Sustainability Matters in Fiber Craft Industries…and Beyond
The work of industry is hazardous to ecologies. There’s no way around that fact. Corporations (and small businesses with corporate mindsets) employ “greenwashing” as a strategy to muddy the marketing language used in touting their products’ environmental advantages. Greenwashing can trick a well-intentioned, empathetic customer who just wants to feel good about what they buy.
I understand the appeal of simplification. But I’m going to try to resist the urge to use it when addressing sustainability. Because I think it’s a stronger business practice to unveil what I value and what guides my own purchasing decisions. That way, you can make your informed decisions about what to believe, what to buy, and what not to buy. The value of a blog, to my mind, is to push past the sorts of empty marketing gimmicks that still hold sway; a blog is a space to examine things with greater care (and greater complexity).
We Commit to Sustainability in Three Different Ways
- Lessening the environmental impact of the products created for our business to sell
- Supporting, nourishing, and challenging the creativity of our community
- Avoiding marketing appeals to customers that encourage overconsumption
3) WHY NOT FOSTER AND FEED INTO A YARN ADDICTION per say?
Let me tackle this list from bottom to top. #3 is not a concern that typifies commonplace discussions of sustainability. In our fiber craft industry, I see many appeals performed to, for, and by consumers where the term “addiction” is put front-row-centre. Yarn, wool, rope, ribbons, and thread are often sold with relatable appeals to consumers’ “shopping addictions”: to their growing fiber stashes (#yarnaddict is a well populated hashtag at this point); and to their emptying pocketbooks (if you’re on social media, then you’ve more than likely seen a recent reel trend where crocheters, knitters, macramers, and weavers are self-deprecatingly frying/cooking/blending their fibers. The joke is of course that fiber is more important to afford than food or safety in this challenging economy).
These appeals are humorous–of course they are. But they also perform loaded idealogical work that encourages over-consumption, rapid consumption, and waste. To add, there’s even a trivialization of the severity of addiction, food insecurity, and poverty at play.
I swear to you that I laugh perpetually and love a good joke! This one, while relatable, and while communitarian, establishes points of contact that actually lessen our capacity to engage with one another more generatively. It would seem short-sighted for a fiber supply business who’s passionate about offering sustainable materials to turn around and foster a wasteful relationship with those materials. Simply put: I’m not going to sell you on recycled fiber by encouraging you to buy more of it than you can use. I’m not going to do that because, as a business, I’m committed to lessening landfills and decreasing environmental impact.
We need to do this not simply for the sake of a “sustainable product” badge. We all need to internalize practices of consumption that are sustainable too.
2. WHAT DOES CREATIVE DRIVE HAVE TO DO WITH SUSTAINABILITY?
Late Capitalism has conditioned us to pursue short-term solutions over longterm growth. Capitalism doesn’t really encourage a sense of futurity at all, does it? Recently, I spent some time doing a deep dive into Etsy’s current CEO, Josh Silverman. When that dastardly platform forced Unfettered Co into Vacation Mode unexpectedly, I wanted to better understand the automaton (and corporate personality) that had harmed my small business. While the fullsome workings of any organization cannot be reduced to the public statements of their CEO, those rehearsed statements spoken repeatedly in interviews (and likely in board meetings) do offer something of an “executive summary.”
Josh (yup, not even going to extend the respect conveyed by using his last name) talks pridefully about his first BIG gesture when he became Etsy Inc.’s CEO. For years, he proclaims, hundreds of Etsy employees had been working on “The Etsy Studio,” a new wing of Etsy that was designed to focus on promoting craft supplies. Within 48 hours of his new CEO gig, Josh shut-er-down. Why? Because, as he shamelessly put it, The Etsy Studio would have taken at least 3 years to demonstrate its value. Under his watch, Etsy has invested exclusively, unabashedly, and unapologetically in the sorts of short-term gains aimed to show up immediately in sales revenue. THAT, Josh claims, is what helps sellers. But, proscriptively, it only helps the sorts of sellers who are neither selling crafting materials nor handmade goods. Those of us who do both know well the value of slow time.
Short term revenue gains at the expense of longterm investment. This is our corporate hellscape.
