Do you know what’s in your wardrobe? What your clothing is made of? Where it comes from? How it was made? These are all the types of questions we need to ask when considering how environmentally sustainable our clothes are.

That being said - the most sustainable clothing is the clothing you already have. In your draws and cupboards, in bags and boxes. The best way to be a good steward of the earth resources is to use them and to take care of them.

Here is a helpful illustration by Sarah Lazarovic that helps me when thinking about the sustainability spectrum of clothing.

Start with what you have

I like to get out all my clothes at least once a year and go through them. Try them on, check them for holes or other issues. I then choose what I want to keep, what I need to fix and what I want to part with. Also in this process I normally find a gap in my items where I don’t have something I need so will have to make a plan to get some things new.

I have done a few swap shops with friends where we have swapped excess clothes or accessories. Otherwise I take items that I am not going to use anymore but are in a good condition to my local charity shop.

If your clothes are in a bad condition then you can try find somewhere that recycles textiles near you. A lot of large supermarket car parks in the UK have recycling points for various things like this. Recycle Now is a great site to search for local recycling options if you live in the UK.

Repairing

In terms of repairing items there are various things we can do to extend the life of clothes. Simple things like sewing buttons back on or mending little holes.

Then there are bigger fixes like letting out clothes that we have grown out of, patching bigger holes and other altering jobs. Depending on your sewing skills you may, or may not, be up for this.

You can also outsource your mending! You may have a local seamstress that does repairs. Or a local cobbler who is be able to resole your shoes for a quarter of the price of a new pair.

In other good news more and more sustainable brands are offering repairing services for their products. So check brands to see if there is an option of returning it to them to get fixed.

Any repairing we can do (or get someone else to do) greatly extends the life, and therefore the sustainability, of our clothes.

Once we have exhausted our skills, and others, in the use and repair of the clothing we already have we will probably have to get in new items. To do this in an environmentally friendly way we can shop second hand or buy new from more sustainable brands. I’ll be going into the details of these options in my upcoming blogs!