the environment. For example, every day, 21,5000 diesel truckloads of Amazon goods enter Los Angeles, creating “an estimated $642 million in uncompensated public costs for noise, road wear, accidents and harmful emissions.”

The report calls its warehouse jobs “grueling and high stress” and chastises Amazon for not paying $20 minimum wage along with full health benefits. (Amazon pays $15 minimum wage, and many employees enroll in publicly subsidized health insurance.) “The only benefits that cities are receiving from Amazon’s warehouses are from construction jobs and fees, and employment of residents in low-wage jobs, along with modest, trickle-down multiplier effects as they spend their sparse earnings. Cities do not receive sales tax revenue from the sale of goods in these warehouses.”

An Amazon spokeswoman called detractors like Athena “self-interested critics” and “unions and groups funded by our competitors that have a vested interest in spreading misinformation about Amazon.” She highlighted the 400,000 U.S. jobs Amazon has created over eight years, an upcoming $700 million investment in upskilling 100,000 employees, and the launch of The Climate Pledge to reach net zero carbon by 2040.

“Amazon is a force for good in communities where we operate,” she said in an email. “It’s no coincidence to us that this group would emerge now, because large shopping events have become an opportunity for our critics, including unions, to raise awareness for their cause—in this case, increased membership dues. These groups are conjuring misinformation to work in their favor, when in fact we already offer the things they claim to be able to provide.”

Athena comprises four dozen organizations, including Green America, the Partnership for Working Families, the Transit Riders Union, and New York Communities for Change. If you’re curious about the group’s efforts, you can signup for the Athena email list here.

Would you like a receipt? That's usually a simple question to answer. Most people want to make sure their purchases were rung up correctly or make returns easier.

The tougher question these days is this one: paper or digital?

Digital receipts – electronic versions sent via email, text or app – are growing in popularity and can be handy to track purchases, make returns, keep to a budget or prepare for tax season. Paperless proponents also argue that printed receipts are environmentally wasteful.

On the flip side, digital detractors raise privacy concerns. And recent surveys show consumers still prefer old-fashioned physical receipts more than 3 to 1.

But experts say we may be nearing a tipping point.

They expect momentum for paperless receipts will grow at cash registers and with consumers, driven by the habits of millennials, who tend to spurn paper.

Even CVS, whose receipts are so epically long they've spawned scores of internet memes and Halloween costumes, has moved into the post-paper age and offers a digital option.

"Unlike paper receipts, digital receipts won't fade, get crumpled or lost," said Regina Conway, a consumer expert at Slickdeals.net. "This is especially helpful during the holiday season when it comes time to return unused or unwanted items."

But there's more to weigh before chucking paper forever. Here's what to consider and when you should still walk away with printed paper in your hand.

First, the basics

Every year in the United States, receipt use consumes more than 3 million trees and 9 billion gallons of water, according to Green America's Skip the Slip report, which also notes that generating receipts produces more than 4 billion pounds of carbon dioxide and 302 million pounds of solid waste during production.

Any receipt is better than no receipt for proof of purchases, and they're crucial for warranty issues, especially on big-ticket items like appliances and electronics. Having an original or gift receipt in whatever available format should make the return process go more smoothly, improving your chances of getting a full refund.

Choose Paper, a global campaign supported by the paper industry, did a survey in April and found 62% of consumers are concerned that their personal information held electronically is at risk of being hacked, stolen, lost or damaged.

The survey also found 62% of U.S. consumers are concerned they'll receive unsolicited marketing if their transaction history is stored.

Nearly seven out of 10 Americans say they prefer getting a paper receipt, compared with 19% who'd rather get an electronic receipt and 8% none at all, according to an August 2018 YouGov survey of close to 24,000 people.

Personal preference

Just like picking up a book or an e-book, it sometimes boils down to preferences.

Beth Porter, one of the authors of Skip the Slip and Green America's climate campaigns, said the nonprofit recommends businesses ask customers their preference to reduce automatic printing of receipts. Earlier this year, California lawmakers considered a bill to require businesses to offer a digital receipt option and provide a paper receipt upon customer request, but the measure failed.

Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst at CompareCards.com, travels a lot for business and says digital receipts are easier to keep organized "rather than having to keep track of a ton of paper receipts that are easy to misplace.”

When will we ditch paper receipts?

Similar to the cashless movement, there's a long way to go before total conversion.

“I can foresee a day when we make it so easy that consumers get comfortable with it as an alternative to that actual paper receipt,” said Rod Sides, vice chairman and retail leader of consulting firm Deloitte. “I think in the next three to five years, we’ll find more and more people accept it.”

Where can I get a digital receipt?

Apple started the digital receipt movement in 2005. Now the early adopter is joined by Best Buy, CVS, GNC, Kmart, Kohl's, Lowe's, Macy's, Nordstrom, Publix, Sam's Club and Walmart with its mobile payment program Walmart Pay.

At Target, if you pay for an in-store purchase with a card associated to your Target account or by using the Wallet in the Target app, you can access a return barcode and print a gift receipt from the retailer's website.

Some stores that don't have digital receipts also can look up purchases with a credit card or loyalty program.

Avoiding e-receipt overload

If you’re worried about a security breach and looking to keep your inbox less cluttered,  consider setting up a separate receipt email account.

Schulz suggests moving digital receipts into a designated folder in your email to help keep track. "It’s simple to do and it can save you some time if you go looking for that receipt in the future," Schulz said. "Also, consider saving the digital receipt as a PDF and saving them in a folder on your computer. It never hurts to have extra copies of these things."

Kimberly Palmer, a personal finance expert at NerdWallet, recommends using an email management service like unroll.me "so all those types of marketing and shopping emails go into a separate folder and not your inbox."

Tips and strategies

Make money: Saving receipts also can net you some money whether it's on cashback apps like Ibotta or Shopkick, both available for in-store and online purchases, or grocery rebate apps like Fetch Rewards or SavingStar. You also have higher odds at larger payouts with class action lawsuits that pay more with proof of purchase like receipts.

Double up: Take both receipts when offered, especially for major purchases, said Sara Skirboll, RetailMeNot shopping and trends expert. “If I'm only offered a paper receipt, and there's a small chance I may return the item or I'm giving it as a gift, I will always take a photo with my phone,” she said.

Digitize receipts: In addition to taking photos, if a store doesn't offer digital receipts, you can use apps including Receipt Hog and ReceiptPal, which both reward consumers for uploading receipts. When using a phone's camera, consider making an album of receipts. For the highly organized, make an album per store. 

Holiday return tips

Gift receipts: Always ask for gift receipts and then keep it with the gift. Also save all of your original receipts (physical or digital) to ensure your friends and family receive the full price you paid if they need to return or exchange your gift. At Target, returning an item with a gift receipt often means the person returning item will get a merchandise return card, which unlike a regular gift card can be used only in-store.

"A gift receipt is actually somewhat of a gift itself. It means that if the person doesn’t like what you got them, they don’t have to just stash it in a closet or put it on the curb on bulky-trash-pickup day," Schulz said. "They can easily swap the item out for something they’d like more."

Know the policies, deadlines: Read policies at store websites, on store signs or on the back of receipts.

No receipts? Returns without a receipt usually result in a merchandise credit for the lowest recent sale price or possibly no refund or exchange at all, depending on the store's policy.

Exchange it: Like the gift but want it in another color or size? Look for the item or ask for help, and if it’s not in stock, ask a store associate if it’s available online or at another store location.

Bring your ID: Even if you have a receipt, some stores require a government-issued ID.

Mail in rebates: If giving a rebate item as a gift, something to consider is whether you feel comfortable cutting off the UPC from a package. Some of the items are good deals because of the rebate.

Extra fees: If you are returning any electronics or an item that has been opened, be prepared to pay a restocking fee of up to 15 percent.

Talk to a manager: If you have a problem returning a gift, contact the store manager or the retailer's customer service department.

Sell or donate it: If you can't return or exchange gifts, consider selling them on eBay or similar apps and websites. Or donate them.

Americans are good at a lot of things: making cheese, sending astronauts to space, playing football. But we’re bad at recycling. We recycle only 34 percent of the paper, glass, plastic and other stuff that we could, according to Beth Porter. She’s the climate and recycling director for Green America, a nonprofit organization that supports sustainability.

In January 2018, the United States got a little worse at recycling. China used to buy 700,000 tons of plastic alone from us every year, to make into new products. Then the country stopped buying almost all our recyclables. Suddenly, our bottles, cans and newspapers had nowhere to go.

How did this happen?

“We were lazy and didn’t keep up with the latest technology to sort paper from plastic and aluminum at recovery facilities,” says Randy Hartmann. He is senior director of affiliate operations for an organization called Keep America Beautiful. We sent everything all mixed up to China. The country couldn’t use our “contaminated” trash. China updated its standards. Then, says Hartmann, “we couldn’t meet them.”

Some cities, such as Eugene, Oregon, couldn’t afford to collect certain types of plastic anymore. Other cities, including Phoenix, Arizona, saw an opportunity. Hartmann says Phoenix has created a “circular economy” of its own. It now collects its community’s plastic trash and turns it into fuel.

Some businesses have stepped up, too. An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take mixed-paper recyclables. That includes junk mail fliers that “got hit hardest when China changed their rules,” according to Hartmann.

A company called TerraCycle sends out special “zero waste” boxes for collecting lots of products, including plastic bottle caps, action figures or art supplies. After you fill the box, you send it back to the company to recycle everything inside.

Still other companies are turning plastic grocery bags, juice cartons and even cigarette filters into plastic “lumber.” Local governments are helping by getting better at teaching people what can and cannot be tossed in the recycling bin.

“They’ll come out and look in your cart and say, ‘Oops, your gardening hose and holiday lights shouldn’t be in here!’ ” Hartmann says.

Recycling facilities are also starting to update their equipment. Instead of using humans to sort paper, plastic, glass and metal by hand, they are buying machines that can sort things robotically, or even optically — that is, with a camera that can tell the difference between materials.

It’s going to take a year or two to get this new equipment up and running. But, says Hartmann, “It’s a great time to reset, and a lot of innovative things are happening out there.”

We still have a way to go before we are doing recycling just right, Porter says. “Companies must learn from recyclers how to make products and packaging that are recyclable. And they also need to use more recycled materials in making their products,” she says.

We need local governments to develop pro-recycling policies, too. And most of all, says Porter, “we need to practice the three R’s in order: reduce first, then reuse and lastly recycle.”

Recycling tips

1. Learn what can be recycled in your own community and stick to it. No “wish-cycling.”

2. Learn recycling best practices. Rinse bottles and cans, and cut the super-oily spot from the pizza box before recycling the rest. Learn more from the Recycling Raccoon Squad at recyclingraccoons.org.

3. Print out your local recycling rules and paste them on the bins. That way, everyone in your family can do it correctly.

4. Away from home? Find a recycling bin for your empty water bottle. Better yet, take a reusable water bottle.

5. Get your teachers involved. Have them take your class on a field trip to a local recycling facility. Write letters to local politicians asking them to support the “three R’s.”

At the US’ Southern border, immigrant families are held for unknown amounts of time in facilities that are often grossly overcrowded and understaffed. Across the country, citizens in prison face similar conditions. What these facilities have in common is that they’re both private prisons. Private prisons hold about nine percent of the nation’s total prison population and about 73 percent of immigrant detainees, reports the New York Times.

This year, banks responded to wide-spread pressure from social justice groups, corporate responsibility organizations (including Green America REAL GREEN Investing and our ally the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility), and shareholders. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, BNP Paribas, Fifth Third Bancorp, Barclays, and U.S. Bancorp all announced that they will no longer issue loans to the two largest private prison operators, CoreCivic and GEO Group.

By funding their operations, big banks have been complicit in the human crises that continue to unfold in private prisons. By the end of 2016, just four of those megabanks had $2.6 billion in lines of credit and loans invested in CoreCivic and GEO Group, according to In The Public Interest. That these banks will no longer be issuing new loans or lines of credit to private prison companies is a huge win for activists and organizations that have been pushing for banks to take accountability.

GEO Group and CoreCivic are contracted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the US Marshals Service to run facilities that hold immigrants. Private prison operators earn substantial profits from detention as the number of detainees increases.

There are a growing number of reports of inhumane conditions in these facilities, especially as such a high percentage of immigrants are placed there. Some of these conditions are violations of human, civil, and political rights outlined by the United Nations. There is now a class action lawsuit that was filed in Los Angeles this August on behalf of 55,000 people in ICE detention centers, alleging severe mistreatment, including in facilities run by GEO Group. Twenty-four people have died in ICE facilities since Donald Trump became president, according to an NBC News analysis of federal data.

Though eight banks have bowed to pressure from justice reform groups and concerned investors, five smaller banks have not yet made the commitment: Regions Financial Corporation, Citizens Financial Group, Pinnacle Financial Partners, First Tennessee Partners, and Synovus Bank.

Following the momentum of the megabanks’ announcements, Green America joined a coalitional letter to urge these five banks to thoroughly review the human rights impacts of their financial ties to private prisons.

