Hi! I’m Isabel,
Founder of My Earthable
Did you know that Americans consume 17,030 tons of textiles annually? More than 66.4% of what is consumed ends up in landfills!
Wanting to adopt sustainable practices, I tried finding places in my neighborhood that could do magic with leftover fabric but could not find any. So, I donated my good clothes to the Salvation Army and disposed of the old ones in our garbage thinking that I had done my part to protect the planet. However, I was shocked to find out that most of the donated clothes ended up in landfills in America or made their way to countries like Ghana where close to half of the clothes were tossed into landfills.
Why? Fast Fashion. There was a time when fashion consisted of only four seasons per year, but now, it has increased to eleven—nearly one every month! Fashion brands make up for the losses in unsold goods by reducing the quality of the fabric used. This in turn causes the clothes to wear down faster making it difficult to reuse them.
Searching online for sustainability practices to adopt, I stumbled upon an article on the National Geographic website that talked about how cloth bags made from new fabric were the opposite of sustainable, requiring thousands of uses per bag to offset the carbon footprint generated. That article inspired me to create My Earthable—an exclusive website for cloth bags made from pre-owned clothes.
Wanting to adopt sustainable practices, I tried finding places in my neighborhood that could do magic with leftover fabric but could not find any. So, I donated my good clothes to the Salvation Army and disposed of the old ones in our garbage thinking that I had done my part to protect the planet. However, I was shocked to find out that most of the donated clothes ended up in landfills in America or made their way to countries like Ghana where close to half of the clothes were tossed into landfills.
Why? Fast Fashion. There was a time when fashion consisted of only four seasons per year, but now, it has increased to eleven—nearly one every month! Fashion brands make up for the losses in unsold goods by reducing the quality of the fabric used. This in turn causes the clothes to wear down faster making it difficult to reuse them.
Searching online for sustainability practices to adopt, I stumbled upon an article on the National Geographic website that talked about how cloth bags made from new fabric were the opposite of sustainable, requiring thousands of uses per bag to offset the carbon footprint generated. That article inspired me to create My Earthable—an exclusive website for cloth bags made from pre-owned clothes.
