One of the most polluting sectors today and whose specific weight in the market is enormous is the textile sector. The materials used in this sector by companies and consumed by us, the citizens, in many occasions have a huge ecological backpack in the form of consumption and emissions for their manufacture absolutely unsustainable.
However, this should not necessarily be the case since there are sufficient resources, diverse and sustainable raw materials of sufficient quality to avoid the high environmental costs of this manufacturing industry.
Finding the best alternatives for manufacturing that favor the protection of our planet means to put in value those sustainable raw materials such as organic cotton, recycled textile materials, bamboo fiber, vegetable leather or rattan and hemp, organic linen or silk … are just some of the sustainable materials that can be used by the textile industry reducing environmental costs to a great extent.
Consumers, in turn, must become aware of the need to introduce these materials into our consumer ideology and therefore buy and consume with the awareness that what we buy reduces the weight of this industry on the planet.
In this sense, the EU itself, through its rural development policy and its RESET Interreg Europe project program, proposes good practices for the textile manufacturing industry that emphasize sustainable production and consumption.
Best practices that emphasize sustainable development in: “a) textile recycling, b) water and energy management, c) sustainable chemistry, d) smart textiles, e) natural fibers and f) new materials, which have served as inspiration to develop new projects and own initiatives in the 9 participating European regions.“
“Thanks to the series of good practices exchanged at RESET, several of them have served as a source of inspiration to raise new projects in the European textile industry.”
This drive to value sustainable textile materials has a clear exponent in the OEKO-TEX certification, “which allows consumers and companies to make responsible decisions that protect our planet for future generations“.
OEKO-TEX, develops “test methods and limit values for the textile and leather industry”, providing “important impulses for innovation” and making “a significant contribution to the development of high quality products. Our mission is to build confidence in textiles and leather and their production.“
About 20% of the contaminated drinking water (in addition to 35% of the microplastics discharged into the sea and 10% of global carbon emissions) in the world is the responsibility of the textile sector and its production processes, which makes the commitment to the use of sustainably produced textile materials and their certification as such even more important.
In short, the need to bet, not only from the production side by adopting sustainable textile processes and materials, but from ourselves, the consumers, for the “slow fashion” model or sustainable fashion as an innovative alternative to reduce the great impact of the textile industry on the environment, should be an imperative at this time of great anxiety for the planet and society both present and future.
In this sense, at Ekohunters we have always been committed to sustainable production and consumption in accordance with raw materials and a way of producing that respects the planet and its resources.
Visit Ekohunters.com and make your commitment to sustainability tangible.