Companies Profit from Prison & Detention Centers

Private prisons hold roughly nine percent of the US incarcerated population, but almost three quarters of people detained by ICE are held in privately funded facilities. Of those, most are run by CoreCivic and GEO Group, showing the companies’ dominance in the private prison sector and their reliance
on tough immigration policies.

“In memos to their shareholders, both companies [GEO Group and CoreCivic] acknowledge that policies with the potential to reduce the US detainee population constitute potential risk factors to their business model,” according to an August 2019 report from the Center for American Progress.

“Over the last 5 years, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has been putting together a map of the prison industry as a whole, which is not just the companies that operate private prisons but all of the companies that profit from mass incarceration,” says Dalit Baum, director of economic activism at the AFSC. “Despite the fact that the majority of US prisons are publicly run, the entire system is deeply privatized, from bail bonds, to telecoms, to food services.”

The AFSC built a free online divestment platform called Investigate, which allows people to scan their investments for companies with ties to the mass incarceration and detention industries, and take action. You can find it online.

Banks Change Policy, An Important First Step

In response to organized campaigns, public outcry, and banks’ own risk assessments, more financial institutions are stopping new investment in for-profit private prisons. All banks that have committed to this have also agreed to fulfill their current contracts, some of which won’t expire until 2024 or 2025.

“It’s hard to describe this in terms of divestment because what the banks have said is that they will no longer extend credit,” says Nadira Narine, senior program director at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR).“On the asset management side, all of these companies still invest their clients in GEO Group and CoreCivic, so in terms of equities they’re still very much invested.”

The private prison sector is already feeling the impact of the eight banks’ decision to stop issuing future loans. In October 2019, TruthOut reported that GEO Group had officially run out of banks to borrow from, representing an 87 percent drop in funding.

Move Your Money

As the megabanks continue to fulfill their current contracts to prison companies, one big way concerned investors and activists can take action to end the private prison system is to use Green America’s Get a Better Bank directory to find community development financial institutions that do not support for-profit prisons.

Some CDFIs, like Self-Help Credit Union, even work to have a positive impact in the justice system, instead of simply not having a negative one. One way they do that is by working with legislators to end the cash bail system.

“Much like payday lending, cash bail results in creating a cycle of poverty among those with the least financial means,” says Jennifer Marsh, executive staff at Self-Help Credit Union. “Being incarcerated for as little as 24 hours can lead to job loss, lost custody of children, and increases the chances a person will have future involvement with the criminal justice system.”

For more information on divestment from for-profit prisons and fossil fuels, read our article “Taking Stock of Divestment Movements." Individually and collectively, our economic actions make a difference every day and can bring us closer to the kind of world we need in which all communities are healthy and safe.

Sixteen Million. That’s how many people globally are trapped in forced labor in the private sector, according to a 2016 report from the International Labour Organization. Besides these 16 million, untold others are subjected to labor abuses in global supply chains daily, such as forced overtime, harassment, withheld wages, exposure to toxic chemicals, and other abuses.

You don’t have to look hard to find a news story reporting recent cases of workplace abuses in the supply chains of major fashion brands. It is confusing that so many fashion brands have corporate social responsibility programs (CSR) and regularly use audits to check workplaces for abuses, yet we still face an enormous human rights crisis in global supply chains.

While it is important that corporations make commitments and progress to address supply chain issues, the truth is they vary widely in their effectiveness. Some companies have made progress through CSR programs (as noted in our Toxic Textiles report, Nike and Target are improving their chemical management policies at the factory level). Unfortunately, a vast majority of CSR initiatives have not resulted in the needed changes. CSR programs around environmental concerns are often more successful than those addressing labor issues.

Environmental impacts are often easier for corporations to monitor and measure, and energy efficiency, clean energy, and packaging reduction projects save companies money. Therefore, environmental CSR programs are easier to implement and often pay for themselves, while programs impacting workers are often more costly.

However, there is a different model that has proven successful in multiple industries: worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) programs. These which place workers at the center of the designing and implementing the solutions. It makes sense, as workers are the ones who know what conditions are on the ground in their industries.

Unfortunately, top-down CSR efforts often impose challenging standards onto suppliers that are often already struggling to keep prices low and meet high product demands.

“The worker-driven social responsibility model puts the power to set and enforce safety standards with market consequences in the hands of workers,” says Sarah Newell, director of outreach and communications for the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network (WSRN).

The Differences Between CSR and WSR

Enforceability: CSR efforts are voluntary, which means there is no one effective enforcement mechanism to ensure that companies uphold their commitments; whereas WSR is legally binding between worker representatives and the brands. This holds brands accountable that are profiting off workplace abuses.

Workplace Monitoring: CSR monitoring is conducted by auditors who are often rushed, have limited training, and are paid by brands. The results of these audits are rarely shared with workers or shoppers. WSR provides thorough workplace monitoring conducted by independent, well-trained individuals. WSR also places greater emphasis on worker interviews. Through WSR, the results of the monitoring are shared with the workers.

Complaints: In CSR, complaints often go to the employer, brand, or a brand-contracted organization; this structure does not put the workers’ needs at the center, rather it puts workers at risk for retaliation if they speak up. The WSR model has an independent body responsible for complaints, so workers are not at risk for retaliation, resulting in the mechanism actually being used and workplace issues being resolved.

Supplier Support: Due to the structure of global supply chains, corporations seek the lowest price for their products, which puts pressure on suppliers to cut costs—often labor costs—ultimately harming the people who make the products. With WSR, brands are required to provide financial support to suppliers so that the suppliers can comply with labor laws and standards without going out of business.

Specificity: CSR standards often do not account for risks or dangers specific to an industry and do not reflect an understanding of the issues facing workers. Through WSR models, worker organizations create codes of conduct specific to their industries and workplaces; the people with the greatest understanding of the issues develop the standard.

Transparency: CSR initiatives usually don’t share the names and locations of their suppliers, whereas WSR efforts are public and transparent.

Worker Success After Rana Plaza

In April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing over 1,100 workers and injuring over 2,500 more. The Bangladesh Accord, an agreement that was created in the aftermath, is one successful example of WSR.

“Before its collapse, two of the factories in the [Rana Plaza] building were inspected and certified as ‘safe’ by CSR-style monitoring programs,” Newell says. “In May of [2013], the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety launched; unlike existing, previous corporate social responsibility programs, the Accord is a legally binding and enforceable agreement, in which brands are obligated to implement their commitments under the program.”

Under pressure from groups like Green America and labor-minded consumers, over 200 brands signed on to the Accord, covering 1600 factories and two million workers.

Since its inception, Accord inspectors have identified more than 122,000 safety violations at covered factories; 90 percent of original safety hazards found have been fixed; over 300 safety committees have been created and trained to monitor safety conditions on an ongoing basis; and the Accord’s complaint mechanism has resolved 375 safety complaints from workers and their representatives.

Gender Justice in Lesotho

A legally binding, worker-driven approach is now also being tried in Lesotho, in which 85 percent of clothing exports come to the US. The Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) released a report in August 2019, documenting pervasive workplace sexual abuse in Lesotho’s garment industry. The supplier involved in this report and the new agreement employs roughly 10,000 people. The report found that managers and supervisors coerced workers into sexual relations; female workers experienced sexual harassment from managers and coworkers; this was coupled with management often not taking disciplinary action against the offenders; and the tolerance of said harassment created a culture of acceptance in the factories.

“Many supervisors demand sexual favors and bribes from prospective employees. They promise jobs to the workers who are still on probationary contracts. […] All of the women in my department have slept with the supervisor,” said an anonymous Lesotho employee of the company Nien Hsing Textiles to the WRC. “For the women, this is about survival and nothing else… If you say no, you won’t get the job, or your contract will not be renewed.”

Together, international brands, a major apparel supplier, unions, and women’s rights advocates will work to address gender-based violence occurring in the Lesotho garment sector. The agreement establishes an independent body to investigate complaints and punish or dismiss managers that are abusing workers.

A Way Forward

The WSR model has proven successful in industries outside of the apparel sector too, such as with the Fair Food Program in the US agriculture industry. While CSR has advanced transparency and other qualities of supply chains, and WSR may not always be possible in countries that severely limit the civil society space, the challenges of CSR combined with successes of WSR should make us consider what will bring change to the conditions that workers around the world face on a daily basis. When workers have power in the workplace, they are in the position to create solutions and positive change.

The continued exploitation of people and the environment demonstrates a need for change. If workers, NGOs, consumers, and corporations can come together, we can alter the current unjust power dynamics in supply chains.

The fashion industry's relationship with marginalized groups is complicated. For decades, people from communities often subjected to inequality and stigma have found fellowship in an industry where art, creativity, and individuality reign. The careers of designers and influencers like Jason Wu, Carolina Herrera, Andre Leon Talley, Vera Wang, and Willow Smith are just a few that exemplify what’s possible in the modern fashion industry in terms of representation.

Unfortunately, major fashion brands too often create designs appropriated from Black, Brown, and Indigenous cultures, or worse, invoke painful history. For example, in 2012, the Navajo Nation unsuccessfully sued the apparel company Urban Outfitters for using the word “Navajo” on various products, including shirts and underwear that featured “tribal” prints. In 2018, an H&M ad showed a Black child wearing a sweatshirt bearing the words “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle,” shocking consumers with how oblivious the company could be to the hurtful evocations of racist imagery. In 2019, Gucci debuted a now-infamous black sweater featuring a large collar with bright red lips worn over the chin and nose, which prompted shoppers to call out the design’s blackface resemblance.

The issue is not only with racism in design but internal homogeneity and inequality. Only three percent of the members on the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) are Black, and when the organization released its 2019 Insider/Outsider report, only about 40 percent of fashion executives felt their company’s commitment to inclusivity was important to the success of the company.

A truly green fashion movement addresses the harm caused by conventional clothing production, especially in respect to race. Thankfully, leaders in this work are willing to share what they’ve learned.

To Brooklyn and Beyond

Dominique Drakeford is the founder of Melanin And Sustainable Style (shortened to MelaninASS)—an online community dedicated to celebrating the successes of people of color in sustainable fashion and beauty movements. MelaninASS elevates the work of designers and craftspeople of color, whom Drakeford calls vanguards. Drakeford and collaborator Whitney McGuire are co-founders of Sustainable Brooklyn, which organizes educational events, workshops, and curricula to promote them to communities targeted by systemic racism via harmful education systems, public policy, and toxic marketing. For Drakeford, affirming the place of people of color in sustainability movements is just as important as speaking about oppressive systems.

“Black, Indigenous, and people of color [BIPOC] have been conditioned to not think of themselves as important figures and change agents in the sustainability space. That has to do with who is controlling the narrative,” says Drakeford. “MelaninASS, Sustainable Brooklyn, and myself are always stressing the importance of reclaiming our environmental heritage and what that may look like in today’s landscape.”

Drakeford, who holds a master’s in sustainable entrepreneurship and fashion from New York University, says her work is about putting the money generated from the fashion industry in the hands of the often Black and Brown communities that produce clothing and inspire their designs.

Drakeford has been pursuing this goal through the educational events hosted by Sustainable Brooklyn and her other speaking engagements.

“We have to look at the regions of the world where communities are struggling with apparel pollution and where fashion waste is exported, such as Africa and India,” says Drakeford. “We tend to focus on garment workers in regions like Bangladesh, but this also effects farmers, dyers, and every aspect of production globally.”

One action people can take to promote racial equity in sustainable fashion is to simply buy from clothesmakers of color. Like MelaninASS, the Instagram account @BuyfromBIPOC, founded by teacher and sustainable fashion influencer Emi Ito, focuses on highlighting the works of sustainable designers of color and is one such place where consumers can find people to support. Other action items include hiring people of color for executive creative positions at fashion companies, pursuing BIPOC ownership throughout a company’s supply chain, rewriting trade agreements like NAFTA, which have shown to lead to unlivable wages and unsafe working conditions in developing countries, and advocating for fair media representation.

In 2019, Drakeford and McGuire hosted Sustainable Brooklyn’s “EARTH” symposium which focused on fashion, food and wellness. The duo are planning to bring Sustainable Brooklyn’s educational symposiums to more cities in the US and are set to debut two more, dubbed “FIRE” and “WATER” in 2020.

The Diversity Ethos

Brothers Raj and Akhil Shah know something about harnessing creative and economic power for good. Coming from an entrepreneurial family that sold textiles in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, the Shahs immigrated to the US in the ’70s, and started their first apparel company, Shah Safari, in Seattle.

Since then, Raj and Akhil have founded several other apparel companies affiliated with Shah Safari, including International News, AW Outfitters, Zebra Club, and Mecca USA, and have donated to over 33 charities including in India and Kenya where they still maintain some of their business operations. The brothers have also become well known for their knack for celebrating cultural trends in an authentic and non-appropriating way. Shah Safari, inspired by Indian culture, and bold, baggy, Mecca USA apparel targeted to the hip-hop community, are a couple of examples.

