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In some of my earliest inspiration gathering sessions for Sevenbillionth, one particular area simultaneously shocked me and completely captured my imagination. The further I looked in to it, the more a key question bothered me. How does an industry home to some of the most creative, rebellious, forward thinking minds on the planet…an industry so fast paced that it not only celebrates change, but relies on it for it’s continued success and in its most iconic moments, has completely thrown convention to the wind…

How does fashion remain to this day the second most polluting industry on the planet?

Considering how integral the necessity of moving with the times is to the fashion industry, surely it should be leading the way in terms of pioneering sustainable technology, production and by extension, sustainable products? Yet, the more the environmental implications of fast fashion started to appear on my radar, the more frequently I found myself derailed by another shocking statistic. It was an interesting breed of surprise in that it was only shocking because in all honesty, it had never really occurred to me before.

I had never really been confronted with the realities of mass producing textiles for an audience that has an insatiable appetite for the new. Even before I started writing about it I would have considered myself a relatively “conscious” individual, but if you’d have asked me, I would have said plastics or the meat industry were the bigger polluters. Perhaps this is just a byproduct of my “liking” every ‘save the wave’ type Facebook page or because the algorithms have long since clocked that I’ll pause my scrolling to watch a video of human cuddling a cow/sheep/goat/turtle/stingray/barnacle (I’m a sucker. I’ve accepted it. Sue me.) but its been a couple of years now since Cowspiracy started doing the rounds and it seems that everyone has seen the viral videos of shocking conditions in slaughter houses, or folks scuba diving through plastic trash in place of abundant fish. But while people in general seem to be more aware of the scale of the problem where these issues are concerned, fast fashion seems to have slipped the net of public scrutiny in a way its counterparts haven’t…or it would have done, if it weren’t for this meddling kid.

So how did that happen? Well, there is a distinct absence of transparency within the fashion industry that prevents us from knowing the true extent of the damage being done. Take ‘deadstock’ as an example. Of the sale rails that are full to bursting at the end of each season, there are clothes that cannot be sold the other side of multiple reductions…where do they go? (and if you’re looking for an idea of scale with regard to how many items become deadstock each year, it’s largely still guess work for now, it hasn’t been investigated to a point where we can be sure of exact numbers, but from what I can make out it’s safe to assume we’re in to the multi-millions of items of clothing…) Well, frequently unused clothes are destroyed outright. Incinerated or shredded and made in to insulation, that kind of thing. When they’re not though, they are often donated to charities and shipped to developing countries. Which at surface level sounds like a reasonable solution, after all it prevents them from piling up in landfill. But another slightly less desirable outcome of bulk offloading hand me downs on lower income countries is that it waters down the economy, hindering local designers ability to turn a profit from their craft. It’s a complex, multilayered issue with many pros and cons that a brief mention in a blog doesn’t do justice to and I sure as hell don’t have a full grasp on. But it’s a good illustration of how something that seems like a reasonable, if not beneficial solution to fashions waste problem on the surface has much less desirable knock on effects. There is no straight forward answer here.

Surely, brand new unworn clothing can just be recycled though? Well actually, it turns out that recycling has a slightly different meaning when it comes to clothing. When we refer to recycling clothes, we are largely talking about them being worn again by somebody else. Being swapped or donated. Textiles are notoriously tricky to recycle in the traditional sense. So tricky in fact, that the technology doesn’t really exist. Not yet anyway…more on that in billionths yet to come. According to my much-loved-to-the-point-of-it-being-dog-eared, slightly torn and heavily underlined edition of Fashion Revolutions most recent fanzine “Loved Clothes Last” (as a quick aside, if anything I’m saying here is even vaguely sparking an interest in you, I cannot recommend highly enough that you follow what these guys are up to on all their social media platforms and familiarise yourself with their reading material. Their work is beautifully presented, easily digestible, informative and not to mention, incredibly important. They’re making the kind of waves you’re going to want to ride, trust me.) less than one percent of collected clothing is fully recycled in to new textiles. Unlike high grade plastics which can be easily melted down and reconstructed in to a complete new product, the chopping up and treating of textile fibres shortens and weakens them. That’s if you can separate them to begin with.

I watched a really interesting TED talk recently by Amit Kalra, a fashion enthusiast eagerly seeking out solutions to fashions pollution problem. He shows` an interesting diagram of a way in which a jacket could be built with all of the zips attached to an internal hidden skeleton, meaning once the jacket was at the end of its usable life, it could be easily separated in to its component parts, making it much more cost effective and less time consuming to recycle. It suprises me that this kind of intelligent design isn’t widely used in the fashion industry already?!

