Earth Day is coming up and I am having a hard time with climate change. It’s such a big, complicated issue. Climate change, according to Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), is inherently abstract, scientifically complex, and globally diffused in causes and consequences. People have a hard time grasping the concept, let …
Water. Our lives depend on it. It’s so plentiful that the Earth is sometimes called the blue planet – but freshwater is a remarkably finite resource that is not evenly distributed everywhere or to everyone. The number of people on our planet is growing fast, and our water use is growing even faster. About 1 …
Why did the manufacturers of children’s bedding and clothing, who urged the Consumer Product Safety Commission to exempt their products from the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, consider their products safe from lead residues? In many instances the bedding and clothing designed for children are made from naturally grown fibers, often organically grown fibers. …
Last week we talked about the importance of livestock management in the battle against climate change. It came as a real revelation to this city girl that large grazing animals are a vital and necessary part of the solution to climate change. Sheep can actually help to improve soils, which improves the soil’s ability to …
Although most of the current focus on lightening our carbon footprint revolves around transportation and heating issues, the modest little fabric all around you turns out to be from an industry with a gigantic carbon footprint. The textile industry, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is the 5th largest contributor to CO2 emissions …
The mass of debris in the photo is, apparently, a tiny part of what the Wall Street Journal reports is afloat in the Pacific. Nobody really knows how big it is: “Some say it is about the size of Quebec, or 600,000 square miles — also described as twice the size of Texas. Others …
Discussion of the energy used to produce cloth.
The questions is whether it’s a better choice to use inherently flame retardant fabrics such as AvoraFR rather than a natural fiber (like cotton) which has been doused with toxic FR chemicals. The answer is complicated and like most in this emerging green area, there may be no “best” answer. We think the answers may …
The Environmental Working Group has a new campaign, to gather support for the new Kid Safe Chemicals Act. To understand what the fuss is all about, we’ve copied the page from the EWGs web site, below, but you can go to http://www.ewg.org/kidsafe and see what you can do to help. There is a declaration you …
The new Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Mt. Sinai Department of Community Health and Preventitive Medicine (www.childenvironment.org) is looking into, as they say, a “whole host of diseases that come from toxic environments”, including: asthma, autism, allergies, ADD and ADHD, leukemias, brain cancer and birth defects. The chemicals they focus on in the YouTube …
OEcotextiles 