“You have to ask whether a brand intends to celebrate a certain culture or simply piggyback on a market trend and profit from that,” says Raj Shah. “It pays to inspect the purity of the brand’s intention and whether the brand supports nonprofits and other groups that seek
to empower and better the lives of those whose cultures they are emulating.”

The brothers’ newest venture, Ably, explores adding a coating called Filium (patent pending) to fabrics made from natural materials to repel liquids, stains, and odors, in an effort to reduce the number of times garments must be washed. The Filium coating is produced according to bluesign® standards.

The Shahs’ marketing efforts for Ably set a positive example for other sustainable apparel companies. Shah says Ably targets its clothing design and messaging to Gen Z, 48 percent of whom identify as non-Caucasian, according to the Pew Research Center.

“A big part of our ethos is diversity and inclusion—from how and where we manufacture our clothing, to the personnel we employ throughout our operations, to how we treat our employees and vendors around the world,” says Raj Shah.

Why Green Fashion Matters

Green America’s 2019 Toxic Textiles report addresses the disproportionate burden carried by the communities that host clothing factories around the world.

When consumers use their money to support green fashion companies and designers, they’re not only investing in environmental sustainability, but environmental justice as well. Supporting minority-owned businesses also helps to close historic racial wealth gaps and boost representation in the green economy.

Being intentional with our purchases can slow, and even end wastefulness, pollution, and inequality perpetuated by the apparel industry by pressuring companies to do better. Fashion has always followed the lead of the people and we have the power to make every thread we wear count for a greater purpose.

For many of us, fashion is fun. It’s a chance to show the world who we are. For others, getting dressed might be a chore. However you look at your closet, it’s affecting the Earth—the fashion industry has a bigger climate impact than air travel and maritime shipping combined.

According to Elizabeth Cline (author of Overdressed, a book that helped document fast fashion and bring new attention to the ethical fashion movement), Americans buy one out of five garments made in the world. The number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer increased by 60 percent just from 2000 to 2014, and shoppers kept them half as long (Read the full interview with Cline here).

For over 30 years, Green America has been active in greening the apparel industry by putting pressure on the largest companies including Nike, Hanes, and Gap, to address sweatshop labor in their supply chains. Our latest work on the issue is our Toxic Textiles Report, which focuses on the fashion industry’s influence on climate, the environment, and worker health. Our report found that the industry uses around 43 million tons of chemicals to turn raw materials  into textiles this year.

Toxic chemicals abound in the industry—they’re added in agriculture, dyeing, and finishing textiles. For products like polyester, nylon, and other manmade materials, chemicals are part of production from the start, too. Workers who interact with these chemicals are not always provided with safety information or protective equipment.

But there is much progress to report. The 2013 tragedy at the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh sparked anew a global interest in fair wages and safe workplaces. One victory that came from the disaster was the creation of the Bangladesh Accord, in which brands work with labor groups to create safer factories. Under pressure from groups like Green America and labor-minded consumers, over 200 brands signed on, covering 1600 factories and two million workers. Read more about worker-led social responsibility projects like the Accord in “Worker Tested, Worker Approved Social Responsibility."

The Rana Plaza tragedy also engaged millions of consumers in the fight for safer workplaces, even those across the globe. Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement, has teams operating in over 100 countries and promotes the hashtags #whomademyclothes and #imadeyourclothes to bring greater transparency into the industry.

“Amongst the brands and retailers we have reviewed over the past three years, we have seen a nine percent increase in their average score,” says Carry Somers, co-founder of Fashion Revolution. “We see transparency as a means to change, not the endgame. Transparency helps to reveal the structures in place so we can better understand how to change them.”

As always, the green economy is pushed ever forward by small, innovative, green businesses, like the leaders in our Green Business Network— read the stories of businesses on the front lines of sustainable fashion in “Bringing More Color to Green Fashion" and “From Fast to Fair Fashion."

If you go to a Forever 21 location two months in a row, odds are that practically nothing about the clothing selection will look the same. Forever 21 played a massive role in popularizing fast fashion, and as Green America’s Toxic Textiles report recently found, workers and the Earth pay a massive price for these seasonal looks, exposing workers to hazardous conditions and polluting our water, soil, and air.

Between 2000 and 2015, clothing production almost doubled, from about 50 billion pieces a year to over 100 billion pieces a year. In addition, the amount of clothing Americans dispose of annually has almost tripled during that time. Green America recently investigated sustainability practices in the clothing industry, revealing how the push towards fast fashion has resulted in significant carbon emissions and environmental degradation. Green America’s labor justice campaigns manager Charlotte Tate says it is crucial for individuals to know exactly what toxic chemicals could be in their clothing, especially given the lack of transparency in the industry.

“Currently, companies are deciding what chemicals are okay for consumers to be exposed to and at what levels, and companies are making those same decisions for workers,” says Tate. “Information about what chemicals are being used at all tiers of the supply chains must be made public, so that the deciding power is not only with companies trying to maximize profits.”

Textile producers and clothing companies not only largely fail to commit to environmental sustainability, their increased activity threatens the water supply and soil quality, while also using materials that present dangers for their labor force.

Further, less than one percent of the resources used to make clothing are captured and reused to create new clothing. Although many people donate their unwanted clothing, many of those clothes go unused after donation, eventually also becoming trash. This failure to create a cyclical system of clothing reuse means that most textile sales are of new products, accelerating the release of chemicals.

Water Use and Pollution

Water pollution is the most notable impact of clothing production, with around 20 percent of global industrial water pollution traceable directly back to the textiles industry. The pollution is multifaceted and affects all aspects of water ecosystems, from chemical contamination of drinking water to the spread
of microplastics into waterways around the world.

Target, VF (which owns The North Face and Jansport), Nike, and Gap have all introduced Manufacturing Restricted Substances Lists (MRSL) and Restricted Substances Lists (RSL) to eliminate the use of some chemicals that harm workers and consumers. These lists are an excellent first step, with a MRSL restraining what can be used in the manufacturing process and a RSL dictating what can be in the final product. The reality is that the vast majority of chemical exposure is to workers—some exposure occurs when consumers get the clothes, but much more to the worker.

“Companies need to work with their suppliers to ensure that the MRSL is being implemented appropriately,” Tate notes. “Companies need to be paying enough for their products so that the supplier is able to implement the MRSL, and all apparel companies should come together and agree on one complete and holistic MRSL and RSL—raising industry standards across the board.”

The impacts of chemicals banned in the final product but allowed in the manufacturing process, like dyes, polyfluorinated chemicals, and flame retardants, are striking. In China, 70 percent of the rivers and lakes are polluted, and in Bangladesh, the Buriganga River is so polluted with toxic chemicals and heavy metals prevalent in the leather tanning industry that it can no longer sustain aquatic life.

Even alternatives to conventional textile production cause environmental degradation. Organic cotton is grown without toxic chemicals, but unless the clothes are certified under GOTS, bluesign®, or Oeko-Tex certifications, toxic chemicals may be added in the textile production process.

Green America’s Toxic Textiles report also found that the bamboo used in some shirts involves a more chemical-intensive process to make the material soft. Like bamboo, rayon fabric (and its variant, lyocell) is derived from raw materials in wood pulp, which go through energy- and chemical-intensive processes with to become a semi-synthetic material. The chemicals used generally aren’t recaptured but instead are released into waterways.

Cotton is among the most water intensive crops and both organic and conventional clothing manufacturers consume enormous amounts in both farming and textile production. An astonishing 2,700 liters of water are required to grow the cotton needed to make a single t-shirt. These watering practices are especially harmful in the primary cotton-growing countries as they often face water scarcity but need to continue cotton production to maintain their economy. In Kyrgyzstan, where water is both contaminated and scarce, many civilians have no access to clean drinking water, even as cotton producers use thousands of liters.

Microplastics

Unfortunately, chemicals aren’t the only harmful substances polluting water as a result of the textile industry. At every step of the manufacturing process, including after the product reaches the consumer, microplastics can be released into our waterways. When synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon, and acrylic break down, they release microfibers, another form of microplastic.

 The global spread of microplastics was discovered relatively recently but is a cause for major concern, both for the uncertain health effects on humans and the deaths of aquatic animals that have consumed these microfibers.

When washing clothes using materials prone to shedding microfibers, each load releases as many as 700,000 microfibers into the water. These tiny plastics spread quickly, and when they accumulate in the digestive systems of oceanic animals, they can be fatal. With their health effects largely unknown but potentially hazardous, this spread is concerning.

“You and I and everybody else on earth is drinking and bleeding microfibers,” says Dimitri Deheyn, a marine biology researcher at University of California in San Diego, who spoke about microfibers at the Unveiling Fashion conference in Washington, DC, in September 2019. “There are no studies whatsoever on the effect of microfibers made of plastic on public health, […] we’re just starting to look at this toxic aspect of microfibers.”

But contamination is not the only negative effect on water that occurs during the textile manufacturing process.

Air, Soil and Agriculture

Many of the same chemicals that contaminate water end up in the soil as well, affecting agriculture as more land becomes less arable. Additionally, irresponsible sourcing practices for the raw materials also threatens endangered ecosystems, including rainforests and heavily deforested areas.

This impacts even supposedly sustainable materials, including rayon, a common silk substitute. Rayon is made with wood pulp, which is regularly sourced from endangered or protected forests. Worse, 60 to 70 percent of the wood pulp is lost in the process. As a result, rayon production fuels the deforestation crisis and requires vast amounts of wood for relatively little fabric.

Wood pulp harvesting, particularly when done in endangered forests, accelerates deforestation, which has wide-reaching effects on biodiversity. It is unfortunately part of the production process for rayon, viscose, and lyocell. Removed trees can no longer enrich the soil and air, negatively affecting the forest ecology. Degradation also occurs at the manufacturing stage; Rayon manufacturing factories in China contribute to severe air and water pollution, and residential areas near factories have reported dangerous levels of carbon disulfide, a chemical that can cause insanity, Parkinsonism, and birth defects.

Conventional cotton is very likely to be grown from genetically modified seeds, which often increase the use of pesticides on the crop. Cotton production has also increased over the past few years, as an increase in clothing demand drives farmers to extreme measures to keep up. The scale means farmers are prevented from planting a more diverse set of crops, which could help maintain the integrity of the soil and which also require less water. See our story on regenerative cotton to read more about regenerative and conventional cotton.

Exposing Workers to Toxic Chemicals

With sweatshop labor notably prominent in the textile industry, worker safety is rarely a priority in textile factories. However, increased textile production and the widespread use of chemicals in many developed countries also threatens these workers.

Polyester textiles, used in 55 percent of all clothing production, rely on the use of heavy metals, like antimony, a possible carcinogen, as well as known carcinogens, like cadmium and lead. Research from the National Institutes of Health shows that occupational exposure to antimony can cause respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal symptoms, and may even cause cancer. Too often, factory workers who may encounter such toxic materials are not notified about safety procedures or given proper equipment to reduce exposure.

It’s not only polyester—nearly every textile material undergoes the wet processing phase of production, where dyeing and chemical processing takes place. Too often, workers lack proper protection. In countries with these wet processing factories, like China and Bangladesh, officials don’t enforce the need to inform workers about the dangers of the chemicals or provide them adequate safety equipment. Wet processing plants are far down the supply chain from the companies and get less attention as a result.

Companies can help protect their workers by restricting the types of chemicals used in their clothing, but until that occurs, workers are threatened at every step of the process. This starts with the field workers, endangered by the cocktail of pesticides sprayed on conventional cotton crops.

“Chemicals used to produce clothing can disrupt hormone systems, harm liver health, or cause cancer,” says Tate. “Brands have a responsibility to ensure that workers in their supply chain have a safe and healthy workplace and that their basic right to health is not violated by the chemicals used to make clothes.”

Consumer Activism as a Solution

For three decades, Green America has been active in greening the apparel industry, by pushing companies like Nike, Hanes, and Gap, to address sweatshop labor in their supply chains.

Transparency is the first step in creating a safer textile industry. As consumers learn about key issues, they can begin to protect themselves, workers, and the environment from extreme pollution. The first and most important thing for people to do is reduce their consumption of new clothes. Even the alternatives to conventional textiles aren’t without their own concerns. As Green America’s report makes clear, there are no true leaders in this field, only relative successes.

“Brands are great at making big, vague commitments that don’t deliver the implied impact,” says Tate. “And on top of this, a majority of the commitments are voluntary, meaning there are no repercussions if the company does not meet its commitment.”

Green America and our members have a large role to play. With workers often unable to advocate for themselves in factories, consumer pressure may be the best way to advocate for ethical and environmentally sustainable textile production.

Other organizations have also joined the push for more responsible textile production, as our ally Stand.earth pressures Levi’s to put in place firm climate commitments for their overseas production facilities.

“Consumers have a lot of power with the textile industry. Millennial and Gen Z consumers especially are shifting their purchasing to companies that treat their workers well, use fewer toxic chemicals, and create durable clothes,” says Todd Larsen, Green America’s executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement. “This shift in purchasing has drastically reduced sales at fast fashion companies like Forever 21, which just declared bankruptcy.”

