The word 'Sustainability' in the fashion industry refers to the environmental impacts of making, wearing, and disposing of clothing. It's also starting to include social and economic factors.
By shopping at H.E.A., you're making a transition to sustainable shopping. And when you consign with us, you're increasing access to ethically sourced clothing.
Your shopping decisions have so much power
You aren't only helping the environment through your secondhand shopping. You're putting money back into another parents pocket, and helping my small business.
You also aren't contributing to the demand for modern day slavery and child labour.
THE TAKEAWAY
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Lowering Your Carbon Footprint
While you’re browsing from your favourite brands, consider whether you could acquire the same items secondhand.
“if everyone bought one item used instead of new this year, it would save 5.7B lbs of CO2e.” -ThredUp
Re-use and recycling offer some carbon savings because the lifetime of clothing is extended.
Most of the carbon emissions come from farming the rare materials that go into fashion. And more CO2 is produced during the manufacturing process. So instead of contributing to the problem, you’ve decided to buy some or all of your maternity wardrobe secondhand.
Second-hand Clothing Isn't travelling as far to get to your door.
Clothing makes a lot of stops before it gets to your door, or your fingertips if you're in-person shopping.
The total journey of one piece of clothing is approximately 32,000 kilometres.
That's 19,884 miles!
From the farm to the factories, then over the seas to your favourite brands. Your closet has traveled more than you have! Second-hand shrink these KM's dramatically!
"Textile manufacturing results in 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, which is more emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
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"Textile dyeing is one of the most polluting aspects of the global fashion industry, devastating the environment and posing health hazards to humans." -CNN Style
We can’t have fashion without colour, but colour poses a huge environmental and health risk to the manufacturing countries around the world.
Fast fashion leads the clothing retail market trend. The use of environmentally harmful chemicals is part of the reason the fashion industry remains the second worst polluting industry worldwide.
Historical records of the use of natural dyes extracted from vegetables, fruits, flowers, certain insects and fish dates back to 3500 BC. It wasn’t until 1856 that synthetic dyes were discovered.
It’s estimated that there are more than 3600 individual textile dyes in use by the clothing industry. The fashion industry also uses more than 8000 chemicals in various processes of textile manufacture including dyeing and printing.
An average sized textile mill (8000kg daily output production) uses about 1.6 million liters of water per day. The amount of water used in dyeing fabric varies from 30-60 Liters per KG of cloth. The overall water consumption of yarn (cotton) dyeing is about 60 liters per kg of yarn.
The World Bank estimates that 17 to 20 percent of industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing and finishing treatment given to fabric. Some 72 toxic chemicals have been identified in water solely from textile dyeing, 30 of which cannot be removed. This represents an appalling environmental problem for the clothing and textile manufacturers.
The waste water (effluent) that has been studied, contained the “presence of sulphur, naphthol, vat dyes, nitrates, acetic acid, soaps, chromium compounds and heavy metals like copper, arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, nickel, and cobalt.” Other harmful chemicals present in the water: formaldehyde based dye fixing agents, chlorinated stain removers, hydro carbon based softeners, non bio degradable dyeing chemicals. These organic materials react with many disinfectants especially chlorine and form by products (DBP’S) that are often carcinogenic and therefore undesirable.
Natural dyes may not be chemically derived, but they aren’t necessarily better. Mordants (substances such as chromium), have to be used with natural dyes to “fix” color into the fabric. These mordants are very toxic and leave the dying facilities in the waste water. Natural dyes require large quantities of water for the dyeing process, almost equal to or double that of the fiber’s own weight. About 80% of the dyes & mordants stay in the fabric, while the rest goes down the drain and into the water system.
Treating wastewater is not an economic option for the fast fashion industry. It’s another expense that drives up cost and lowers the industry’s profit margins. It’s not ethical. Polluting someone else’s backyard and not cleaning up your mess. But there’s no one to hold them accountable.
There are three possible treatment methods for the effluence, but even using all three methods does not remove all the chemicals present in the water. The three methods, physical, chemical and biological. Combination of various effluent treatment methods can remove more than 85% of unwanted matter. The textile industry continues to search for an economical solution to decolorize the nearly 200 billion liters of colored effluent produced annually. There’s no solution for our consumption problem.
Consume Less
Wear your clothing longer
Research has shown that "extending the average life of clothes by just three months of active use per item would lead to a 5 to 10 percent reduction in each [item’s] carbon, water and waste footprints,” says Sonali Diddi, a design and textile researcher at Colorado State University.
