(Chickety) Check Yo Self

Before I write this post I would like to just send a quick thank you to everyone who has recently sent pledges for paid subscriptions over the past few weeks, it turns out my self esteem is extremely validated by people offering money for my thoughts! For the time being, this will remain a free newsletter, not because I would not like to get paid for it but because I am currently not able to write with any guaranteed regularity, and I hate disappointing people more than I hate budgeting. But I really, sincerely thank everyone who has sent these pledges in, and would like you to know that I have characteristically screen-capped them and saved them to a designated photo folder for a rainy day. :)

There are, relatively, very few people talking about the sustainability and ethics measures of their businesses, and even fewer of them talking about it in any real, meaningful way. I ordered a pair of pants for my kid the other day and they showed up in this shipping bag, which, if you know me, you know drove me into a rage:

The store that sent the pants probably thought they were doing something great by ordering bags marked like this, because whoever sold them the bags told them a bunch of lies or half-truths, and then there is a mandala effect because the bag reaches the consumer and the consumer by osmosis starts to believe that anything marked like this is good for the planet, and the whole reason that any of these falsehoods are spread is because nobody has real conversations about anything at all.

There is no such things as 100% biodegradable or 100% compostable. In fact, it is illegal in certain states in the U.S. and everywhere in the E.U. to make those claims because they are categorically false. What’s more, both terms, “compostable” and “biodegradable” are conditional descriptors that carry with them a ton of qualifiers and certifications. When you elect to omit this information from your packaging design, either because you do not know they are required or because you don’t like the way it looks, you are doing a disservice in two ways:

1. It is confusing and misleading to the person receiving your goods, and

2. these materials, which are not properly marked for disposal, will end up in the landfill 100% of the time. With little to no exceptions.

Anyway, the reason I am bringing this up is not to sh*t-talk the store that sent the pants, which were very cute, but instead to point out that we, as a culture, are extremely misinformed about what is and is not good for the planet, or to what degree, or why, and when we normalize touting claims without backing them up or contextualizing them, we honestly end up doing more harm than good. And a huge reason for that misinformation is that we don’t talk enough about them.

A few people have asked me who is doing a good job reporting on or talking about their sustainability claims, and typically what I offer is the Ganni Lab vertical within the Ganni business. Ganni does a decent job talking about what they do, what they’re trying to address, what they’re trying, and while I wish they would publish more information about their claims and experiments, their reporting serves as a great jumping off point for consumers to discover more. We cannot except brands, companies and governments to educate us about everything we should know, it should be considered a given that we will have to educate ourselves and our communities to ensure an optimal outcome for everyone.

For example, Ganni recently published this post, a highlight reel of their recent runway collection’s sustainability highlights. Below, I’m breaking them down with more context, because some of these advances are great! and some are meh! and it’s just good to talk about what and why.

Something else I want to say before I list these out though is: I am in no way criticizing Ganni for taking these leaps into new materials, regardless of what I say below about how sustainable or conversely unhelpful they may be. As Lindsay Peoples of The Cut recently wrote: “… a factual critique or reporting is not a hit or gossip, and we have to be able to critique each other to get better.” The fact is, Ganni with its volume and influence and MONEY helps scale a lot of these solutions to a larger audience when they get involved, and the only thing I’m encouraging below is critical thinking, literacy, and continued evolution. Join me.

1. Denim made from textile waste with Circulose:

So I’m not going to lie, Circulose is very cool and I have few critiques about this. It’s the kind of production that is extremely expensive (and thus at risk of failing) until its performed at scale, and Ganni investing their denim business here is akin to the kind of scale needed to make it work.

Basically, Circulose is reliant upon mostly cotton textile returns/donations, and those are obviously plentiful, even if you just rely on promotional or sports merchandise, which would otherwise end up in Kantamato or Dandora (and, on a huge scale, do). Circulose does not explain it’s stewardship for disposing of buttons, zippers, polyester fibers, or other non-renewable items, but they do claim their production process is circular in energy use, and their end product is a 100% recycled cotton, which is very cool.

1. Boots made with waste from sugar cane farming:

On this slide they do not list their patented partner, so this claim is more challenging to research, but usually when people mention sugar cane waste they are talking about bagasse, which is basically the husky non-food leftovers from sugar cane farming. In the sense that we are trying to return to the concept of “using the whole” of things, this sounds very cool, except… the waste is already put to good use. Bagasse is burned for energy in the sugar cane farming process, and rarely is there so much excess that it needs another solution. Also, I know burning things gets a bad wrap, but burning a natural waste product like bagasse versus, I don’t know, trendy clothes, is ultimately not the worst solution when you consider that in order to turn bagasse into boots it needs to go through a caustic, energy-intensive production process.

1. Bags and boots made with oranges and cacti together with OHOSkin:

After a deep dive into this company’s website, it looks like this is not so much a sustainable product as it is a vegan product. Which is cool! Their main goal is to reduce harm to animals, and the residual harm to the environment that happens when you treat and process animal leather, and they are definitely doing that. To look beyond this goal, I couldn’t find anything on their website to confirm that the material is completely free of plastics, which are often used to treat vegan and authentic leathers alike for finishing and durability. They are not certified by anyone other than the Anti-Vivisection League, so this is a cool company to watch and see how they evolve as they become certified, and if their sustainability mission extends beyond reducing harm to animals.

1. 25% of the collection will be available in extended sizing from EU 32-52

That is very cool! In the U.S. one of Ganni’s biggest markets, the average woman’s dress size is a 14 (IT 50, FR46, not sure which Ganni uses). I would love to know if this means they will be producing even more products, or if they will be producing more economically across their full size range.

1. Outerwear filled with fibers derived from ghost fishing nets from deep sea fishing

So one thing I have noticed about plastics is that people are extremely interested in the 3% of plastic that ends of in the ocean and very uninterested in the 97% that ends up in landfills, even though both are poisoning us and everything around us. Part of the reason is because of the PR around creating products from things like “captured ghost fishing nets”, which sounds both vert tragic and romantic, and certainly much more so than something like “captured plastic waste from any of the 900 new buildings being constructed in New York City”, which certainly outnumber ghost nets in volume but don’t seem to inspire the same ennui is pictures of the sea life we are destroying.

In this case, the vendor partner is not provided, which means we have no information about how true or untrue this is, and cannot fact check. But it sounds great, I am sure their PR team is very happy.

1. Knits in responsible alpaca standard wool

Textile Exchange (a great company to follow btw!) has a whole page about responsible alpaca farming here. This is kind of a “lowest hanging fruit” situation for any brand, because here in the year 2023 using farmed products without knowing the stewardship process and sourcing is…. stupid. It’s so available. So this is not groundbreaking, or rather it shouldn’t be, but it’s important to talk about in case there is some other mass-scale brand out there who hasn’t caught onto this yet, and can start feeling the pressure and making some changes. Maybe because now you know how easy it is and you can put some pressure on them!

There is absolutely no good excuse for not knowing intimately the sources of all of your materials in this present day.

That’s it! That’s everything they reported. Some of the claims are great, some of them are meh, most of them sound great in the press, and the press is a vehicle of communication, so I’m rarely going to be mad at just increasing the general conversation around sustainable measures. The question comes down to the personal responsibility conversation we’ve had here before: when someone gives you info, are you going to blindly accept it, or are you going to lovingly hold space for more critical or analytical thought than fits into an Instagram post?