Kids clothier Carter’s (which also owns OshKosh B’gosh), is a major polluter, but their defensive response to questions about their process shows how these companies want to be seen as environmentally friendly and how they will fight to protect their image. Since the launch of Green America’s campaign to pressure Carter’s into improving their supply chain, almost 7,000 concerned people have signed on.

The systematic failure of textile producers and clothing companies to protect their workers and the environment outlined in the Green America report shows the necessity of this action. And as Larsen notes, customers can make their voices heard.

“This is the same approach we used to address toxins in the electronics sector, and it works.”

When we clean out our closets, we often use three piles for clothing: keep, donate, and toss (or, landfill). Even though many Americans donate clothes, textiles still make up a shocking amount of the U.S. waste stream. The EPA reports that Americans generate 17 million tons of textile waste a year, equaling just over 6% of total municipal waste. On average, 700,000 tons of used clothing gets exported overseas and 2.5 million tons of clothing are recycled. But over three million tons are incinerated, and a staggering 11 million tons get sent to landfills.

We need to reduce textile waste and prevent burning or landfilling used clothing, which release tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Plus, it typically costs $45 per ton to dispose of textiles, equaling hundreds of millions of dollars per year, showing a clear economic case to reduce waste.

Donating clothes can also be problematic. Bagging up and dropping off these items might end their story in our minds, but it doesn’t signify the end of life for your shirt or pair of pants. Not by a long shot.

Donate Clothing

Many people donate their worn clothing to a local charity shop. One popular charity shop chain is Goodwill, which reports that it offers many opportunities for the clothes to be resold, although roughly 5% of donated clothes are directly sent to landfills, largely due to mildew issues, which can contaminate entire bales of clothing. The rest remain in the 3,300 stores for four weeks before being moved to Goodwill outlets, found in 35 states, where items are sold for 99 cents per pound. What doesn’t sell at the outlets is then sent to Goodwill Auctions, where huge “mystery” bins full of items are sold for as little as $35 each. Finally, what clothing remains gets sent to textile recycling centers where they will be cut into rags, processed into softer fiber used for filling furniture and building insulation, or sent overseas.

Another well-known thrift store, Buffalo Exchange, with 40 locations around the U.S., purchases secondhand clothing from community members to resell in stores. It offers clothing that it cannot purchase as donations to local non-profits. Store merchandise that doesn’t sell is sent to outlet stores in Texas and Arizona. Unfortunately, most thrift stores don’t track where their donations head after they pass them along to the next step, and that includes Goodwill and Buffalo Exchange.

Textile Recycling

Recycling textiles can keep materials out of landfills and incinerators as well as reduce need for virgin fibers by extending the life of existing ones. Textiles are sorted by material type and color. Sorting by color means that no re-dying would need to take place, which saves energy and dyes. The textiles are then shredded. Zippers and buttons are removed from the shredded piles using magnets. Natural textiles, like cotton or wool, are cleaned and mixed through “carding,” a mechanical process that passes fibers between moving surfaces to break up locked clumps of fiber and aligns individual fibers to be parallel to each other. The product is then re-spun into yards of threads and ready to be used for weaving or knitting into new products.

Synthetic fibers, such as polyester or acrylic, are processed into polyester chips, which are essentially plastic pellets that become polyester again. The chips are melted and spun into new filament fiber for new polyester fabrics. There are small businesses and major brands committed to using recycled materials in their goods. For example, Patagonia sells clothing made with recycled down, wool, and polyester. Even the labels and zippers in these items contain up to 80% reclaimed material. Green Business Network member Ooloop uses recycled wool, cashmere, cotton, and even recycled fishing nets in its clothing. Ooloop also uses surplus material (the discards from the fashion industry), for its clothing lines to keep those materials out of landfills.

Overseas Exports

Secondhand clothes that don’t sell in the U.S. or go into textile recycling are often exported. Roughly 700,000 tons of used clothing gets sent to other countries annually, reportedly creating a big market and contributing to job growth. But it’s highly contested whether the impacts of this trade on local economies yields beneficial or harmful results. The sheer volume of exported clothing has suppressed local clothing industries and developed an increased reliance on other countries. It’s estimated the cost of a secondhand garment is as low as 5% the cost of a new garment made in Kenya, meaning local industries are unable to compete with the influx of cheap, used clothing.

In 2016, the East African Community (EAC) agreed to a complete ban on imported clothing that would have gone fully in effect in 2019. The Trump administration pressured leaders to rescind the ban, which they eventually did. But a range of projected outcomes were debated during the multi-year discussion of the ban. Kenya had said it wouldn’t be able to follow the ban’s deadline, as it lacks the capacity to meet domestic demand for clothing and the export demand for its textiles. Local small businesses need to expand and scale up to satisfy demand. Kenya’s new garment industry had half a million garment workers a few decades ago but now only has tens of thousands.

Opponents of the ban pushed back by saying it violated international trade agreements, could have eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, and reduced millions of dollars of income. Donated clothing was previously given away for free in East Africa. It then became a commodity to sell, which is what suppressed the local textile sector, but created livelihoods in the secondary clothing market at the same time.

Kenya's textile economy relies on AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act) to convert raw materials (usually from Asia) into clothing sold to U.S. retailers like Levi Strauss and Walmart. Interestingly, these clothes are assembled in Kenyan factories, sold to U.S. buyers, and donated to Goodwill, and eventually returned to Kenya as secondhand clothing.

Reduce, Reuse, and then Recycle

With almost two-thirds of clothing castoffs headed directly to the landfill, what’s abundantly clear is that we produce far too much clothing in the first place. With the influence of fast fashion, we now see over 50 “micro-seasons” of clothing being made in a year instead of the previous two seasons (spring/summer and fall/winter) from decades past.

Here are three steps you can take to reduce your impact on the Earth when it comes to clothes:

1. Reduce clothing purchases and consider the larger waste trail behind the textiles we buy. Donating clothing is far better than landfilling, but it does not erase the impacts of the clothes we buy and discard.

2. When buying clothes, choose secondhand. You can find used clothing for sale in local thrift stores or online.

3. Avoid purchasing from fast-fashion retailers like Shien and Temu. Discourage your friends, family, and colleagues from purchasing from these retailers. The clothes are made poorly to churn out thousands of styles that only last one or two wears. These clothes are inundating thrift stores but lack the quality to be worn again, which ultimately results in more clothes going to landfills or incinerators.

4. For new items, look for “recycled content” products to ensure we are creating demand for recycled textiles, which leads to more incentive for companies to close the loop and give new life to used textiles.

Beyond these individual habits, we can advocate for less waste throughout the fashion system. Host a clothing swap to build community and show others the importance of reducing waste. Use social media and email to contact clothing companies and express the importance of designing for a loop instead of a landfill. Ask your local government to explore better collection systems for used textiles to ensure they are repurposed or recycled. Spread the word about the harm and waste perpetrated by the unsustainable fast fashion industry.

For all of us who wear clothes, there are many ways we can make a difference for people and the planet.

Last updated August 2025.

In South India, one garment manufacturer is busy changing the narrative around offshore factories. What started in 1994 as a nonprofit rehabilitation program by Franciscan nuns has grown into a thriving social enterprise. Assisi Garments uses local organic cotton and provides training and employment for deaf, mute, and economically disadvantaged women in a safe and supportive environment. The revenue Assisi Garments makes goes to paying the women a fair wage as well as supporting orphaned youth and medical facilities.

This story is one of many that sustainable fashion entrepreneur and Source My Garment (2019) author, Adila Cokar, loves to share. Cokar has worked in various roles of the fashion industry for 18 years—from starting her own clothing line to connecting other clothing businesses with fair trade suppliers. Her recent book named after her business, Source My Garment, is an insider’s guide to
responsible offshore manufacturing.

“There’s a huge misconception that all factories are unethical,” Cokar says. “There are a lot of great manufacturers out there that need our help as a global economy.”

The bad rap around offshore garment manufacturing is founded in disaster. In 2013, building owners ignored warnings that Rana Plaza, an eight-story building housing five garment factories in Bangladesh was unsafe. Garment workers were ordered to return to work the day the building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people and injuring 2,500 others. Many of the garment workers were young women.

The deadliest incident in the history of the garment industry caught the attention of people around the world to the mistreatment of factory workers; yet over six years later, women workers are still exploited in the fast fashion industry through harassment, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and long contracts with low pay. While feminist movements have attempted to reform issues around reproductive rights, workplace harassment, and discrimination, fast fashion retailers have monetized the movement with t-shirts bearing feminist slogans made by women working in overseas sweatshops.

Fast Fashion is a Feminist Issue

Feminism fights for gender equality—equal rights and access to opportunity among the sexes. But while women make up about 80 percent of garment workers around the world, they earn significantly less than men, and promotions are a rare prospect for these women. On average, Bangladeshi women work 60 hours a week and earn an hourly rate of 28 taka or $0.95 in USD, according to the 2018 Garment Worker Diaries report. The nonprofit Labor Behind The Label’s “Undercover, Told by Workers” campaign in 2016 recorded that working conditions in Cambodian garment factories are poorly ventilated and lack access to water. These conditions, coupled with overwork and chemical exposure, mean workers in these factories are fainting and malnourished.

Poor working conditions are just one element of this feminist issue—workplace violence often goes unchecked in unregulated factories. A 2018 report from Global Labor Justice includes a written report from an Indian woman working in an H&M supplier factory, where she was beaten by a supervisor. After filing a complaint with the human resources department, the supervisor was told to apologize, but his harassment did not stop. As a recent widow, the woman continued to work at the factory to support her daughter.

This is not an uncommon story for women garment workers. Barriers to equality are rooted in poverty, lack of education, and exploitation by the fast fashion industry, to name a few. But like Assisi Garments, there are businesses that challenge the narrative of exploitation by implementing practices to give power to these women.

Finding Fair Trade

Fair trade is an example of such practices. The fair trade movement is “about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world,” according to Fair Trade Foundation. This system requires companies to pay fair prices to workers, establishing transparency, accountability, and respecting the rights of workers and the environment.

Businesses that employ fair trade principles are in direct contrast to fast fashion brands—for women workers, these principles have made offshore manufacturing equitable by advocating for living wages, combating unsafe labor conditions, and challenging abuse and harassment in the workplace.

Mira Fair Trade is one business that exemplifies these values. Fond of handmade clothing and accessories, Meera Viswanathan would purchase products local artisans created on her annual visits to India with family. Upon visiting rural areas in Rajasthan and Gujarat one year, she learned the women artisans loved to create but had no outlet to sell—if they had access to markets, they could support their families. Inspired to act, Viswanathan researched the fair trade model and began Mira Fair Trade.

“I noticed firsthand in some rural areas in India[…]when you pay a woman, whatever money she gets she saves for the family,” Viswanathan says. “These women bought rice and inexpensive vegetables to cook and feed the kids. If they had a little bit more money, they would buy clothing for their kids, medicine, and if they could make a tiny bit more money, they send their kids to school. Food first, medicine next, then education, in that order,” she adds.

Mira Fair Trade works with no more than 30 families to adequately support the artisans. The women workers set their own prices based on material and labor costs. The business is Fair Trade Federation verified.

“I haven’t heard anything but good things [from the artisans],” Viswanathan says. “These women are paid, and more importantly, are treated with respect. They can support their families and send their kids to school.”

Like Mira Fair Trade, Cokar’s business is changing the narrative around garment workers. Cokar uses her platform to amplify the positive changes that have taken place in factories around the world by facilitating partnerships with clothing brands seeking ethical and environmentally friendly manufacturers. Most of all, Cokar values the people she works with.

“It’s all about building relationships,” says Cokar. “Every person has a story, so does a factory. It’s not just about where it’s getting made[…]the second part is really to tell their story. They’re part of the business.”

Rebecca Ballard of Maven Women is familiar with the injustices of the fast fashion industry as a former human and labor rights lawyer. She believes women empowerment and fashion can go hand in hand. Maven Women, like Mira Fair Trade and Source My Garment, is committed to fair trade values.

“I am passionate about women claiming their potential to be changemakers in our world,” Ballard says. “This is our industry and the problems in this industry are problems we can solve.”

Ballard started her ethical and sustainable fashion brand because she had trouble finding clothes that fit her values, vocation, and aesthetic. After three years and two children, she refined her business to honor both workers and consumers with clothing that is sourced sustainably, is high quality, and functional for working women.

“We are a movement of women demanding more of themselves and others,” says Ballard. To her, ethical fashion is about giving women ownership of their bank accounts, their homes, and communities.

These three women herald a change in the fashion industry—that clothing brands can be catalysts for addressing feminist issues. By paying workers a living wage, women have increased agency in economic decision-making from the household to international institutions, according to UN Women. Additionally, women who are paid more have fewer children due to increased access to education and contraceptives.

