Noemi Romero Vera |
Madrid (EFE).- The global ecological campaign Green Friday (Green Friday) has emerged as a sustainable alternative to Black Friday (Black Friday) but threatens to evolve into a “confusing strategy” that does not help sustainability, warned EFE of several specialists The sector.
“Lower consumption and higher quality of products that are really needed should prevail,” explained Paloma García, director of organic fashion company The Circular Project, because “the anchor in this type of ‘marketing’ is ‘ green’ or ‘black’ does not mean facilitating the transition to low impact consumption” and, even more, it induces “unnecessary purchases using the price strategy and offers”.
The Green Friday initiative was promoted by the European Commission with the support of environmental organizations such as Ecodes, WWF and Ecoserveis and arrived in Spain in 2015 “with the aim of mitigating the current model of compulsive buying and raising awareness responsible consumption and the impact of products,” according to Luis Suárez, WWF conservation coordinator.
However, García believes that responsible consumption should not be the only solution to the impact of the textile industry, but must include the relocation of companies, “seamless” support from the public administration for production local and “fair prices”. who value “the work behind the quality”.
Responsible consumption
Brendan James, marketing coordinator of sustainable business Ecoalf, adds that “responsible drinking means not only buying organic cotton t-shirts, but also investing in quality, timeless clothing made from recycled materials”.
James recalls that since 1996 the amount of clothing purchased in the EU has increased by 40% per person and that fast fashion clothing of such poor quality that “it prevents recycling” at the end of its useful life, are used “less than 5 times, on average 35 days, before throwing them away.”
Another dissenting voice with the Green Friday strategy is that of the director and founder of the Slow Fashion Next platform, Gema Gómez, because “it is about promoting consumption based on what is really necessary, giving away things or experiences that do not negatively affect the environment.
The problem lies in “industry overproduction”, based on obsolescence: “The programmed, which has to do with the low quality of the clothes we buy, and the perceived, linked to fashion.”
Gómez is committed to reducing the amount of water and plastic used, as well as alternatives to toxic chemicals, such as “the 580 grams of toxic substances needed to produce 1 kilo of polyester or the 2,700 liters of water for a cotton T-shirt.”
Use of regenerative materials
For this reason, he raises the need for “brands or entrepreneurial initiatives that begin to use regenerative materials, whose production and consumption promote biodiversity and capture or sequester CO2 from the atmosphere”.
Among them are the projects of the artist Paula Ulargui, who seeks “a connection between the human and the plant” and makes clothes from living organic materials and biodegradable materials, as well as “a palette of fabrics based on gelatin, water, glycerin or agar”.
Ulargui studied and discovered how to grow plants inside fabrics, looking for seeds and new ways to grow that could dye clothes. “As creators – he says – we must understand what use can be made of each material and what impact it can have”.
Another initiative is that of Planeta Dots, whose creators defend that “there is nothing more sustainable than what already exists” and, for this reason, they recover textile waste or disused fabrics from incinerators, dumps or textile donations from the inhabitants of their environment “to extend its useful life”.