Your Shirt Has a Big Footprint

Date: June 4, 2008 | Category: Fashion, Lifestyle, Stores & Resources

While it’s become typical table talk to discuss how many miles it took for your meal to get from the farm to your dinner plate, few of us have any clue how much effort it took to put the clothes on our backs. Patagonia has created the Footprint Chronicles Website to track the energy, carbon emissions and waste generated by one item of clothing, and while the results are pretty shocking (several of the items travel over 15,000 miles from the fabric’s origin to a stateside Patagonia distribution center), we admire their transparency and their commitment to improvement.

Through photographs, videos and interviews, Patagonia gives an intimate
view at the minds, hands, machines, and miles that make up their
clothing. Patagonia highlights what they’re doing right (organic
cottons, cultivating sustainable and supportive relationships with
their suppliers, and a recycling program for certain fabrics including
capilene) and is straightforward about the areas they need to work on
(including long shipping distances and some synthetic chemicals used
for performance gear). All the while, Patagonia offers hope that they
and their related partners will continue making positive environmental
and social changes. I am keen to track the impact of my clothing purchases, but I wonder if
that will alter consumption? Have you used carbon calculators yet? Will
you in the future?

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