Feminist Fashion and Climate Change

Educating women, while a feminist agenda item, also increases resiliency against climate change. Project Drawdown names educating girls and access to birth control as the #6 and #7 most effective solutions to climate change. If you combine them as one goal, they become the top solution. When women are educated, they are more likely to earn their own incomes and determine their own futures on childbearing.

Additionally, women are disproportionately affected by climate change. Around the world, women have fewer rights, funds, and freedoms—these barriers are expected to be exacerbated by the climate crisis. Since around 80 percent of the estimated 60 to 75 million workers in the garment industry are women, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, the fight for gender justice in the fast fashion industry would empower millions of women around the world.

Sectors like the fashion industry that depend on a female workforce also face material risks. Women are more in tune with community wellbeing and are usually among the first in community response to natural disasters, according to a UN report. The current barriers to equality limit a business’ ability to respond and adapt to the unpredictable realities of a changing climate. If the fashion industry is to adequately prepare for a climate disaster, addressing gender inequalities and building gender-sensitive policies can bolster a company’s resiliency.

As consumers, choosing ethical and sustainable fashion goes beyond voting with your dollar—it manifests substantial change for disenfranchised women workers around the world. Clothing brands based on fair trade principles empower women on both sides of the supply chain. Researching a company’s supply chain and pressuring fast fashion retailers to clean them up fights for the rights of women garment workers and your right to know what is in your clothing.

“In terms of consumers, fashion is identity,” says Ballard. “It’s hugely empowering to say, ‘I’m going to dress myself in a way that fits my body and my values.’” In this sense, fashion is literally wearing your values on your sleeve—and dressing yourself in ethical clothing is a feminist action.

As I began research for the Unraveling Fashion issue, I was able to get the first copy of Elizabeth L. Cline’s new book, The Conscious Closet (Plume, 2019), from my public library. The book is a practical guide to making your closet more ethical and sustainable, by giving tips on looking for quality when shopping, mending instructions, and how to define your tastes to reduce your fashion needs to begin with.

Cline’s first book, Overdressed (Portfolio, 2012), helped document the fast fashion industry and brought new attention to the ethical fashion movement in 2012, just before the Rana Plaza disaster. The journalist and now garment waste expert has seen the movement continue to grow. In our interview, she shared what gets her out of a rut when she gets discouraged and why she wrote the book to be gentle and welcoming.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: You spoke to Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2013 and said you were 100 percent convinced the Rana Plaza tragedy was the turning point in the sustainable consumption of fashion. Six years later, do you think that was true?

Elizabeth Cline: It absolutely was a pivotal moment. I think that was when the conscious fashion movement was born really. There had been people working on this issue for a long time, but that was when is really coalesced to a global movement. I think that the climate change conversation has also kind of pushed sustainable fashion further, too. So that would be the second inflection point giving this movement its wings. But Rana Plaza was it was a turning point for sure.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: How have you seen people take action and things change?

Elizabeth Cline: There are now probably two dozen NGOs dedicated towards fashion sustainability and fashion ethics. Fashion Revolution [founded in 2013] is one of the organizations that has galvanized literally millions of citizens around the world, to call for greater environmental responsibility and social responsibility and discussions. The United Nations has convened summit on sustainability and fashion. It's on the political agenda in the UK, and France, Germany, and all over Europe.

If I go back in time, when Overdressed came out, like I would go to meetings about the sociopolitical state of the fashion industry, and there would be 20 people in the room. And now it's a global movement of, literally millions of people.

And I do think that aside from the fact that the social movement part of it is very strong, I do feel like that conversation has gone mainstream. Mainstream media covers sustainable fashion, pretty regularly, the fashion press covers it pretty regularly, and fashion brands themselves. That is probably the biggest change in the in the most unexpected change is like how quickly over the last say year or two years, more and more brands have come out with pretty impressive sustainability goals. I mean, they're not doing shit about wages, but nobody wants to destroy the planet because of climate change, and fashion brands are finally doing some really, really interesting things around changing their business models to meet our climate goals, which is amazing and surprising to me.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: You just mentioned companies not doing much about wages. I spoke with someone at the Fair World Project about the Fair Trade Certified label used by many brands not being very trustworthy, and I noticed you recommended it in your book, so I was wondering if you knew about that label being less good for workers and not supplying fair wages.

Elizabeth Cline: I would say that I would agree that we need more, third party, regulating certifications. The fashion industry could learn a lot from the food industry where there are reliable certifications and, guidances for consumers. When I was when I was writing the Conscious Closet, I was like, 'Here's what's available,' but also, in the back of my mind thinking like, 'we need more than this.' And we do need the support of the FCC and the EPA to sort through the claims that brands are making and communicate what, what's real and what's not to consumers. Because if it's difficult for me as a journalist, it's impossible for shoppers.

In the book I give the most real estate to talking about the fight for living wages, which has got to be the goal. It's not enough to give people a little bit extra, we're for, an organization to arbitrarily decide what is going to be paid. A living wage is based on the calculation of the cost of living in an area and it's also considered a human right, by, the International Labour Organization. I've heard these critiques of fair trade, too. For me, with the book, I wanted to make sure to cover everything that was out there.

I talked at length in the book about how few factories there are in the world that pay living wages, and how far we are really from having an ethical fashion industry. Especially right now in this specific moment there is a lot of there is a lot of political will organizing around worker rights after Rana Plaza. But because of the climate change movement which of course is crucial and necessary and so important in society, right now the focus is on sustainability. But we have to make sure we don't abandon the wider mission which is that ethics and sustainability have to go hand in hand, otherwise they're both meaningless.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: Absolutely, there’s a lot to the topic of fair trade. I’m about three quarters of the way through Conscious Closet right now and it feels like there could be an entire book for every chapter you cover. But Green America is absolutely on board that it has to be both good for the planet and good for people for an industry or product to be green.

Elizabeth Cline: Conscious Closet is really about broadening the audience for this movement because a lot of people feel guilty, like they're going to be shamed if they buy a shirt from H&M, or they buy something that was made in a sweatshop. But this is the system we’re in, and it's really difficult to feel like all of your choices are ethical and sustainable. That's also not the goal. The goal is to make the industry more responsible not to create these perfect, conscious consumers, it's more about using our consumer power to make broader change. The book is like very gentle and welcoming. I want people to feel included instead of scared away.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: When you get overwhelmed by the issues with fashion, what do you do to get out of that rut?

Elizabeth Cline: Climate week is such a good example of how I get inspired. Whenever you feel like you're participating and creating that new way of life like that, that that's really rewarding. And for me, it's like everything from when we have a mending party in Brooklyn, a clothing swap, a documentary screening, or a book club, or just when I hear about people meeting up in person to define was their sustainable and ethical existence looks like, that's so, so inspiring to me, because it's really the revolution of everyday life, that, the book is about, and that I think makes like such a big difference.

Like everybody else, I go through cycles of like, pessimism and optimism. But I think if you're a progressive person, it's just your instinct, to keep moving forward, because we do this because it's right. Even if sometimes we feel like, we're never going to reach the ultimate goal. You just have to keep going, because it is just what's right and ethical.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: What first sparked your interest in ethical and sustainable clothing?

Elizabeth Cline: For me does that all the way back to when I was in high school in the 90s and I, I just remember hearing about sweatshops for the first time and, companies like Gap and Old Navy using sweatshops. It was, for me just like a watershed moment, because I couldn't believe that companies that I thought were so cool, that were obviously powerful and had plenty of money, were also exploiting people in other places who were much more vulnerable than I was.

So that that was the moment for me, when I started to politicize when I realized that, I care about social justice about fairness. But Overdressed was inspired by also by how I fell into this habit of shopping for fast fashion. And I got really lured into buying trendy clothes and like getting the best price that I could. And I just thought it was interesting that even for someone like myself who was trying to be careful and socially aware when I shopped, even me, I just wanted to put the best deals. So that was kind of what fired, Overdressed was me wanting to find out like what was behind the rise of disposable fashion.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: From Conscious Closet, it seems like being ethical and sustainable is always on your mind when shopping now?

Elizabeth Cline: It becomes second nature. One of the things that gave me the confidence to write the book is the fact that it's not just me who consumes this way, it's a social movement of millions of people around the world, and everybody has kind of figured out what works. When I first started out, it was like, do I really have to buy, that two-hundred dollar organic, made in the US dress, is that my only choice? And then we all just figured out as a movement, like no, obviously, like, that's not the only choice.

You could shop secondhand, you can also shop your own closet, you can also buy whatever you want, and then just use your voice to communicate with your, your elected leaders and with brands. And then conscious shopping looks so many different ways. Because clothing is personal, but also, because people are coming into this movement from so many different, economic situations and phases in their life.

When I was buying a lot of fast fashion, it was because I was like working in an office in Manhattan and was supposed to look a certain way. But now I'm in my late 30s, I have a totally built out wardrobe, I love my clothes. And it took me a long time to build out my wardrobe. But that's one of the cool things about getting older, I've gotten to assemble the wardrobe that I always wanted. And I couldn't have had that when I was 25. But yeah it's got to be the strategy.

Eleanor Greene / Green America: I think our younger readers would be happy to hear there’s less pressure on them to do everything right. Because it sustainably made can be so expensive and sometimes it seems like those expensive products are the only way.

Elizabeth Cline: A sustainable product is the product that last a long time, people don't always want to hear that. But that's the truth.

We need to be working to extend the life clothing, especially in the United States. We have the most disposable clothing habits in the world, we wear clothes a quarter of the global average, and some consumers wear them as little as one time, like Instagram influencers or something. And it's just really, really bad for the environment. We buy one out of every five garments made in the world. If we know that fashion is responsible for eight to ten percent of carbon emissions, we know that like a large percentage portion of that is like on our shoulders as American consumers. The environmental side of it is connected our excess.

It's important to remind people that it's possible to live really well without buying so much. There's a lot of space in between how we live and consume as Americans and living like a monk. We must find that comfortable space in the middle, where we're still living well and dressing the way we want to and feeling good in our clothes. But also living within the boundaries of our planet.

Though nobody likes having tough conversations around the Thanksgiving table, we at Green America think that having family and friends over is a great time to talk about sustainable Thanksgiving food. These dishes can spark conversations about your values for ethical and sustainable food.

One fun way to get people talking is to bring sides worth dishing about. These delicious dishes will fit right in with your Thanksgiving dinner and can also start a conversation around on important sustainable issues--fair trade, the climate crisis, organic foods, and more. 

Swapping Out Classics for Vegan Versions

Vegan Mashed Potatoes and Vegan Mac & Cheese: Potatoes and mac & cheese are bona fide Thanksgiving classics—satisfy everyone with this delicious and savory mashed potato recipe and this creamy mac & cheese. 

The Issues with these Classic Dishes:  

• Carbon emissions aren’t just from cars and factories. The cows that produce the milk, butter, and cheese used in standard mashed potato and mac and cheese recipes also contribute to the climate crisis. While meat gets more attention for its carbon emissions, much of the emissions coming from that industry aren’t from the slaughterhouse but from the production of the grain feed. This feed also has a secondary effect, as it forces methane out of the animals’ digestive systems. Notably, methane has an even greater warming effect than CO2. 

• Industrial agriculture can be cruel and harm the environment; these recipes cut the animal agriculture industry out of the picture. In addition to the emissions from the feed, the feeding operations at industrial dairy farms are cramped and unethical, as cows are forced to eat on concrete floors, surrounded side-to-side by other cattle.  

How to Talk about Going Vegan:

• Carbon emission from vegan ingredients are considerably lower than other foods, although some ingredients may still be GMO. 
• You can get the same creamy texture to your mashed potatoes without sacrificing your commitment to environmental sustainability. There’s no downside to making the switch to vegan dishes, they can improve your health and protect the earth 

Fair Trade Cranberry Sauce

No Thanksgiving meal would truly be complete without a sweet cranberry sauce—but non-fair-trade sugar could contribute to harming workers, and without using organic sugar, you’re almost certain to be using genetically engineered sugar from GMO sugar beets. By using fair trade sugar and leaving out corn syrup, your cranberry sauce will spark conversation about labor rights and GMOs. 

The Issues with Cranberry Sauce:  

• Without fair trade certification, your sugar could be produced on farms and plantation without any labor protections, whether against forced labor or child labor. Further, some fair trade organizations implement environmental policies to ensure farms are protecting our water and soil. Both the Fair Trade Certified™ label and Fairtrade America prohibit the use of certain herbicides and encourage farmers to grow organic crops. 
• Corn syrup is higher in fructose than normal table sugar and is almost certain to use GMO crops, as is regular table sugar in the US. 
• GMO crops allow for massive pesticide use, as they are engineered to be resistant to certain herbicides and pesticides. Although Monsanto claimed GMOs would reduce overall use of herbicides, studies have found that herbicide use has only ballooned with the introduction of GMOs. Some notable herbicides include dicamba, a chemical known to harm worker health, as well as known carcinogens 2,4-D and glyphosate. 
• GMOs also promote monocropping, the growth of only one type for crop variety in the same plot of land for a long period, which depletes nutrients in the soil and reduces the soil’s fertility. This forces farmers to use supplements, like nitrogen and phosphorous, that pollute waterways and cause dead zones in the oceans, killing marine life. 

How to Talk about GMOs and Fair Trade: 

• Your cranberry sauce will taste the same – the only difference is that you can assure your conscience that your sugar isn’t being produced by exploited labor and child workers. 

• Corn syrup can be easily replaced in most recipes, and not using it reduces the market for GMO goods and industrially produced corn, which can hurt soil vitality. It’s also very important to replace corn syrup with organic, fair-trade sugar to avoid replacing GMO corn with GMO sugar and to ensure you’re not supporting unethical labor practices. 

• It’s nearly impossible to guarantee that your corn syrup is GMO-free because 92 percent of corn crops in the US are GMOs. If your family isn’t concerned about potential health effects directly from GMOs, remind them that GMO crops are often created to allow greater herbicide and pesticide use, which impacts workers, soil health, pollinators, and our water. 

  • Monsanto’s RoundUp, the most commonly used herbicide in the US, is a known carcinogen and the company is facing tens of thousands of lawsuits for cancer cases related to the chemical. 

  • Runoff from conventional agriculture, both from overuse of water and the pesticides, contaminates the water supply and kills aquatic animals, leaving a less diverse ecosystem. 

  • The pesticides don’t leave once the crops are harvested—residue from dozens of chemicals remain on produce in the grocery store. 

Dessert 

After dinner’s wrapped up, bring out this chocolate mousse or any other dessert using fair trade chocolate to end your meal with some delicious sweets while drawing attention to the use of child labor in the chocolate industry.  

The Issues with Conventional Cocoa:

• We’ve just discussed why fair trade is important, but chocolate producers have a greater need for certification than many other food industries 
• Child labor and forced labor are widespread on cocoa plantations, and these groups are responsible for massive deforestation as well 
  • Companies may not always be transparent about their environmental policies, but Green America determined what efforts major chocolate companies are undertaking to end deforestation. 

How to Talk about Ethical and Sustainable Chocolate: 

• Chocolate supply chains can be more complex than simply looking at fair trade certification. Companies need to have innovative solutions to instances of child labor and react to a changing supply chain. 
• Along with the more complex problems in the chocolate supply chain, Green America has a scorecard ranking various chocolate companies on child labor, fair trade certification, farmer compensation, and deforestation. 
• Your family can use this scorecard to figure out which chocolate companies are exploiting child and forced labor and destroying forests and which are ethically sourcing your sweets. Avoid buying from Mondelez, Ferrero, and Godiva, which all received a grade of D or worse. In particular, Godiva has no labor certification process in place and received an F-grade from Green America. 

Not Cooking? Try an Organic Wine Pairing 

You don’t need to make an elaborate dish to get people interested in green living—your choice of wine could. Pick out an organic wine from any of these certified organic wine sellers for a high-quality dinner pairing and an excellent conversation starter. 

The Issues with Wine:  

• Organic is more than just a label—let your family know why they should select organic options when possible 
• Conventional wine production involves the use of toxic pesticides. In California alone, 25 million pounds of pesticides were applied to wine grapes. 
• Conventional farming can also be harmful to workers on small farms, as mass produced crops can be easily produced by agribusiness. Meanwhile, organic farming can be done at a smaller scale, leaving room for small farmers. 

How to Talk about Conventional vs. Organic:  

• Organic food isn’t only better because of the lessened effect on the soil as a result of not using toxic pesticides- it even has an impact on climate change. Investigations have found that transitioning all US crops to organic would have the equivalent impact of reducing our emissions of 1.6 billion tons of CO2 per year. 
• As you’re talking about your drink over the dinner table, you can talk about how it helps make your water safer as well. Runoff from conventional agriculture infects our water sources. 
• Organic wine sellers exist all around the country and usually hope to serve their local community. By buying from these local companies, you have the added effect of reducing the environmental cost of transporting your wine. 

You can start up a conversation about green living with your friends and family this Thanksgiving by preparing one—or even all!—of these dishes. Your delicious sustainable dishes will help you raise awareness about crucial issues like the climate crisis, fair trade, and the downsides of GMO crops. These dishes can also be made year-round, so you can enjoy organic and fair-trade meals as often as you’d like. Have a Happy and sustainable Thanksgiving! 

Finally, it’s not hard to find green and ethical clothing in mainstream stores any more. While it’s a great thing that fair trade and sustainable fabrics are in front of millions of shoppers, green claims are worth checking out. Green America looked into popular brands with “green” offerings, Madewell, Target, Everland, and H&M to see if they are truly green or just greenwashing.

Fair Trade at Madewell and Target

You can get a pair of jeans for around $130 from Madewell’s Fair Trade Certified line. Madewell is owned by J.Crew, which got one of our lowest scores on Green America’s Toxic Textiles Scorecard because of its lack of transparency in its sustainability and labor policies—if it has policies on those issues, it’s keeping them a secret.

Target’s Fair Trade Certified jeans cost around $40 a pair. Target was the top-rated company in Green America’s Toxic Textiles report, because it clearly reports its environmental and social policies and shares its progress in most of the categories we looked at. Unfortunately, one of the areas where we found it fell short was in factory safety reporting.

Both Madewell’s and Target’s denim lines hold the Fair Trade Factory Certified label from Fair Trade USA. Unfortunately, the label may not be as strong as customers think, partly because it only certifies the factory where the garments are sewn, not where cotton is grown, dyed, or woven. Labor and environmental abuses occur frequently lower in the supply chain. By not verifying those conditions, companies leave themselves open to the risk of profiting off of human and environmental exploitation.

Anna Canning, campaigns manager at Fair World Project, a fair trade watchdog agency, explains that the Fair Trade Certified factories are inspected once a year and even those workers rarely take home a living wage.

Even companies that have a strong record on organic and recycled materials, like Pact Apparel and Patagonia, both produce clothes using this certification, instead of a stronger one like Fairtrade America or Fairtrade International. Unfortunately, those labels are more likely to be found on chocolate bars or bananas than clothing in US stores. So, when it comes to fashion, a good label to look for is GOTS Certified, as it addresses organic content, added chemicals, and labor through the production of a garment (though not including the harvesting of any crops).

And when it comes to buying denim, your best bets are buying used or from truly green companies; see the end of the article to learn how to identify those green companies. You can read more about what truly fair trade supply chains look like in “From Fast to Fair Fashion."

Radically Transparent Everlane

Everlane came onto the ethical clothing scene in 2010 and has gained popularity with its tagline, “radical transparency.” It’s rare for customers to see supply chain information next to sizes and price—with each product, you can click through a series of links to learn about the factories where the piece is produced.

But what you end up learning isn’t quite “radical.” For example, it identifies the factory where a cashmere sweater was made, but gives no information about workers’ pay, nor of the practices used by farmers that raise the goats needed to create the textile; it says only that the cashmere comes from Mongolia.

Even though Everlane emphasizes on paper the importance of good craftsmanship and timeless pieces, Good on You says “Everlane fails to live up to its own hype.” Everlane has not adopted any meaningful standards like fair trade, organic, or others. Everlane declined to comment on its knowledge of farmers working down the supply chain in cashmere and cotton. The company also does not disclose its supplier code of conduct or its sustainability policies, which leaves consumers unable to compare it to other
companies. In short, its transparency is radically underwhelming.

Eco-Conscious H&M

Each piece in H&M’s Conscious collection includes at least some organic cotton, recycled polyester, or Tencel. Paired with the brands’ in-store clothing recycling program, H&M might be looking pretty green; but these programs aren’t indicative of H&M as a
whole. Only 0.1 percent of donations to its in-store recycling boxes are recycled into new textiles, admitted Henrik Lampa, H&M’s Development Sustainability Manager in 2016.

H&M’s business model is to keep people coming back into stores often for inexpensive clothes—to do that, it brings cheap new looks into stores about every other day, which satisfies customers’ tastes for novelty. It’s a wasteful model—after the 2017 holiday season, H&M reported it had an inventory of unsold clothing worth $4.3 billion.

The Clean Clothes Campaign included H&M in its 2019 Tailored Wages report and found that it was not paying its factory workers down the supply chain enough to pay for basic needs such as housing, health care, food, and education for children. In fact, none of the 20 global brands assessed in the report were paying a living wage.

“H&M’s constant demand for new fashions pushes unrealistic production times on suppliers, all while asking for extraordinarily low prices for those products,” says Charlotte Tate, labor justice campaigns manager at Green America. “Workers and our planet end up bearing the brunt of this unsustainable model.”

Finding Truly Green Clothing

The moral of this story is to check out company claims. When it comes to finding truly green products, clothing or anything else, the key is to do your research and ask questions. A great place to start is with the clothing section at GreenPages.org, where you can find businesses that have gone through Green America’s rigorous certification program and are Certified Green Businesses. The most sustainable garments are those that last a long time, so consider buying secondhand and higher quality new items to make the most of every piece.

Resources for fact-checking greenwashing

When you walk into a store or find yourself on a website where things seem to have “green marketing,” it’s a good idea to do a little research for yourself.

Step 1: Look closely at the label and tags or online listing for the product. Does it back up claims like “natural” or “sustainable” with certifications or explanations?

Step 2: If you’re not already online, pull up the brand’s website. Look around for a sustainability page. On that page, do they identify specific processes, or just speak vaguely about valuing people and/or planet?

Step 3: If you’re coming up short or only finding vague information, look deeper. This article was informed by knowledge gained in creating our 2019 Toxic Textiles Report, which includes a scorecard rating 20 top companies selling clothes in the US based on what they are doing to protect the environment and treat people well. Other sources shoppers can use to investigate green or fair claims are Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index or the Clean Clothes Campaign’s Tailored Wages report.

The website and app Good On You has a database with rankings for clothing and shoe brands on a five-point scale, from “We Avoid” to “Great” based on company policies/practices regarding the environment, labor, and use of animal products.

Of course, GreenPages.org includes only Green Business Network members certified through Green America’s rigorous process, which you can learn about here.

Green America has long called for a large-scale transition from conventional agriculture to a regenerative model that sequesters carbon as we work to reverse the climate crisis. Through our green economy campaigns like Soil SuperHeroes and Climate Victory Gardens, and our Center for Sustainability Solutions’ Soil Carbon Index—the world’s first agricultural standard for soil health—we are leveraging the power of farmers, food companies, scientists, consumers, and other stakeholders to demand change and transform the system.

Regeneration is for every facet of society that involves cultivating the land, and that includes the production of fibers, fuel, and forests. Our Toxic Textiles report uncovered that textiles manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of industrial water pollution and the fast fashion industry is responsible for eight percent of global greenhouse emissions, according to the sustainability metrics company Quantis.

Can you imagine if one of the dominant fibers used to make our clothes was grown with techniques so sustainable and in concert with nature that its production helped the planet? That’s the vision regenerative cotton farming presents to the world.

To view the full-sized infographic, click here.

Memorably called “the fabric of our lives” by the industry, cotton is the most commonly used fabric for clothing in the world, and it grows in over 100 countries and accounts for 2.5 percent of the globe’s cultivated land. Humans have been cultivating cotton for over 7,000 years and its soft, pliable properties have made it popular for clothes. But, unsustainable practices like the use of pesticides, nitrogen-based fertilizers, and genetically modified seeds have contributed to the climate crisis.

Some of the world’s largest cotton-producers are in precarious situations. India, the world’s second largest cotton producer, is experiencing severe water scarcity exacerbated by the cotton industry, according to the Water Footprint Network. And China, the world’s leading cotton producer, is struggling to manage a growing population of mirid bugs—a major pest that has been thriving under the country’s warming temperatures and feasting on cotton.

With a commitment to the soil where cotton grows, we can reverse environmental damage and quell associated threats to communities. By ditching mechanization, pesticides, an chemical fertilizers for no-till methods, animal integration, and composting on an industry-wide scale, we can better protect farmers and reduce chemical pollution. These methods could even quench cotton’s thirst, since nurturing soil health is proven to improve the crop’s water retention.

Molecular biologist and California  State University adjunct professor David C. Johnson, Ph.D, has developed an advanced soil health management system  that works for cotton and anything else with roots in the ground, called Biologically Enhanced Agricultural Management (BEAM). This practice replenishes soil microbes in soil that has been degraded through conventional farming methods. Johnson is a member of Green America’s Carbon Farming Network, and is working closely with us on scalinghis solutions.

“The Carbon Farming Innovation Network is engaging with apparel companies and farmers who supply them that are advancing regenerative agriculture,” says Mary Johnson [no relation], director of that network at Green America’s Center for Sustainable Solutions.

Though US apparel companies are still in the earliest stages of bringing regenerative cotton products to market, breakthroughs are happening. In September 2018, The North Face unveiled its Cali Wool Collection, which showcases clothing and accessories produced from regenerative methods on California farms. In 2019, Wrangler announced a new line of denim jeans that, though not grown regeneratively, use 30 percent recycled cotton and eliminate 99 percent of water used in the dyeing process.

