Tackling climate change isn’t something that can be done on your own - we need everyone to play a part in reducing our impact on this planet.
Nearly everything we do releases some amount of carbon into the atmosphere, but how much depends on a huge number of factors. This means that you can increase or decrease your carbon footprint with your everyday choices.
For example, the food you buy from your local supermarket has a carbon footprint attached to it. This is because it requires machinery and resources to grow, harvest, package and transport it to where you bought it from. Then, more energy is expended when you cook that food, which adds even more to its carbon footprint.
But simply by purchasing environmentally considered clothing, you can reduce your carbon footprint. If you choose to buy organic, or recycled then no chemicals will be used in its production reducing resources used further, thus lowering the overall carbon footprint. What you’re wearing, drinking and even eating makes a big difference, as vegetarian and vegan diets have much smaller carbon footprints than consuming meat or other animal products. Using 100% renewable electricity, opting for local or ‘already running’ public transport instead of your car can shrink that carbon footprint right down.
This is how we look at our carbon management.
At TOBEFRANK we limit our carbon as much as possible and where we can’t we choose to offset it . Many companies offset their carbon, which is either paying money to a third party to do the work or even better, do the work themselves. This can be achieved through projects for example involving planting trees which turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.
However in many cases brands and retailers can be pretty thoughtless when it comes to carbon footprint management. For example, they might produce their clothing in North China, their mill is based in South China, the mill buys the spun yarn from Italy, weaves it in their larger mill in Cambodia and the original cotton farm ironically was in China. Already before the fabric has even been cut it it has a huge carbon footprint. Then they decide to offset it, simply throwing money at the issue instead of improving. Some see offsetting as an easy way to continue business as usual. We believe, should be the last resort.
If we at TOBEFRANK use organic cotton, it’s from a farm in Istanbul, it travels down the road, then its spun and finished all in the same postcode. Keeping our carbon footprint low. Of course we are still producing carbon dioxide, through our machine running, water recycling and colour dying, however, we are tracking this so we know where and how we can improve this.
