Thinking Sustainably

Ever considered the impact our fashion choices make on the environment? As our appetite to own more grows, we find ourselves making impulsive shopping choices without much thought on the consequences of our shopping decisions. 

We at Urban Touch have been in the fashion and lifestyle business for a good part of the decade now and there are things we may not have given much thought to all these years. But we’d like to change all of that beginning now with baby steps. 

We buy clothes and lifestyle accessories that fill up our wardrobes every year and in all that will be a ton of stuff we may not even wear once. 

Has it ever occurred to you what the cost of a single tee shirt or a pair of jeans is on the environment? Well, a lot! 

A single cotton tee shirt costs the earth nearly 2700 litres of water. That’s enough water for a person to drink for 900 days. Sounds hard to believe? Well ... here’s how. 

The cultivation, processing and transportation of cotton from the fluffy ball stage to yarn that is spun and woven or knitted into fabric is a tedious procedure that consumes high amounts of energy and water. One load of laundry consumes close to 40 gallons of water. 

The water situation on the planet is grimmer than ever. While the earth seems to be covered with vast oceans and innumerable water bodies, 97% of that water is salty and therefore unfit for use. 2% is locked away in the form of glaciers and snow. What we’re left with is a mere 1%. Cotton is a very thirsty crop. 

Think about the number of clothes in your wardrobe/ in your city/ in your country and exponentially across the planet. How many of those clothes do you actually need. How often do you wash and dry them? 

Can we pledge to use lesser water and lesser energy? In a country such as ours, we are able to sun dry clothes and dyed yarn, thereby skipping mechanised drying processes that consume very high energy. Sometimes we skip the ironing too, thereby reducing our carbon footprint by 1/3rd. 

Take a pair of Jeans for example that also uses Cotton as its raw material. Manufacturing a pair of Denims could cost the earth up to 2866 gallons of water. Not to forget treatment and dyeing of textiles pollutes our water bodies with the release of untreated effluent. 

It’s about time we as manufacturers and you as informed consumers gave the matter some serious thought. After all, the choices we make today will shape our future. 

Let’s aim to Reduce the purchase of what’s not sustainable. Let’s try and Reuse what we already have. Let’s try and Recycle our clothes and accessories so that they get a second life. In other words, let’s make Recycled goods fashionable. Let’s attempt to close the loop by giving away what we have an excess of or converting used garments into rags and cleaning cloths. 

We at Urban Touch are looking at some serious sustainability in the years to come. This could mean ripping apart used clothing and accessories to come up with brand new refashioned clothes or stuff that’s shredded down to textile fibres only to be refurbished into brand new styles. 

Join us in this venture of ours! Let’s be the change we wish to see.

Author: #Sneha Sundareshan