I never would have known any of this without having a specific interest, and going looking for information. Which realistically and completely reasonably, isn’t what the majority of people have time to do -and nor should it have to be. In an ideal world, consumers should be able to take for granted that their clothing is being produced in line with technological developments which ensure there is as little damage being done to the environment as possible. No one should have to go on a time consuming investigation, which often leads to dead ends anyway due to the current lack of information, to figure out where is safe to find environmentally friendly, ethically produced clothing. But a little bit of awareness can go a long way and leave you feeling much more empowered to make change. Until we are in a position to trust our clothing isn’t being produced at the expense of our planet, one of the easiest ways to make your contribution towards making that change a reality is to put pressure on retailers for higher standards across the board. For garment workers and for the planet. Movements like Fashion Revolution certainly make that easy for you. The other way is to vote with your wallet and increase the demand for sustainable clothing…

A world in which clothing brands are completely transparent about their products would look very different to how it does at present. Its certainly something I didn’t think existed beyond small independent companies…until I found Reformation. “Being naked is the no.1 most sustainable option. We’re no.2” is their tagline. And you know what, from what I can work out, I’m inclined to believe them. They are not over here in the UK yet, but they have three stores in New York, three in L.A., one in San Fran and one in Dallas. They show no signs of slowing down, so keeping your fingers crossed for a London store doesn’t seem like an unreasonable hope at this point…(PLEASE REF. PLEASE.) If when you imagine environmentally considerate clothing, the image you see in your head is all hemp trousers and vegetable dye, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things, if that’s what floats your boat, I’m all for it. But I’m not fucking with you, the clothing they produce is mouthwatering. I’ve had dreams about some of their dresses. (If at this point you’re thinking I’ve got some sort of crazy sponsorship sell out deal from them, think again. This is my second ever blog, the majority of my readership is formed of Mums friends -thanks by the way guys, I really appreciate it! Also, Reformation if by some miracle you’re reading this and want to send me some clothes, I’m not saying I’m not a sell out, I’m just saying I’m not writing this because I am right now, you get me?)

In all seriousness. These guys have one of the most extensive “who we are” sections I have ever read and sustainability is at the core of everything they do. From using wind to power their factories to calculating the construction footprint of their stores and offsetting 100%, to using recycled paper hangers to display their products and providing pre paid shipping labels so that you can reliably recycle their clothing after your next wardrobe clear out, Ref have thought of it. They even offer their staff one paid day off per month to volunteer in the community (-could I also mention at this point that over three quarters of their management team are women?)

But from the perspective of making it easy for you to make an informed and empowered choice as a consumer…every item of clothing they sell displays exactly what impact each garment has had on the environment. I’m sure you can appreciate why I was overjoyed to find these guys after everything else I had discovered about an industry that…actually I really love. Not only are the guys at Ref proof that this is possible, just imagine what clothes shopping would look like if they were the blueprint. If they, and companies like them took centre stage. It feels particularly ambitious right now, but imagine the shift in our buying habits as consumers if considering the environmental impact of any given product was standard practise? Or if we lived in a society in which total transparency and declaration of environmental impact was a legal requirement? Sigh. I have a dream.

Sadly, sustainable clothing is still a relatively niche market and the price tag attached to said clothing often reflects that. That is something that will change with time, but as much as I would love it to, it’s not a shift that’s going to happen overnight. So until we’re all buying beautiful Ref clothing with our pocket money what can we do? Charity shopping, and shopping vintage are sustainable three ways (-your money either goes towards a good cause or presumably a small local business, less brand new clothing is produced thus less drain on resources and energy spent on production, and you’re preventing clothing with a useable life left in it from going to landfill. Well done you!) it’s also much easier on the wallet. Aside from those obvious benefits, there are some other really optimistic byproducts of a shift in attitude more towards this style of shopping. Creativity and individuality being one. Although there is an appeal and a sense of community towards following fashion trends, given that realistically they do not cater to all shapes, sizes and budgets, it often leaves people feeling excluded and left behind. I have often found in the past when shopping brand new the extent of the creativity I’ve used is maybe liking an item of clothing and then coming up with a couple of things I own already that it might go with. When I shop in charity shops, I don’t just think like that, I think about what I can do with those clothes. How I can alter them, embellish them to make something really unique. It already feels like theres less at stake because I haven’t spent a fortune, I’m more prepared to take sewing machine based risks on them. And when I do, excluding the times I completely fuck it up, I usually end up with something much more meaningful to me than something I picked up on impulse in H&M on my way home from work.

Which leads me to my final and potentially most naive and romantic point on the matter. With the mass production of clothing, not only did clothes get less expensive, but the intrinsic value of them got lost too. In the grand scheme of things, the times when you saved for months for one pair of jeans, wore them to death, reincarnated them and then did it over again are not that long ago. I’m not saying we’d be better off being back there, but I do think there is a lot of value and sense to be learned from the creativity and grit of the make do and mend era.

