Author: Hope Myers

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Week 5: Response to Gullingsrud and Perkins – Hope Myers

I thought this article had a lot of really good points about how companies can re-design their process to become cradle to cradle, however one issue I had was that they made doing all of these things sound really simple. They give all of these nice lists of things to do but obviously in reality it will be much harder and more costly, as well asking taking time to make these changes. However I do think it’s possible, but the best way to start would be to get bigger companies on board. A lot of the difficult part is developing the new technologies for things like separating fiber types, but big companies with larger budget for research and development would have a much greater impact. Unfortunately these companies are also often the ones that are most resistant but once there is more competition to develop and use the cradle to cradle technologies the process will be much quicker. It needs to be pushed more as a world wide movement that affects everyone!

I think it says a lot though that only one chemical company was willing to share their formulas to help develop sustainable carpets and I find it astounding that of their 8000 chemicals only 38 were deemed human and environmentally safe. It would probably be hard to force companies to share their formulas since they are most likely patented, but more transparency would have a big impact.

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Week 4: Response to The Story of Eileen Fisher – Hope Myers

I thought this article was structured really well in a way that first gave you an overview of Eileen Fisher inc and then went more in depth on each specific aspect. I was surprised by how many different sustainability and social consciousness projects the company focuses on. Usually I would think that if they’re trying to do that many things at once it wouldn’t be possible for them to be done well, however at least on paper all the company’s efforts seem true and impactful. It would be really easy to say that you’re working with sustainable companies and then just turn a blind eye to whatever they’re actually doing so I’m impressed that Eileen Fisher inc. actually follows up with and monitors each individual company, be it cotton, or fibers, or dye, to make sure they are actually following her sustainability goals.

The company also doesn’t give up when they fail, for example the article talked about how they tried to find a chlorine free wool cleaning process but the first type they tried didn’t work out. Instead of just giving up and saying it wouldn’t be possible they kept trying other things until they eventually found one that worked. This idea of not just giving up on things is especially important when it comes to sustainability. One thing thing the article didn’t mention and I wonder is if the company does any work trying to encourage other companies to be more sustainable. Maybe sharing their success story could encourage more companies to follow suit.

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Week 4: Response to Hethorn – Hope Myers

Although I felt like this article was more geared to designers I thought she still made some interesting points. One question she asked, what piece clothing is your favorite and why, made m think. One of my favorite pieces of clothing that I own is a dress that I got tailor made in Vietnam. Because I was able to choose the fabric, pattern, and pretty much every aspect of the dress and it fits me perfectly I am much happier with it than other things I buy, like random clothes from taobao that I don’t actually end up liking. The only reason I was able to do this though was because labor is so cheap in Vietnam that it still only cost $20 to get the dress made, which is actually cheaper than buying one from stores like forever 21. But this option isn’t really feasible for most clothing in most places. I looked at the website for Matrushka Constructions, a store in LA that locally sources and hand makes all their clothes, but a dress similar to the one I got is 6 times the price. That being said even just simple hems or taking things in a bit can improve a piece of clothing so much and would be a simple fairly cheap thing to offer in stores. My grandmother is really short and has to hem all her own pants but for people who don’t know how to sew or don’t have time it’s a lot harder. All the fast fashion brands keep trying to shove people into a few basic sizes to make manufacturing cheap and easy but thats not how it should work!

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Week 3: Response to Scatturo – Hope Myers

Technological advances have allowed us to keep up with the increasing demand for fashion and new innovations in tech have even lead to new demands. Actually sustainable fashion is hard to achieve, there are a lot more organic cotton farmers now but it takes so much more land to grow that it may not even be much more sustainable than regular cotton. GM crops have the potential to be more sustainable but like we saw in the movie the true cost the big companies like Monsanto that have patented all the crops only care about profit and end up ripping off the smaller farmers leading to continued unsustainable farming methods.

A lot of people see technology as detrimental but really it just needs to be more structured and governments need to have good policies in place that force the technology to be used in ethical and sustainable ways. One of the things we have been talking about in my economics class is how people choose the cheapest option between natural resources, labor, and capital, but once we start to lack any of these things we turn to technology to increase productivity. We haven’t run out of natural resources or labor yet so nobody is extremely motivated to create more sustainable technology. Some of the big companies have created some but with no real competition there’s nobody to push them to innovate further. Scatturo advocated for fibre recycling tech to become open source so it’s also accessible to smaller manufacturers, not only would this allow everyone to start with the basic recycling tech, it would also push the innovation that we need to improve.