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There are seven unique steps required to process cotton before it can be made into clothing.
the average growing season is 150 to 160 days from planting until harvest. Because cotton is a crop, it requires weed control, insect controls and irrigation. Soil conservation is an issue affecting cotton growth. Wind and water erosion of soil is damaging to the plants stem. Any damage to the stem harms a cotton yield.
The crop must be harvested before weather can damage or completely ruin its quality and reduce yield. Harvesting is done by hands or by machine, different practices are used around the world. The cotton seeds are separated from the crop before being transported to the Gin.
This is where the seed, stalk, stem, leaves, and any other VFM (visual foreign matter) is removed from the cotton. Heat is used to reduce the moisture in the cotton so that it flows through the equipment properly. Cotton is then moved to a warehouse for storage until it's shipped to a textile mill for use.
Once the baled fibre from the gin arrives at the purification plant, the fibres are placed into a vat where they're wet out and pressed into a dense cake. The cakes go into a kier where the oils and waxes are removed by pumping alkali through the cake to achieve the desired absorbency.
After fiber purification, a fiber finish is added to aid in further processing. The fibre is then dried and put into bales, which are used
"The marketing of cotton is a complex operation that includes all transactions involving buying, selling or reselling from the time the cotton is ginned until it reaches the textile mill. Growers usually sell their cotton to a local buyer or merchant after it has been ginned and baled, but if they decide against immediate sale, they can store it and borrow money against it."Textile Value Chain
The cotton is combed by a carding machine, which finishes the job of cleaning and straightening the fibers, and makes them into a soft, untwisted rope called a sliver. The Silver is then converted into yarn, by another manufacturing process, and that yarn is what is used to make fabric. Machines called looms weave cotton yarns into fabrics the same way the first hand-weaving frames did
The woven fabric, called gray goods, is sent to a finishing plant where it is bleached, pre-shrunk, dyed, printed and given a special finish. This fabric is then sent to manufacturing pants where it's made into clothing.
That's quite the process and there's a lot of travel and energy that goes into the preparation of the cotton before it is even made into clothes.
“A simple cotton T-shirt doesn’t seem so simple when you begin to trace the various steps in the now-standard vast global process from cotton farm to clothing shop.” -Matthew Green
Even before clothing is made it has accumulated a fair amount of land, sea or air miles. Producing a single shirt relies on coordinating an international supply chain. An average t-shirt travels over 39,000 miles to get to North America.
Your cotton T-shirt label may say “made in Cambodia”, but the raw materials came from a different country. Cambodia doesn’t grow cotton. Nor does it spin cotton or even manufacture artificial fibers. Instead, Cambodian factories import textiles from abroad, and make a finished product.
Before your Cambodia-labeled T-shirt leaves Cambodia, the raw materials have already traveled nearly 10,300km (or, 6,200 miles) by sea and rail. - Fast Company
From the farm to the factories, then over the seas to your favourite brands. Your closet has traveled more than you have! Second-hand shrink these KM's dramatically!
THE TAKE AWAY
Secondhand Clothing Isn't travelling far to get to your door.
And you don’t have to worry about the carbon footprint of the raw materials either.
Less travel time, means less carbon emissions.
Try this activity with your kids or with your friends Clothing Map
Where does cotton come from?
Resources
https://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/story/where.cfm
https://sourcingjournal.com/market-data/cotton-data/world-cotton-124059/
When you decide to buy secondhand during your pregnancy your choice makes an impact. Three of us benefit. H.E.A., the person I’m selling the clothes for, and you. You’ve created a circular economy whose benefits stay local.
you’re saving money on your clothes when you’re shopping with us.
you’re getting paid for them when another expecting mom enters our circle. And the cycle continues.
Everyone benefits and continues to benefit. And I (through H.E.A.) get to keep doing what I love!
That sense of community. That feeling that I’m making a difference is why I love this little business I started back in 2015! Please tell your friends about us to ensure this circle keeps turning!
When you choose secondhand, you’re breaking out of the fast fashion consumerism cycle. If secondhand doesn't work for all your pregnancy needs, buying new, if done right, can also help the cycle.
Buying quality clothing that can be handed down is the best way to go. These pieces come with a higher price tag, but they’ll have the best resell value. And the most value to offer the next person in the cycle. Remember Slow fashion resells, fast fashion ends up as rags.
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Buying second-hand clothing and thrifting have become quite popular recently and for many good reasons. Buying used clothing has a bunch of benefits to not only you but the environment and your community as well.
As we know, maternity clothes can be quite expensive, and you’re only wearing that clothing for nine months. So buying second-hand clothes for maternity makes sense for a variety of reasons.
Here are some of the main benefits.
