Be sustainable, be fashionable

For the final day of Climate Week, we get you looking the part while doing your part.

It’s hard to imagine fashion being sustainable. In fact, Blue & Green Tomorrow has previously written about how it seems like an oxymoron.

However, there have been some recent changes. H&M, the high street clothes shop, is one of the sponsors for Climate Week who are sustainable in their business. Magnus Olsson, country manager of H&M UK and Ireland, said, “Climate Week is an inspirational British initiative that we are very proud to be a part of; a call to action, promoting positive, practical steps to combatting climate change, one of the major challenges of our time”.

Climate Week’s top tips are:

• Recycle your clothes by giving them to a charity shop
• Look out for sustainable clothing collections
• Launder at low temperatures because this is where most of the damage is done
• Reuse clothing once it has come to the end of its life as cleaning materials
• Refashion your clothes and give your wardrobe a new look
• Hand down clothes once they’ve been outgrown

As part of the week, H&M released a t-shirt made of 100% organic cotton and produced with renewable energy. It is great to see positive initiatives like this when all too often we hear tales of clothes being made unsustainably.

However, most of the environmental impact of clothes comes from washing them. Simply reducing the temperature of the wash, or avoiding the tumble dryer can make all the difference and significantly reduce the item’s carbon footprint.

To help you be more sustainable when shopping we’ve created a guide section to help you on our website. If you are seriously interested in shopping ethically then we recommend taking a look at the Ethical Superstore.

Related articles:

Climate Week 2012 kicks off

Is it alright to shop til you drop?

Sustainable fashion: an oxymoron?

Prisoners’ ethical fashion launches in the UK

Ethical Shopping 2011