I like to think that the clothes I buy have a life beyond me. As they did before me, for the vast majority of them anyway. I try to keep that in mind when I shop now. I try to think much further than just one occasion I could wear an item of clothing to, as I have done in the past. The doe eyed couple in the image at the top are my Mum and Dad. They’re every bit that cute now, if you were wondering. The outfit my mums wearing, she passed on to me. If I had seen it in a shop, I don’t know if it’s something I would have considered “me”. As a general rule, I steer clear of pink. No shade, just not my cup of tea. But I gladly make an exception for those shorts -because they were hers. They mean so much to me because of that. The more I’ve thought about it, the greater my sentimentality. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that when my mum was rocking those shorts she never imagined her daughter would be wearing them and writing about them the best part of thirty years on. I don’t know who it is wearing my hand me downs in this rosy image of the potentially impossible future, but I do like to think these shorts have another generation of summers, beach walks, festivals and holidays still to come beyond me…

Maybe, my Sevenbillionth looks a little like this.

 

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Three things about me. When I was a child, my parents, to their endless credit, sent me to a weekly spoken word poetry workshop. To have new material to present each week, I would have to write in the days between. Unsurprisingly, the peaks and troughs in the life my ten year old selfs week neither skyrocketed to great altitudes nor plunged to great depths (-I didn’t fully immerse myself in the writings of Nietzsche until I was at least eleven and three quarters.) So drawing inspiration from the smallest of observations and words as a knee jerk response to anything and everything became a habit deeply engrained in me from an early age. This might be the first time any of them have ever made it to the elusive public eye, however. I recently crossed over from crunchy peanut butter to smooth. I have no idea why and I’m hopeful it’s in no way indicative of a premature mid-life crisis, but only time will tell. Thirdly, the plastic encasing the eyeshadow on my bedside table it going to outlive me. By several lifetimes.

I recently went to visit my baby cousins in Oxford. They are two and five. They are full of curiosity, laughter and ideas. They have everything yet to discover. Shortly after I arrived at their home, the youngest, Toby, was sat on my lap “making gingerbread men” i.e. burying lumps of butter under tiny mountains of flour so that the monsters couldn’t eat them, and then making it snow in my tea. Max, the elder of the two, was sat opposite us, mixing bicarbonate of soda and vinegar together in a test tube from a small chemistry set. His eye’s were widening as the two elements reacted to each other, fizzing and overflowing from their glass confines. It’s all happening on one small kitchen table and it’s chaos. Magical, interactive, fast paced chaos. They introduce me, by name, to their pet fish. We make towers out of colourful wooden robots, then we knock them down. I love these children more with each mildly exhausting hour I spend with them and in the back of my mind I feel a determination solidifying.

I used a similarly solid determination to move to Brighton when I was seventeen. Anyone living here will tell you that as a resident, there are a few things that are inescapable. The seagulls, for instance. They are the size of terriers and they care not for your delicate emotional balance which may or may not be being held together entirely by your recently purchased comfort food. They care for your chips. I’m yet to do an official study, but I’m relatively sure there are more open mic nights in Brighton than atoms in the known universe. It is a comfort to the majority of us here to know that though we may be short on hours sleep, we will never be short of live music. It’s impossible to walk through the North Laine without bumping in to someone you know. An extra 10 points if, whilst you’re there, you cross paths with birdie whistle guy.

What both attracts us to and holds so many of us here in this city is it’s inhabitants. We’re a likeminded bunch. It’s a well known joke around these parts that born and bred Brightonians are a rare breed. You move here because you didn’t fit in back home, wherever that may be. It’s what we all have in common. Brighton will welcome you with open arms whatever your dietary requirements or artistic persuasions. Bring your hair dye, your tattoos and piercings, your vintage clothes and your guitar, and make yourself at home. Barista skills/coffee snobbery preferred but not essential. If it sounds like I’m laughing at the place, trust me I’m not. As a liberal, Vegan, caffeine slave/musician, that would be both hypocritical and foolish. I certainly grew to fit my city.

Two last points regarding my geographical location before I bore you with it. We have a Green MP, and a beach. As a city, Brighton from my experience is a politically engaged place. It’s an echochamber, but a caring one. People here are aware, and passionate about our current global situation. I have my opinions, which I’m trying on a day-by-day basis to grow more informed and grounded, but I’m largely going to leave politics out of this. Though I think it’s fair to say I’m as troubled as everyone else is right now.

Those who know me will tell you that I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I am, especially on the surface, a very positive person. But realistically, when I get an idea in my head, positive or negative, it spreads like a fucking forest fire. No one knows this more than my Mum and Dad, who derail me when I’m ‘hamster wheeling” as my pops calls it, on an almost bi-weekly basis (subject to increase or decrease depending on what’s in the news…). One such example of this, is the inspiration behind why I’m sat writing this now.

