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.
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
Heavy rains over the past week have overwhelmed southern and central Taiwan, with flooding, landslides, road closures, damage to property and the evacuations of thousands of people. Schools and offices were closed in some areas due to the deluge throughout the week. The heavy downpours brought by the southwest monsoon are a second blow to a region still recovering from last month’s Typhoon Danas. Strong winds and significant rain from the storm inflicted more than NT$2.6 billion (US$86.6 million) in agricultural losses, and damaged more than 23,000 roofs and a record high of nearly 2,500 utility poles, causing power outages. As
The greatest pressure Taiwan has faced in negotiations stems from its continuously growing trade surplus with the US. Taiwan’s trade surplus with the US reached an unprecedented high last year, surging by 54.6 percent from the previous year and placing it among the top six countries with which the US has a trade deficit. The figures became Washington’s primary reason for adopting its firm stance and demanding substantial concessions from Taipei, which put Taiwan at somewhat of a disadvantage at the negotiating table. Taiwan’s most crucial bargaining chip is undoubtedly its key position in the global semiconductor supply chain, which led
RSS