Green America looks forward to expanding our work with apparel companies for a regenerative future. To help us jump-start that, reach out to your favorite clothing companies and ask them to adopt the Soil Carbon Index.

It’s easy to ignore the huge influence garments have on workers and the planet. Luckily, activists and businesses are working to make the fashion industry better. If you wear clothes, you can too.

Recycling is a daily practice for many of us, but it can be hard to know if it’s really helping the planet like we’d hope. As we toss recyclables into our curbside bins it can feel like an individual action that doesn’t yield much of an impact.

But what we do as individuals feeds into a larger system of many processes, industries, and impacts. While there are no “silver bullets” to addressing the climate crisis, recycling is an important part of managing materials more sustainably. And it’s in need of repair.

So, the short answer is, yes, recycling helps the climate. But the longer answer is, it helps the most when the system actually works. Recycling is currently facing challenges nationwide, but there are solutions, and if we can scale them up, recycling will have a bigger impact on the climate crisis.

What’s the problem?

A downturn in global recycling markets has recently brought attention to what isn’t working. The US used to sell a third of our recyclables in overseas markets, with the majority selling to companies in China. But the past few years, as many recycling programs have moved to single stream (putting all recyclables in one bin), we’ve seen a big increase in contamination (dirty items or stuff that can’t go in your curbside bin). For a long time, China accepted recyclables of any quality, but last year it released a policy putting strict contamination limits on incoming recyclables. This has caused huge disruption in the US recycling system, affecting some counties and states more severely than others.

Why fix recycling?

There are big climate benefits to keeping materials out of landfills and incinerators. In fact, landfills make up the third largest source of methane emissions in the US. A bulk of these emissions come from food waste, proving that increasing compost access is essential while we improve recycling. Trash incineration, often called “waste to energy,” emits harmful air pollutants and releases millions of tons of CO2.

But recycling is much more than just an alternative to landfills or incineration. There are substantial benefits to swapping virgin materials, extracted through mining and deforestation, with using recycled equivalents. Across a range of materials, using recycled content instead virgin content cuts energy use and emissions when manufacturing new goods.

Energy makes up the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. It’s critical that we eliminate the use of fossil fuels, shift to renewable energy sources, and maximize energy efficiency. And the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identifies using recycled materials as a top way to reduce industrial energy use.

Since recycled materials have already been processed, it takes less energy to process them again. For example, turning trees into the pulp needed to make paper products requires energy and other resources like water. But turning old paper into pulp for new products cuts down on the resources needed. And materials such as glass and aluminum can be recycled infinitely without degrading their quality. It’s even estimated that 75 percent of all aluminum ever produced in the US is still in use today.

The EPA reports that using recycled materials reduces energy and emissions, even when accounting for the transportation of materials. Using recycled glass and certain plastics instead of virgin materials can reduce environmental impacts more than 50 percent. Recycled paper and aluminum reduce environmental impacts between 70-85 percent.

And these reductions add up. Our national recycling rate, meaning the amount of materials recycled and composted from our total waste, is roughly 35 percent. This reportedly reduces 184 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or the equivalent of taking 39 million cars off the road. And it would be even greater if the US surpassed a 50 percent recycling rate and joined world leaders like Germany and Taiwan.

Recycling is a key part of the circular economy and there are clear climate benefits to using recycled materials. It’s also true that recycling ranks 55th in Project Drawdown’s top 100 ways to cut emissions that are causing the climate crisis, with the potential to cut 2.77 gigatons of greenhouse gases.

As Project Drawdown notes, recycling remains an effective way to manage waste while addressing emissions, reducing resource extraction, and creating jobs. However, it must be part of a multi-prong approach.

There’s a big reason why the order of the 3 R’s is, “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

Reducing first allows us to stop waste before it’s even generated, making it the most environmentally preferable option. There must be an emphasis on reducing waste at the source, reusing materials, and then recycling.

Future of Recycling

To address the climate crisis, we need fundamental societal transformations. This means holding polluters accountable and replacing wasteful systems with equitable, sustainable ones. And for recycling to be an effective piece of this, emissions need to be centered in the goals of recycling companies, manufacturers, and local governments.

As Dan Leif, editor for Resource Recycling, has stated, “If recycling programs and companies want to be ready to serve those leaders of tomorrow, they need to start acting from an ‘emissions first’ perspective right now.”

In September, Republic Services became the first US recycling and waste company to have its emissions reduction target approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), meaning it’s consistent with requirements of the Paris Agreement. The company is aiming to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 35 percent below its 2017 levels by 2030. But to advance sustainability in the recycling system itself, all companies need to set their sights on reducing direct emissions.

Changing Habits and Systems

So, does recycling help the climate? Absolutely. Should we always strive to reduce and reuse first? Without question. We can use materials more sustainably in our communities while demanding larger systemic changes to fight the climate crisis.

There are lots of opportunities to fix what isn’t working in recycling, and many people are rising to the challenge. Policymakers at federal and state levels are proposing legislation to reduce waste and update our recycling infrastructure. Organizations and individuals are holding companies accountable for the waste their products generate and urging for better use of recycled materials. And many municipalities are launching widespread recycling education campaigns (in Michigan, even raccoons are getting the word out).

Improving recycling means practicing good daily habits, like following local recycling guidelines and making sure recyclables are empty and dry before putting them in a bin. But there are many other ways to get involved in creating a more sustainable, effective recycling system.

• Recycling programs are managed locally, so your voice as a resident really matters. You can start by learning what's going on in your area. Contact your municipality's waste division and ask a few questions: What is the local recycling rate? Are there goals to improve recycling, expand compost options, and reduce contamination? And learn how community members can best get involved to drive improvements.
• To ensure that recyclables are used in a closed loop, contact companies on social media or email. You can ask if they use recycled materials and if they've consulted the industries that have to process their discarded products to ensure that they're truly recyclable or compostable. 
• Urge your state representatives to push for policies at the national level that will reduce waste and support recycling and compost programs. Call their offices or attend a local town hall event to learn how they plan to address waste.

From minimalists to ethically-made-or-nothing-at-all, environmentalists can be hard to buy for. But our resident outdoor expert and editorial fellow Mary Meade collected a list of eco-friendly gifts and sustainable products from our Green Business Network members that’ll be sure to get your friends and family stoked for their next adventures— or treat yourself before you next head for the trails.

New Wave Enviro Products makes beautiful water bottles inspired by the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report and the importance of protecting endangered species. Like this stainless steel 600 ml Endangered Species Collection Panda Bottle ($21), each bottle comes with a looped lid which can easily be clipped to a backpack or slid into a bicycle’s bottle holder. The sports top makes it ideal for running, cycling, and other activities where a screw top would be a hassle. 

Green Guru Gear makes outdoor gear from used bike innertubes, wetsuits, climbing rope, and more. Each product is created by upcycling these materials, so no two are the same. This colorful Joyride 24L Roll Top Backpack ($100) is made from upcycled industrial fabrics, reflective street signs, and shoulder harnesses. Its storm-proof, colorful fabric makes it great for the woods and stylish for the city. 

This eco-friendly chain oil is a perfect alternative to conventional petroleum-based bike lubricants for the cyclist in your life. An EPA Safer Choice and USDA Certified Biobased Product, Eco Sheep’s Everyday Chain Lube ($9.99) is made with lanolin, a naturally occurring oil produced by sheep to protect their wool against moisture. Eco Sheep also stocks additional chain lubes for mountain bikes, electric bikes, and extreme conditions. 

Camping’s no fun when you get eaten by bugs. Illuminate the outdoors while eliminating the blood-suckers with this 10.8 oz Citronella Candle ($17) from Big Dipper Wax Works. Handcrafted with locally-sourced beeswax, soy wax, and essential oils in a tin of at least 75 percent recycled metal, this candle will keep you safe from biting bugs for up to 80 hours. The avid camper in your life will thank you for it. 

Located in western Maine, GrandyOats Granola is a solar-powered, non-GMO, organic granola company. For 35 years, GrandyOats has made its granola by hand in small batches. Its Organic Antioxidant Trail Mix ($33 for 3 lbs) was named #1 trail mix by Sierra Magazine and is a vegan super food blend of seeds, nuts, and fruits—perfect for powering your outdoor adventures. 

This Kaa Sports Disc ($14.99) by Pocket Disc is a colorful frisbee designed for outdoor fun. It’s made by Mayan women artisans in Guatemala who are paid a fair wage, set their own hours, and work from home. Pocket Disc frisbees are crocheted, so they are soft and can pack down into a bag or pocket—a great gift for the ultralight traveler. 

Light, breathable clothing like this Gianna Tank ($34) is a must for hot summer adventures. GAIAM’s organic cotton apparel line includes clothing for yoga, pilates, and fitness. Whether at an outdoor yoga retreat or trail running, you’ll be comfortable in this soft and breezy tank. 

Does your favorite adventurer already have everything they need?

Instead of giving more stuff, donate to an environmental organization in their name. Whether that be a one-time donation or a recurring one, putting your cash where their activism is shows you care in a special way. If that organization happens to be Green America, donations support our campaigns and have led to big victories.

For more eco-friendly gift ideas, explore the Green Pages to learn about sustainable businesses chock full of green gifts!

Tackling Sanitation and Soil in Haiti

          One book was all it took to lead Dr. Sasha Kramer on the path to a tremendous impact by providing environmental sustainability and sanitation solutions in Haiti and globally. In a graduate class at Stanford University, Dr. Kramer read Eyes of the Heart: A Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization written by President Aristide of Haiti, and the book’s call to action to empower women, children and the poor to address inequality was a powerful driver.

Dr. Kramer is an ecologist, human rights advocate, Executive Director and co-founder of SOIL.  SOIL’s mission statement is to promote dignity, health, and sustainable livelihoods through the transformation of wastes into resources. SOIL transforms human waste into a regenerative agriculture solution. Dr. Kramer has won several awards and recognition for her humanitarian work, including being named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, an Architect of the Future with the Waldzell Institute, a 2014 Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year, an Ashoka Fellow, and a 2017 Sarphati Sanitation Prize Lifetime Achievement winner.

Dr. Kramer recalls, “In 2004, President Aristide was overthrown in a US-backed coup. When I read about the coup in the in the US media, I realized what I was reading was so dramatically different from the vision that I had at that of the Haitian grassroots democracy movement. I wanted to understand it better, so I found a group in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Haiti Action Committee. They were sending people to Haiti to observe the demonstrations that were happening in the aftermath of the coup.”

 The moment she stepped foot in northern Haiti and met the people she immediately fell in love. She frequently revisited Haiti while finishing up graduate school. In the course of those two years, Dr. Kramer says that sanitation, access to toilets, malnutrition, cost of food, and the challenges of farming were the repeated challenges she recognized from her interactions within the community. With her passion for ecology she wanted to figure out a way to incorporate all those challenges into a solution. As she states ecological sanitation just happened to be a very nice way to use ecological systems to address a wide range of basic human rights issues such as access to food, access to sanitation, and living in a clean environment.

When asked why do you tackle soil and sanitation at the same time? And why is it important to consider these two issues together? Dr. Kramer replied, “It occurred to me that if we are excreting all of the nutrients that we are consuming once we become adults, one of the keys to sustainable food provision in the future will be finding a way to harness all of those nutrients that we’re excreting. Let’s get them out of aquatic ecosystems where they’re making people and other creature sick, and back onto the land where they can restore soil fertility… [R]e-establishing this broken nutrient cycle through the recycling of the food we eat which is eventually the food we excrete. So, for me, sanitation and food are inextricably connected both in the sense that you wouldn't poop if you didn't eat, and eventually if we don't capture the nutrients in that poop, we’re not going to be able to eat anymore.”

To combat the severe sanitation crisis, in 2006, Dr. Kramer and SOIL developed the first composting toilet in Haiti. The compost-based toilet is locally-constructed and low-cost and does not require upfront infrastructure investments as is the case with sewers. Studies have shown that the use of latrines and sewer systems where the waste is left in one place (septic tanks, hole in ground, or ponds) produce high amounts of methane. Whereas, the use of composting container-based toilets would significantly reduce the amount of methane in the air as well as prevent waste from entering the soil and aquatic ecosystems, posing a threat to local communities and the environment.

The process of transporting waste from the households to the  waste treatment facility and then transforming it into the soil is very simple. First, the containers are collected once every week and exchanged for new ones. Second, the containers are brought to the treatment facility where it is thermophilically composted, removing pathogens and creating a nutrient-rich compost. Lastly, the nutrients collected from the waste are restored into the soil providing valuable fertilization for agriculture and reforestation. Since building the first waste treatment facility in Haiti in 2009, SOIL has become one of the largest waste treatment operations in the country, treating over 40 metric tons of waste each month. Dr. Kramer states that SOIL’s impacts in Haiti include increased sanitation coverage, improved soil fertility and climate resilience.

According to the 2018 Global Climate Risk Index, Haiti was ranked number one among the top ten countries affected by climate change in 2016. Although, Haiti “produces 82 times fewer emissions per capita compared to the U.S…” it has the ability to provide a positive example in the effort towards mitigating climate change globally.

