Jane Suttle and Mhairi Fraser discovered first-hand how greenwashing the biodegradable credentials of underwear was just the tip of the iceberg of what’s wrong in the fashion industry. Photo: John Thistleton.
Last year a group of men and women buried their underpants in the ground for six months, dug them up and discovered surprising results.
Investigating the fashion industry and overconsumption, they wanted to test claims on the labelling on their underpants.
One member, Mhairi Fraser buried a pair of her Bonds underpants made of cotton. She thought the elastic in them was for only the waist and legs. When she dug up the pair after six months worms had eaten all the cotton, leaving untouched a web-like structure of all the elastin that formed the shape of the underpants.
Another member, Jane Suttle said the best decomposing underpants were a pair of older ones made of pure cotton. The woman who they belonged to was moving house, so she discarded them in their worm farm.
“All she had in the end were three circles of elastic,” Jane said. “One for each leg and one for the waist. If you have cotton, a natural fibre, it goes but the elastic stays.”
This is not the case these days, where everything from underpants to stretchy jeans has lots of elastin.
Mhairi said: “You think you are buying 100 per cent cotton with a bit of elastic waist, but in fact you are buying underpants with elastin all woven in.”
Coming from Goulburn and surrounding region, the group of 15 women and men collaborated under the banner, ‘Living @ 1.5’. 1.5 degrees refers to the temperature increase scientists believe the people of the world must remain below to avoid catastrophic climate change. The trouble is we’re already exceeding it.
The group felt so little progress was being made on carbon reduction or on the ecological health of the planet, they focussed on their personal lives to see what they could achieve as individuals.
They investigated fashion, finance, technology, food and the transport industry, even the funeral industry and found one bad decision flowed on to another and spread from there.
“The underpants experiment was part of a session we did on the fashion industry from production to grave. Horrifying,” Mhairi said.
One of the biggest shifts in the industry was replacing quality clothing with cheaper choices. These days seasons are shorter, and sales are constant, creating a high turnover of cheap clothes.
“Since COVID, when everyone seriously got into online shopping a new trend appears, ultra-fast fashion where companies can create as many as 11,000 new styles in not much more than a year,” Jane said.
“One company produced more than 300,000 new styles. These garments can be made and available in two weeks,” she said.
Three pairs of underpants showing vastly different outcomes from being buried for six months. Jane Suttle borrowed the idea from Upper Lachlan Landcare Grazing Group, which was studying another aspect of soil. Photo: Mhairi Fraser.
The women give an example of a shirt that begins as cotton grown under irrigation in Australia, sent off to Bangladesh, where it is dyed with toxic chemicals and formed into fabric.
The fabric is flown to Vietnam where the buttons are attached and then to Laos for finishing before returning to Australia’s discount clothing stores such as Kmart, Target and Best&Less and selling for $7 to $10.
When it is discarded, it’s either thrown in the bin or given to an op shop. But landfill is no longer coping with what people are throwing away.
Consequently, the major op shops in Goulburn and everywhere else are overwhelmed with clothes. They sell bulk loads of secondhand clothing to contractors who ship them to third world countries like Ghana.
In many of the third world countries monsoons sweep stockpiled clothing into waterways and to the sea where they twist into giant dreadlocks more than 30 metres long, tangling wildlife, boats and drowning people.
That’s not the story told in the marketing and packaging of clothing, including underpants.
“I think companies are aware people have a basic concern, they want to feel a bit moral about what they are buying, but really, it’s rubbish,” Mhairi said.
Jane adds: “Greenwashing is everywhere. Once you start looking, you begin to see it and the underpants (experiment) helped us do that, because you look at the labels and you think they might be true-ish but look at the examples. We are really kidding ourselves.”
Mhairi adds: “When faced with incredibly cheap, cute clothes in rainbow colours, here’s a test: is it a natural fibre? If not, don’t buy it. Do you really love it? Then buy one, not three and wear it for as long as possible.”
The women bundled up their old underpants that did not break down in the soil and enclosed the major manufacturers’ sustainability claims, then sent them to companies’ chief executives for a response. Unsurprisingly, they did not receive one.
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