While I know that The Etsy Studio, a faction designed to promote craft supplies wouldn’t have necessarily altered Etsy Inc.’s trajectory, it would have gone some distance to foster a more self-sustaining ecology on the Etsy platform. It would have nourished sellers who retain a commitment to handmade goods: to the effortful process of selecting materials, to the slow processes of creating with them, to the onerous tasks of marketing and selling them. Small businesses selling craft supplies within The Etsy Studio could have cross-marketed for small businesses selling craft made from those materials. There would have been interesting opportunities for alignment of value there and cross-pollination. But the idea was scrapped.
Unfettered co’s practices, as a small business, have always aimed to help makers sustain their creative drive. If you’re ever in doubt, then observe the happenings of a Mystery Box Challenge. Or, better yet, partake in one. It’s a lot of work to run a business that doesn’t simply sling supplies: to run a fiber supply business that doesn’t only encourage the entry-level makes that are intended for resale and craft commerce. But we do that work. We do that work because investing time and effort into helping creative people sustain their sense of imagination, experimentation, and play is a longterm investment that ensures a sense of futurity for fiber art and fiber craft industries.
1. WHILE SUSTAINABILITY NEITHER ENDS NOR BEGINS WITH ANY INDIVIDUAL PRODUCT, UNFETTERED CO WAS THE FIRST FIBER SUPPLIER IN NORTH AMERICA TO OFFER RECYCLED COTTON TO CRAFTERS ON A LARGE SCALE
So let’s talk a little bit about our recycled cotton. When working with my longterm recycled cotton supplier, I always strive to translate what she’s already producing for her local markets into our North American one. To me, it’s important to avoid adopting a marketing stance that positions me (a white, western woman) in a position of authority over the countries that produce cotton. The questions I ask when engaging in an order always have to do with the domestic uses of a fiber in question: Why do you make this? How and where do you find uses for it? I think this approach boils down to sustainability, in a way, because it encourages the finding of different uses/markets for a product that already exists vs. creating a brand new one. The former strategy takes its cues directly from producer countries, while the latter asserts a Western imperialism that’s dislodged completely from the labours, intentions, and enmeshments of production.
Our cotton has three different stages of production. The first (which corresponds to the top fiber bundle in the above pic) involves scrap collection. Clippings and discards are collected from textile production practices: these are the scrappy amounts that fall to factory floor and that are cut away before being transformed into a fast fashion garment. Fast fashion is one of the industries destroying the planet. But we can help to make its expenditures stretch a little further than they would, and we do this by adopting different uses for its wastes. These wastes would be headed for a landfill and would end up in oceans, so adopting scraps before they’ve been tossed seems like a worthwhile endeavour!
Once pre-consumer garment scraps are collected and compiled in colour categories, they are blended into a fuzzy pulp (you can see what it looks like in the middle pile above). That fuzzy pulp is sometimes wound into a thick cotton yarn roving, and is otherwise twisted into tiny filaments that become each strand of our rope/string.
If you look very closely at any one of our rolls of recycled cotton, you’ll notice differently coloured speckles throughout. We lovingly call these our “freckles,” and we’ve even gone as far to name our famed colour “freckleberry” after them.
Freckles are our recycled cotton’s beauty spots. They tell the story of the cotton’s former lives, and they enrich it with character. Our freckles remain visible because no external dyes are used in the production process. We create colour exclusively from compiling, blending, and pulverizing scraps. We do this because it adds yet another layer of sustainability to our recycled cotton. Repurposing discarded scraps is part of the equation, but so too is avoiding over-dyeing practices. It’s not just cotton production that devastates ecologies; it’s also textile dyeing. The toxic liquid run-off from dyeing textiles infiltrates waterways and devastates marine ecologies. We love our cotton’s freckles because, in addition to their obvious charm, they mean that excess dyes have been avoided. One day, maybe consumers will demand speckled cottons only 😉
The final layer of sustainability that I’d love to share with you is that in 2020, we moved away from ordering individually-plastic-wrapped rolls of cotton. This single-use plastic seemed highly unnecessary. It was there to protect rolls from damage during the shipping journey, but we worked with our supplier to develop a single biodegradable plastic lining per box of 25-100 cotton rolls. Committing to more sustainable practices involves not simply sourcing recycled cotton. It also requires creative waste reduction systems applied to our cotton’s packaging (upon arrival to us, and upon arrival to you!)
If you’ve read this blog post, it’s probably because you’re a conscious consumer who cares about matters of sustainability and we want to give you a very big virtual hug for that. Committing to sustainability involves so much more than using wishy-washy terminology to market products. It requires a more long-form discussion, and we’re happy to begin it here.