1) It Will Save You Money
Purchasing second-hand maternity clothes will go a long way for your wallet. Since retailers are likely to lose you as a customer after your pregnancy, the markup on maternity clothes is higher than on regular items.
Buying second-hand, you’ll never pay close to full price for an item, and there are plenty of high-quality pieces from great brands that are ready to be reused.
Take the time to seek out the best value for you. Some thrift stores may capitalize on the vintage shopping trend to price second-hand clothing higher than it should be. Explore the second-hand shops in your community to see who has the best deals for your budget.
2) It’s Good for the Environment
When you buy second-hand, you're doing the environment a big favor.
You are reducing the number of resources and consumption needed in order to produce more clothing. It also prevents used clothing from ending up in a landfill. This reduces your environmental impact and goes a long way toward promoting sustainable and ethical fashion.
Especially in maternity wear, you’ll find that second-hand pieces are not far off from buying a brand new item and still have a lot of wear in them. So when you go out to purchase your maternity clothes, know that by shopping second-hand, you’re helping the planet!
3) It Benefits Your Well-Being
Optimizing your physical and mental well-being during your pregnancy is a major priority.
Mentally, when you buy second-hand, you're reducing your impact on your budget and on the environment. This goes a long way towards promoting your peace of mind during your pregnancy.
Physically, buying second-hand clothing reduces the likelihood of interacting with chemicals and materials used in the production process of the clothing. This is why it’s always recommended you wash your new clothing right after you buy them. When you buy second-hand maternity clothes, you are buying an item that’s likely been washed several times and has been freed of any of these hazardous materials.
4) You Give Back to the Community
When you buy second-hand clothing, you are giving back to your local community.
Maternity pants and maternity jeans donated or sold to consignment shops benefit the employees working at these shops and the mothers selling the items. It promotes a system of repurposing and reusing, and you’ll come to love the items just as the previous owner did.
At Happily Ever After Maternity, we’re committed to giving back to the local maternity community and giving new purpose to second-hand clothing. You can sustainably shop all your favourite maternity brands in one place. When you’re done, we’ll resell your clothes and put money back in your pocket!
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You can choose to donate your clothing to us. What we can't sell we'll donate back into our local community.
Your donations help us cover part of shipping costs not paid by the customer. We charge a flat shipping rate of $10 or ship our clothing for free.
The reality is we subsidize the shipping price on all the orders we ship out. The average order costs $18 to ship domestically. The money we make from selling donations helps us continue to offer our great low shipping rate.
If you'd like to donate your clothing, contact us. We'll send you a free shipping label.
There's nothing more exciting than going through new clothing arrivals! It's like Christmas. Opening the box, we never know exactly what's inside!
Get in touch, and let us know if you'd like to donate or consign with us!
You can read more about our consignment and donation guidelines here.
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Slow fashion is driven by style, durability, and the 3 R's reduce, reuse, recycle. It's a great way to save money, and to protect the environment for your baby.
Feel PROUD about your second-hand purchase! Why? Because you’re using less water, exploiting less natural resources, releasing less pollution into the world, and dropping your carbon footprint.
There are enormous benefits for our environment when you choose clothing that’s been previously loved. Read on and you'll be really impressed by everything you've accomplished simply by purchasing part (or all) of your maternity wardrobe from us!
We can’t live without water, our bodies need clean drinking water to survive and thrive. Tons of water goes into the clothes we wear. From the farms that grow the fabrics, to the factories that produce the textiles and dies, water is consumed at every step of the production process.
On average it takes 400 gallons (1514.16 Litres) to produce one white t-shirt and 1800 gallons (6813.74 Litres) to produce one pair of jeans.
What does that mean?
An average person drinks about 0.66 gallons (2.5 litres) of water per day. In a year, an average person consumes 241.06 gallons (912.5 litres) of water.
Making one pair of jeans and one t-shirt consumes more water than a years supply of drinking water for one person.
Let that sink in for a second.
How many years of drinking water are in your closet right now?
Treating fabrics and dying them results in a lot of water pollution. Chemicals are used during fiber production, dyeing, bleaching, and wet processing of each piece of clothing.
The industrial process of the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of the worlds water pollution. In countries with no strict environmental regulations untreated wastewater is dumped untreated, back into the local waterways. This contamination eventually reaches the ocean and spreads globally.
Another source of water pollution is during the farming process. The use of fertilizers for cotton production heavily pollutes runoff waters and the water that evaporates back into our atmosphere.
If the first world hadn’t moved its manufacturing and industrial farming to third world countries, would these businesses still be operating the same way? Would they pollute and exploit their own backyards like they have foreign soil?
