How green is your wardrobe?

While researching activities that would help me become more sustainable I came across with the website http://planetgreen.discovery.com. In this website you can take different quizzes of everyday activities and it gives you ideas n how to become more “green.” The quiz that caught my attention was “How green is your wardrobe?” I am a big shopper, and therefore have accumulated many clothes. I clean my wardrobe once a year and I wanted to find a more eco-friendly way of disposing of old clothes.

The first question was “What’s the first step toward greening your wardrobe?” the answer I chose was to donate old clothes to Goodwill. Surprisingly the correct answer was “Learning to work with what you have instead of buying new.” It is better to see how I can rework the clothes that I already have instead of starting from scratch and just buying new clothes I will have to get rid of in a year. It also pointed out that when shopping for new clothes, to take into consideration that the items that I pick I will be able to use them indefinitely, not to buy disposable clothes.

Another question that I like what “What’s the greenest way to keep your clothes clean?” the correct answer was hand washing and line drying. When you hand wash you not only avoid the harmful chemicals you also conserve your clothes longer and save water.

An interesting question pointed out the damaged caused by chemical, fertilizers, and pesticides that go into growing and producing fibers. Conventional cotton requires 1/3 pound of harmful additives for one t-shirt, I can only imagine how fast it adds up. Just alone, 68 pounds of clothes are thrown out per American; I can’t imagine how many pounds are bought per person.

I enjoyed taking this quiz. Not only I gained ideas on how to maintain my clothes and recycle them, I also became more aware of how the environment is affected with the production of clothes. Under every question there were related articles to the issue. For example the question that related with pesticide, pointed out and article about “Choose cotton carefully” (http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/choose-cotton-carefully.htm). Tough I did not have time to read every article that came up related to each question, the ones that I did read were very insightful. I learnt how to conserve my clothes ,shop less but when you do shop for useful clothes that are not disposable; clothes that I will use indefinitely.