Visit SOIL in Haiti for more information. 

Farm-to-food collaboration aims to boost regenerative oat production in the U.S.

By: Ken Roseboro, The Organic Non-GMO Report 

Soil health and reduced nitrogen and herbicide use benefits

“Our members identified that they want to grow more small grains because there are a lot of benefits from a farmer perspective,” says Alisha Bower, PFI’s strategic initiatives manager.

The challenge with growing small grains is finding markets. The grain handling system in Iowa and other Midwest states is structured for corn and soybeans. Farmers can’t take their oats to a local grain elevator, which isn’t likely equipped to handle them.

In 2016, PFI received a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) from the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), which offers a cost share of $25 per acre to farmers for growing a small grain followed by a cover crop. The cost share helps to reduce the risk of growing small grains if markets aren’t available.

“We started to ask: can we buy U.S. oats?”

In 2017 and 2018, PFI and Sustainable Food Lab, a non-profit that helps food companies implement sustainability innovations, co-hosted events attended by representatives of major food and beverage companies to highlight the ecological benefits of adding small grains to crop rotations.

Through these meetings, PFI connected with Oatly, a Sweden-based oat milk manufacturer that had expanded to the U.S. in 2016.

“When we came to the U.S. it was important to us as a company focused on sustainability to establish operations here,” says Sara Fletcher, Oatly’s communications and public affairs lead. “We started to ask: can we buy U.S. oats? Is it possible and would that benefit us from a sustainability perspective and also benefit the farmers and the land?”

Oatly, which is seeing strong demand for its oat milk products in the U.S., has been purchasing oats from Canada where most of the food-grade oats in North America are grown.

“Oatly said ‘we buy oats, and we’d like to support farmer profitability and local market development, so how can we work together on this?’ ” Bower says.

Working with PFI, Oatly launched a pilot project to source oats from Midwest farmers. Four farmers in Iowa and Minnesota were recruited to grow oats in 2019 as part of their corn and soybean crop rotations. They would also grow a cover crop that would be planted after the oats were harvested. The farmers would receive the $25 per acre cost share from PFI as part of the NRCS grant. Minneapolis-based Grain Millers would buy the oats from the farmers on a three-year contract and supply them to Oatly.

“We want to see if we can get more oats in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa where they’re shown to be beneficial for soil health and try to convince growers that it can be profitable as well,” says Beth Stebbins, program coordinator, sustainability program at Grain Millers.

Breaks pest, weed cycles, improves water quality, reduces greenhouse gases

Oats are a cool season crop that’s planted in early spring and harvested in mid-summer. By contrast, corn and soybeans are planted later in the spring and harvested in fall, and the short two-crop rotation is susceptible to insect pests and weeds. Planting oats earlier followed by a cover crop like clover or peas helps to break the insect and weed cycles, reducing the amount of herbicides used.

Water quality, a major issue in Iowa and other Midwest states because of nitrogen runoff into waterways, is also improved by having roots in the ground throughout the year.

“Having oats growing in the field in April, a rainy month, soaks up water to prevent soil erosion and keep nutrients from flowing down to the Gulf of Mexico,” Bower says.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to growing oats is the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production, which contribute to climate change. According to Matt Liebman’s research, a clover cover crop grown after oats can add enough nitrogen to the soil to reduce a farmer’s need for fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizer by as much as 80 pounds.

“We’re avoiding a lot of emissions by reducing those fertilizer applications,” Bower says.

“Our source ingredient (oats) can have an active role in mitigating climate change; it’s very exciting,” Fletcher says.

Another benefit to growing oats in the U.S. is that farmers here won’t desiccate or dry them down with glyphosate herbicide, a practice that is common on oats in Canada. “It’s not an issue with U.S. growers. In the U.S., oats are harvested in July and it’s pretty dry,” says Eric DeBlieck, Grain Millers crop specialist.

Grain Millers also has a policy to not accept oats that have been desiccated with glyphosate.

“Growers did the best they could”

The four farmers recruited for the pilot project planted oats this year on about 500 acres combined.

Fletcher says they were initially a little skeptical. “There was a mixed response to the idea of oat milk; one farmer said he’d rather eat his oats. But there was excitement around growing of the oats and to see the commitment from Grain Millers as buyer and from Oatly as the final market as well.”

One of the farmers, Jordan Ellis, in Graettinger, Iowa, says he was excited but also “a little intimidated” about growing oats.

“Adding a third crop in our rotation was something we really want to do. Oats seemed like a good fit,” he says.

Despite Iowa’s history of producing oats, there is a lack of information about how to do it since it has fallen out of favor in recent years.

“One of the challenges is that we haven’t had a lot of research and development in oats and oat production for a long time,” Bower says. “There are a limited number of farmers doing this, and not a lot of info on best practices or how to do it.”

The farmers also faced a challenging year for planting with heavy rains in the Midwest last spring, which reduced the yields.

Despite the weather challenges, the farmers produced an acceptable crop of oats. Three of the four farmers met Grain Millers’ 36-pound test weight specification for food grade oats.

“A good amount of the oats made food grade specifications, which is fantastic,” Fletcher says.

“The growers really did the best they could to get the best crop they could with the weather conditions. We’re fairly happy,” DeBlieck says.

PFI is tracking results of the pilot program, quantifying economic and environmental data based on surveys with the farmers. “The idea is to track the farmers’ data over three years to see if oats are profitable and can be part of a profitable rotation, which is shown to be better for the environment,” Stebbins says.

For farmers who don’t meet food-grade specifications, Grain Millers also offers the opportunity to sell their oats for animal feed. “We’re trying to offer alternative markets if a food-grade market specification isn’t met,” DeBlieck says.

In fact, oats for feed is a much bigger potential market for farmers. Only two million acres of oats is needed to supply the market for food products such as oatmeal, cereals, and oat milk. By contrast, livestock consume 23 times more oats than people, according to Bower.

“Growing oats for food is definitely an important shift, but from a birds eye view of land use in the U.S. it would hardly move the needle,” she says. “For broader change we need to engage the feed and fuel sectors which dominate the uses of grain grown in this country. We know we can feed oats and other small grains to livestock, so that seems like a good place to start.”

“Raising food, not just a crop”

Oatly is happy with the first year’s results. Fletcher says there was a lot of learning and the collaboration with PFI and Grain Millers is “one of the best partnerships I’ve ever been involved in.”

“There is so much good energy about finding ways to be innovative in agriculture and finding ways to connect private companies like us directly with growers.”

Stebbins is also happy with the pilot project.

“The growers really like the program and working with Oatly. All in all I think everyone is pretty happy with the program,” she says.

“I think it’s good,” Ellis says. “To have a company like Oatly along with Grain Millers and PFI offer that incentive for a specific crop; it’s something that can lead farmers to say ‘yes let’s give a shot.’ ”

Oatly wants to expand the project. “How do we scale this up? How do we insure that this goes from a pilot to part of our sourcing? That is a question that we are trying to figure out,” Fletcher says.

The project will expand in 2020 with the goal of increasing the number of farmers participating to 12-15 and the oat acres to 1500.

“The more acres the better,” Fletcher says.

More farmers are interested. “I’ve gotten phone calls out of the blue from many farmers about participating. I’m hopeful,” Bower says.

Overall, the number of oat acres in Iowa has grown from 33,000 in 2018 to 80,000 in 2019. Fletcher thinks the project can create a model for sourcing directly from farmers that other, larger food manufacturers can follow.

“Consumers are curious about where their food comes from; they want to have a connection with the farmers who are growing the oats in their oat milk.”

One of those farmers, Jordan Ellis, has gone from being skeptical about oat milk to feeding it to his one-year-old son, Knox, who has trouble digesting cow’s milk. “It’s exciting to raise a food source for a product that will be used in our family as a necessity. Another thing is that, as farmers, we are raising food, not just a crop,” he says.

Green America retired the National Green Pages in 2019.

We are excited to announce our new publication Your Green Life! It's your green living guide to easily make greener, smarter, and safer choices for your home, life, and the planet! 

Whether you’re beginning a green journey or have been with us for years, we hope you’ll be inspired to green one more area of your life, starting wherever you find interest. If your friends ask how to be greener, we hope you’ll share Your Green Life.

For those of you familiar with our National Green Pages, you’ll notice that Your Green Life has just as much great green living information and tips as that longstanding publication. And, we’re going greener by putting all our green business listings online only, still at GreenPages.org, where you’ll find thousands of great green products and services.

Tezahn is a unique herbal cold infusion that transforms your plain water into a divine tasting detox water, that supports building a strong Immunity for Life. The ingredients used are a unique blend of 100% Organic herbs and spices which are a powerhouse of antioxidants with natural wellness promoting properties.

Yes, we are grateful for your support! Please use this PayPal link to donate: https://paypal.me/GreenAmerica 

After the launch of our Toxic Textiles campaign, you may be wondering how I can make sure children in my family or social network are not being exposed to harmful chemicals? Unfortunately, this is a difficult task.

For example, in our recent Toxic Textile’s report, we found that Carter’s had some of the worst environmental and social practices out of all the US apparel companies examined, while also dominating the children’s clothing market. Most importantly, Carter’s lacks public policies to prohibit toxic chemicals in its factories and in the clothing it sells. As a customer, you don’t know what toxins are in your clothes. And, Carter’s owns other brands as well like: OshKosh B’gosh, Skip Hop, Simple Joys (sold exclusively on Amazon), Just One You (sold in Target), Genuine Kids (sold in Target), Child of Mine (sold in Walmart), and Precious Firsts (sold in Target). Carter’s is a leading children’s clothing brand and boasts of selling “more than 10 products for every child born in the US.”  

And, it’s not like there are great mainstream alternatives to Carter’s. Our report found that there is little transparency in the US apparel industry about what chemicals are being used; what the effects of those chemicals are on consumers, workers and communities; and what steps (if any) corporations are taking to ensure chemicals in their supply chains are handled appropriately.

With such little information being shared with consumers, it can feel overwhelming to find clothes that don’t expose children to chemicals that may have lasting, negative health implications. But, there are things you can do!

Attend or organize a clothing swap

Clothing swaps are a great way to bring communities and friends together. This is a particularly good option for children’s clothing! Kids are constantly growing out of clothing and establishing a network to exchange clothes, rather than buying new, is a great alternative for the planet, workers, and your children. Used clothing that has been washed several times is a good way to avoid contact with residual chemicals that can be found on new clothing.

Here are some tips to organize your own clothing swap.

Bonus: clothing swaps are also a great, sustainable way for adults to get ‘new’ clothing, without the added harm of buying brand new clothes.

Shop secondhand

When you shop secondhand, not only are you potentially saving money on new (to you!) clothes, secondhand clothes help keep clothes out of landfills longer and, again, are a good way to avoid contact with residual chemicals that can be found on new clothing. The apparel industry is a HUGE polluter – clothing manufacturing accounts for 20% of industrial water pollution! Buying second hand lowers the demand for new clothing and if enough people opt for used clothing, together we can start to lessen the negative impacts of the apparel industry.

Thred Up, Poshmark, and The Real Real all sell secondhand children’s clothing.

You can also check out this resource to see thrift stores near you!

Bonus: You can also sell your old clothing on these sites so someone else can get more use out of them, rather than having to buy new!

Buying new? Look for this

Sometimes, you just don’t have time to comb through the secondhand market to find what you need. Sometimes, there are things you would just prefer to buy new. We get it! If you can, try to shop at a green businesses.

Green America’s Green Business Network is a great place to start. By supporting green businesses, you are voting with your dollar for practices that are more sustainable, and showing conventional businesses that consumers care about how their clothes were made. Green Business Network members Maple Grace, daisyeye, Cat & Dogma, Hae Now, and Faerie’s Dance all have great options.

Sustainability certifications can also be a helpful guide to learn more about how your clothes were made.  Bluesign, Oeko-tex 100, and GOTS are all good certifications to look for on clothing to ensure that harmful chemicals aren’t present. There is also fair trade certified clothing, which helps to improve the working conditions either at the factory level (Fair Trade USA) or all their way down the supply chain to the cotton (Fairtrade America).

You can find Fairtrade America brands here.

Or

You can find Fair Trade USA brands here.

Remember: Research the big-name brands

Sometimes you’ll just need to buy something at the mall. Our scorecard can be a helpful resource to see what major apparel companies are doing and what questions you should be asking those companies not on covered by the scorecard.

Additionally, take a look at what sustainability initiatives that your favorite children’s brands have. But beware, companies are smooth talkers – look for clear, quantified impacts and metrics; often brands have one sustainable line of products rather than improving their entire supply chains – and know this is not enough; and compare policies with leaders in the field.

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This holiday season, we encourage you to reexamine what gifts you are giving and consider if it needs to be new or if it can be new to the recipient. At Green America, we will be looking to give gifts that have a positive impact on our planet and the people – and we invite you to join us in that effort! If enough of us change our spending habits, we can reform not just the apparel industry, but how all businesses operate.