Every time you wash a synthetic fibre like polyester (rayon, nylon ect.) microplastics are released into your water. These microplastics are making their way into our diets through the food chain and accumulating in our bodies.
Since the release of microplastics from our clothes diminishes during a piece of clothing’s lifespan, the older a piece of clothing is the less plastic it sheds back into our water. This isn’t true of all synthetic fabrics, some shed the same throughout their lifespan, but it’s great to know your efforts are reducing microplastics.
Do you know where your drinking water comes from? Do you know where your wastewater is released? Is your waste water treated before it’s released?
Fast fashion is creating clothing that is disposable. How? The quality of clothing doesn’t allow it to be worn for long and has no life left to be passed on. This clothing ends up in our landfills. This trend is on the rise. It’s estimated that only 15% of clothing is re-worn or repurposed, the other 85% is thrown away. Why? Quality, it cant’ be reworn and human nature, people won’t recycle if it’s not convenient. According to the US Environmental protection agency, textiles have one of the poorest recycling rates of any reusable material.
Synthetic fibers make up about 72% of our clothing. These fibers are made from fossil fuels and are essentially plastic. Synthetic fibers like polyester, can take up to 200 years to decompose.
Do you know what your local thrift store or SH store does with clothing that isn’t suitable to be re-worn or repurposed? Are they adding the clothing to the landfill or using textile recycling?
The fashion industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions. These greenhouse gasses are produced during production, manufacturing, and transportation of the millions of garments produced each year. Most of the clothing we wear is produced in China, Bangladesh, or India. These countries (parts or whole) are still coal powered. Coal burning is a big polluter and producer of carbon emissions.
You don’t have to worry about any of this when you shop second-hand. Your clothing isn’t traveling the world, and by increasing the life cycle of the clothing you’re wearing, your reducing the impact its production had. Your extending the life of that environmental cost.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the rapid loss of the rainforest for mass farming operations that feed the first world. But did you realize that some of that deforestation is for plantations of trees that are used to make wood-based fabrics such as rayon, viscose, and modal? We hadn’t.
The loss of the rainforest endangers ecosystems, and indigenous populations. It also has global implications. The loss of these trees changes weather patterns, endangers global water supply, and fast tracks climate change.
Trees absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale, but they also absorb some of the greenhouse gases that we produce. Greenhouse gasses trap heat. As these gasses enter the atmosphere, global warming increases.
According to Ruth Nogueron, a researcher for World Resources Institute’s forest program, since the demand for paper products has diminished as technology allows offices and communications to go digital, “the paper companies are looking for alternative markets. Because setting up a pulp and paper mill is a big investment, and you need to have a long-term financial strategy. The emergence of markets for new pulp products like textiles has been growing over the past couple of years.”
Read on and you’ll be amazed by the impact your shopping decisions have on our planet and our economy. To keep things light and to give you as much information as possible, we’ve decided to break this info up into multiple blog posts.
Here's the link to the other posts in this series
Money & Community
This blog post is going to focus on money.
To learn more about the environmental and social benefits, hit the links below. We’ve decided to break this post up into multiple blog posts to keep things light and to give you as much information as possible.
When you shop second-hand, you’re paying a fraction of retail. Saving money on your maternity wardrobe gives you more buying power for other essentials. It just makes sense to save money on a wardrobe you’re going to wear for less than a year. Shop quality and keep your look by shopping maternity consignment. Shopping small means your hard earned dollars stay local and strengthen your community.
By choosing HEA consignments you’re creating a circular economy centered around parenthood. You’re saving money on your clothes, you’re getting paid for them when you’re done, then another expecting person saves money on their clothes. And the cycle continues. Everyone benefits! Money and clothing gets exchanged domestically not globally. You’re buying decisions are having an impact on someone just like you, and benefiting you both.
Consignments have created a community of parents that is quality and care driven. You are “renting” your clothes for a short time, then using a third party, like HEA Maternity, to continue the cycle of care driven value-based second-hand purchasing. HEA was founded by Nancy Skuce, at the time, a new mom who wanted to make clothing accessible and affordable. She later learned about the environmental benefits and realized that the impact of her small business was much larger than she’d ever imagined! Some really impressive things do come from small packages! Shopping from and giving back to the second-hand cycle keeps the local community strong!
Small money is local money. It can also be called slow money or domestic cash. There are no big CEO’s and wage disparity in small money. No negative side effect, no exploited labour. You can shop with a clear conscience. When you choose second-hand, you’re breaking out of the consumerism cycle. You’re a change maker. You’re bettering the world.
You don’t have to give up your favourite brands when you shop second-hand. That’s the beauty of second-hand shopping! You aren’t compromising on anything, you’re simply saving money.