For this round of Freya vs World I had convinced myself that I, a twenty-two year old college drop out without a degree, let alone one founded in environmental sciences, had to single handedly come up with a solution to global warming. No exaggeration. I’d clearly read an article and come up with the only, ahem, “logical” conclusion.

“I have to fix it Dad. So many people don’t understand and it’s not their fault, but I do. I do understand and there’s no time so I have to fix it, now.”

…Or something like that. Imagine it spoken very quickly with an undertone of panic. These phone calls aren’t infrequent. Dad’s a philosophy graduate, and a level headed one at that. He’s difficult to shake up -by international news, let alone me.

“No you don’t, Frey.”

phew.

“There are seven billion people on this planet and all of them are responsible for it’s welfare. You are responsible for your seven billionth.”

That conversation has echoed through my head ever since. It’s a philosophy I’ve applied to many problems I’ve gone on to face, but while we’re here, I’m going to focus predominantly on the environmental one. Without knowing it necessarily, Dad handed me my metaphorical shovel that day. Now I am stood at the bottom of the (not so) metaphorical trash heap, with full awareness that I have one brain, two hands and distinct limitations to what I can do to help. But I intend to do all of them. And at it’s core, thats what My Sevenbillionth is all about. Figuring out the exact size and shape of those limitations and, after honestly and realistically taking stock of the opportunities and restrictions of your lifestyle, your income, your time constraints and perhaps your willingness to make changes…then pushing those limitations as far as they will go.

I am part of a generation that feels the sting of generations before us having fallen short on the necessary steps taken to slow down, let alone halt the climate change process. So, my feeling is that we as a generation moving forward, do not waste our energy on bitterness and blame, but instead use frustration as a catalyst but take action from a place of empathy to do everything we can to prevent generations after us feeling that same sting. I want Max and Toby to grow up and visit their fishes brothers and sisters in the ocean, not to go snorkelling through shoals of plastic waste. I don’t ever want to have to explain to them how we watched marine life falter and decline and did nothing because the truth was too painful to deal with so we buried our heads in the sand. Further down the line, I would like to show many of my friends and their friends and their friends children in years to come, the city that made me who I am. I’m not going to sit back quietly and have as much fun as I can before it gets swallowed by the rising sea.

If, like me, dancing on deck as the ship goes down isn’t enough for you. If any of this resonates. Then I would like to invite you, in a steadily heating world, full of shock politics and inflammatory headlines, fear mongering and environmental disasters, to dare to be optimistic. To believe in the possibility that by using the opportunities and privileges particular to this moment in time, we could be the ones that change things for the better. With the internet and social media, we have outreach and influence like never before. We have a global community at our fingertips and the opportunity to join forces in a unique and beautiful way. To allow innovation and collaboration to be the bi-product of fear and circumstance. Pick up your shovel. Musicians, Illustrators, Activists, Scientists, Dancers and Mathematicians: our strength lies in our diversity and diverse, in our billions, we most certainly are.

It is so easy, the more you read about climate change and the effect we as a species are having on the planet we call home to feel like the only people capable of making any sort of meaningful change are those with Phd’s, money and power. But I’d like to dissect the grand scheme of things down in to slightly more manageable chunks. This is about doing what you can, with what you’ve got. Drawing inspiration from the wider world, and applying it to your backyard.

For me the moment this truly solidified, was in a cafe in Belfast. Waiting for a friend to finish work and reading a passage by the brilliant Naomi Klein on climate change, and taking her four year old son to snorkelling in the Coral Reef. The part of it that’s still alive, for the moment. Maybe it was having spent time with my cousins so recently that made this have such a profound impact on me, maybe it was an accumulation of reading and getting slowly more affected, but a balance in me shifted. The fear of not doing anything at all. Not writing words, and taking action the best and perhaps only way I know how, got bigger than the overwhelming fear I have of being seen and heard. As previously mentioned, hearts aren’t for sleeves.

So what can I do exactly and what do I have? Not academia. I’m by no means an authority on the subject I’m about to start discussing in depth. I wish I could, but I’m probably not about to invent the solution to ocean plastic or light pollution. Nor at this point am I even a shining example in all honesty. I do what I can, and I have good intentions sure. I have a re-usable coffee cup, and hell, ninety percent of the time I actually use it. But there is much more I could be doing. So here is my commitment to doing that “more” and in the weeks to come, a window in to what fulfilling that promise actually looks like. How easy is it really, to give back to a world we are taking so much from. I have a laptop. I have a desire to change things, a stubbornly positive outlook, a metaphorical shovel. My conclusion?

Maybe, my seven billionth looks a little like this.