The Red, White, and Green

With the growing awareness of environmental issues has emerged a growing market for eco goods — fashion and cosmetics, in particular. This month’s Lucky magazine, for instance, touts on its cover “Eco Special! The best of green fashion, beauty, and shopping.” I think it’s great that “green” is starting to creep into the vocabulary of the average American consumer — and the eco-friendly clothing and shoes featured by Lucky this month certainly are great-looking — but I think it’s important to remember the first two incredibly essential tenets of the three R’s of the environment: reduce and reuse. It’s pretty easy to remember both in this economy. 

• Reduce. What do you really need to make you happy? Is it a new pair of platform pumps (even if they are eco-conscious)? Or would breaking bread with friends or going for a hike give you as much pleasure? Every purchase you make has its cost on the environment, whether it’s the carbon emissions released to ship that item to the store, or that product’s eventual destiny in a landfill (not everything can be recycled forever).
• Reuse. The next time you’re about to throw your worn-out shoes or handbag in the trash, march them over to your local shoemaker. For $20, I got another year of life out of my beloved black ballet flats: a hole patched right up, a new pair of soles, and the scuff marks buffed out. Like new! And it only cost me one-seventh the price of a brand-new pair. (You’ll be adding to your beneficence by helping out a local business, too.)

Now, Lucky is a magazine about shopping, after all, and I’m certainly not trying to say that you shouldn’t ever go out and buy eco-friendly goods. It’s laudable that so many designers are starting to realize that every industry — even fashion — needs to rethink how it impacts the environment. And if you’re on your last pair of hole-ridden sneakers, why not choose woven-hemp, biodegradable, sweatshop-free ones for your next pair? But the world’s environmental problems will not be solved by consumption of green goods alone. Americans currently make up 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 25 percent of the world’s energy. Consumerism as we’ve know it — at least in my lifetime — will have to change.

–Jennifer Grayson

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