As I gazed upon the 38 shirts spilling out of drawers and hanging all around my room, the words of a brilliant letter to the Guardian rang in my ears: “And what are we hazarding the biosphere for, exactly? For work widely devoid of meaning, for electronic entertainment consisting of endless repetitive chatter, for recreation which moves us restlessly round the world, and for the chance to shop in order to escape the pointlessness of shopping.”
Talk of Copenhagen and cutting carbon emissions tends to focus on fairly dull technological fixes. As well as boring things like insulating my roof, I want a challenge that is fun and perhaps more profound. I would like to confront the idea that we, in the developed world, can just do a few clever things with wind turbines and Priuses while carrying on consuming. And I want to see if consuming less can actually be liberating. Inspired by that letter from philosophy lecturer John Foster, I’ve decided my carbon emissions cut this year would include the challenge of forsaking all new clothes for a year.
I’d convinced myself that I was not particularly materialistic. I don’t own my own laptop or any kind of games console or even an iPod. But auditing my wardrobe — well, rifling through my drawers — was a shock. Why do I have 19 pairs of shoes and trainers, 21 T-shirts, 14 pairs of trousers, seven suits, 10 ties (I never wear a tie), 21 pairs of pants, 28 pairs of socks (and five odd ones) and two pairs of man tights? I could wear a different outfit each day for two months — so why the hell do I pop down to the high street every month and pick up another cheap new shirt imported from the other side of the world?
I have suits for work, shorts for running, boots for climbing mountains, tracksuit bottoms for vegetating, flip-flops for the beach, party shirts for partying and reassuring knitwear for meeting great aunts. I have five pairs of gloves, four hats and two eye-masks. I have most bases, and all extremities, more than covered.
Like most people, I find shopping in our soulless malls and tatty clone high streets an increasingly tedious chore. Clothes, however, remain the exception. Retail therapy still works for me in the likes of Zara and H&M, where you can buy a whole fresh look for a couple of hundred quid. As a shy teenager, clothes made me feel better about my crap body; a new shirt still gives me a lift for at least three wears. After that, the shirt is still fine but the buzz wears off. This is a familiar consumerist addiction. But I have almost as many years behind me as shirts; I should grow out of such cheap, confidence-boosting tricks.
Giving up buying new clothes has a “hair shirt element which is not appealing to most people,” says Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet. “There is something hard-wired within us that makes us desire things even when we don’t need them. The idea we have got to consume less is incompatible with the culture of the moment.”
Rather than go cold turkey, Goodall recommends I wean myself off this clothes addiction by continuing to buy secondhand. Here, however, I could abuse the challenge and buy just as much by visiting upmarket vintage boutiques and filling my boots on eBay. This would still involve plenty of carbon-guzzling clothing miles, what with stock deliveries and posting parcels. Besides, if I cleared the shelves in Oxfam, its customers might then pop down to Primark. So I resolve to restrict any visit to fashionable retro stores such as Rokit and Pop Boutique to a biannual treat — making shopping special again — while allowing perhaps a monthly mooch around some local charity shops.
“Merely switching from new to secondhand doesn’t immediately solve all the clothing footprint,” Goodall says. Ideally, he says, we would have clothes that lasted a lifetime and swap them between ourselves when we wanted the thrill of the new. We could also fulfill our need to reinvent ourselves, and not look scruffy, by making our own new clothes from reconditioned fabrics.
This might sound far-fetched but one ordinary bloke, John-Paul Flintoff, taught himself to sew, and now customizes, makes and mends his own clothes — and has written a book, Through the Eye of a Needle, about it. I am not confident I will ever buy a sewing machine, but I am making two modest resolutions. One, sew buttons back on shirts; two, clean my shoes.
My favorite desert boots sum up everything that is wrong about my attitude to clothes. I bought them a year ago and have worn them almost every day this year. Despite loving them, I have never once polished or protected them, because I can’t be bothered and I know I can go out tomorrow and buy a new pair. So no more of that: this year I will maintain my shoes and aim to wear them for five years, not one.
This may all sound laughably trivial but buying no new clothes could account for more than half my 10 percent carbon cut this year. Calculating the precise carbon saving is not straightforward. Polyester is better than wool and cotton, for example, which have a big impact on greenhouse gases and consume other finite resources such as water in their production. One cotton shirt guzzles 3,000 liters of water in its manufacture.
According to Goodall’s calculations, we buy about 20kg of new clothes every year on average. Each item made from natural fibers has a greenhouse gas footprint more than 20 times its weight. Not buying new clothes could stop me consuming 0.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide in a year; I only need to cut 1.5 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions for a comfortable 10 percent-plus off the UK annual average of 14 tonnes.
If I was a carbon-guzzling corporation, I would probably cheat my way around this commitment. Yesterday, I could have gone round the shops and bought a year’s worth of suits and shirts in an afternoon. I didn’t, and I promise I have not been stockpiling. Another scam, of course, would be to accept dozens of items as gifts; I’m not going to do this either, although I won’t say no if I get a few pairs of socks on my birthday.
And I aim to resist a new clothing splurge in January next year. I want this to be the start of a new pattern of behavior, not a one-off gimmick.
Cutbacks like this are not just a sacrifice. If I truly love clothes, I will have to become more imaginative about dressing myself. Liberated from the need to jostle through overcrowded and overheated shops, I will have more free time.
And thankfully, I’ll still have more than enough jumpers to keep me warm when I turn the thermostat down.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS