How ethical are high street clothes? | Guardian Sustainable Business. In Ethical Consumer's latest product guide to clothing, which ranks 25 high street clothing brands on how ethical their practices are, M&S came top of the table. Zara and H&M come second and third respectively, with Asda at the bottom with a score of 0.5 out of 20, followed by Bonmarche with 1.5. But what do these rankings really mean? The scores on Ethical Consumer's product guides are compiled from ethical ratings using data in the public domain, including from civil society publications and company sustainability reports.
The ratings cover around 300 topics in 19 areas in five main categories; animals, environment, people, politics and product sustainability. The database, which is updated daily, is a result of more than 20 years' work conducting primary and secondary research and systematically organising it using our ratings system. Empty promises M&S is one of only a handful of companies to take action on the issue of forced labour in Uzbek cotton fields. Highlander – Fast fashion: the real costs of your cheapest clothes. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Today, only two percent of the clothing we wear is actually made in the United States.
Only two percent of the clothing we wear is held to the labor standards we have secured in the United States after years of labor rights movements, strikes, unionization and slow progress. Only two percent of our clothing is dependable for having decent working conditions for all of its employees and proper compensation for work. Meanwhile, the other 98 percent of clothing we wear is made by women and children in developing countries, working in sweatshop factories with terrible conditions and far too little pay. The growth of fast fashion in the garment industry is most easily illustrated by how clothes and trends are going from fashion shows’ catwalks to the department stores’ clothing racks in shorter and shorter amounts of time. But our rapid consumption and desire for the cheapest clothes from wherever we can find them is causing a problem in the global market. The Company That Might Fix Fashion's Waste Problem. "The I:CO infrastructure provides the basis for the sustainable, economic solution of the future - the "circular economy," I:CO managing director Nicole Kösegi tells Racked.
"In an ideal world, materials will be able to flow ‘endlessly' which means that materials tied in products can be used over and over again for new products after the end of the products' life-cycles. " The company was founded in 2009 to solve the textile waste problem. Instead of dumping clothes into a landfill, I:CO provides an alternative where consumers can donate unwanted items to local retailers. Clothing is then delivered to an I:CO facility and a team of sorters.
Ideally, clothes will be in good enough shape that they can be worn again — garments that meet these standards are resold to be bought, worn, and loved by someone else. The rest are organized by about 400 criteria and sent to different stations based on quality. Absorbent fabrics are put through a shredder to become windshield wipers. The 5p plastic bag charge: All you need to know - BBC News. Image copyright Getty Images A new 5p charge for plastic bags is to be introduced in England on 5 October.
Here's what you need to know. What's happening? Shoppers are to be charged 5p for every new plastic bag they use at large stores in England. The charge applies only to shops or chains with 250 or more full-time employees. Plastic bags at airport shops or on board trains, planes or ships, will not be included, and neither will paper bags. England is the last country in the UK to start charging for plastic bags. Why do this? The number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets in England in 2014 rose to 7.64bn - 200 million more than in 2013. Figures collected by waste-reduction body Wrap, on behalf of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), show that the figure has steadily increased for the past four years.
In 2010 almost 6.3bn were used. Campaigners argue that the bags blight streets, spoil the countryside, and damage wildlife, seas and coastline. Image copyright PA. The LIST: Ethically-Made Alternatives to Fast Fashion - Part II. How can plastic bag addiction be cured? - BBC News. Image copyright ALAMY From Monday large shops in England will charge 5p for each plastic bag. But how did shoppers get so used to free carrier bags in the first place, asks Chris Stokel-Walker. The Single Use Carrier Bags Charges (England) Order 2015 comes into force on 5 October. The order requires sellers who employ more than 250 people to charge 5p for a "single use carrier bag" which is less than 70 microns (0.07mm) thick. Though there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, including for medicines, raw meat and razor blades, having to pay for bags will be a major change for most English shoppers. The history of the plastic carrier bag's ubiquity is slightly hazy, with no-one able to place a definitive date on the point when they were standard at all UK checkouts.
Image copyright PA Swedish company Celloplast patented a "bag with handle of weldable plastic material" in the US in 1965. "We've always had a culture of the bag just being there," explains retail consultant Graham Soult. An estimated £140m worth of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK every year #LightTheWay #FashRev #EYD2015. Zady Wants To Slow Down Fast Fashion With A New Sustainability Standard. Zady, the sustainability-focused fashion company known for its ethically sourced clothes and accessories, wants to help other fashion brands become transparent in their sourcing, too. Zady just launched The New Standard—a roadmap to the pain points of the textile industry and an open-sourced set of guidelines for fashion labels to up their antes in sustainability and human rights. While there is no shortage of research about the damage the apparel industry does to the environment and populations in developing countries (where most of the world's clothes are manufactured), the Zady team realized it wasn't all in one place.
"We were uncovering all of these issues related to fashion and climate, and fashion and pollution, and fashion in our water, and fashion in our oceans, and fashion and our forests," says Zady cofounder Maxine Bédat. "But there wasn't one central place that we could go to to find all of this. The New Standard So Zady decided to make its new standard function like a map. Wolfgang Schattling On The Mercedes-Benz Partnership Putting Sustainability At The Heart Of Fashion And Cars. This feature is part of a month-long focus around sustainable fashion across HuffPost UK Style and Lifestyle. Here we aim to champion some of the emerging names in fashion and shine a light on the truth about the impact our appetite for fast fashion has around the world.
Sustainable, green and ecologically friendly are words that get thrown around a lot these days. But at Eco-Age, the consultancy firm behind the Green Carpet Challenge made so glamorously famous by Livia Firth, there are guidelines to uphold. They call them the “GCC Principles for Sustainable Excellence,” and these include environmentally conscious rules as well as be-kind-to-all-humanity standards. Luxury car company Mercedes-Benz on the other hand, has been at the forefront of creating a hybrid that, at once maximises performance, efficiency and cleaner emissions.
Their ‘Hybrid by Nature’ campaign combines fashion with luxury automobiles and the results are everything we want from Mercedes-Benz, and more. Mr. Close Oxfam. So Selfridges Has Just Banned The Sale Of Plastic Water Bottles - In Order To Save Our Oceans. Selfridges has announced it will stop selling single-use plastic water bottles as part of a campaign to reduce pollution in the oceans. As part of the initiative, the store has also opened a drinking fountain in its food hall in London to encourage customers to bring their own water bottles to fill up instead of buying them.
The store's Project Ocean campaign is based on estimates there will be 1kg of plastic for every 3kg of fish in our oceans within the next decade. The removal of single-use plastic water bottles in the London Birmingham and Manchester stores will amount to around 400,000 bottles annually. Selfridges will introduce alternative solutions to plastic bottles, including tetrapak and glass, as well as reusable water vessels.
The store has also committed to reducing plastic packaging within its food halls and restaurants, as well as upholding its commitment not to sell or serve endangered fish. The new water fountain.