Can curing our shopping addiction help cure the planet?

Happy Talk: Could you give up buying clothes for a year? How about doing laundry? Christine Manby goes cold turkey, and finds it’s more than just time and money she saves

The more we buy, the more we wash, and the more microfibres end up in the sea – so how do we stop our pants ending up on our plate? (Getty)

To be human is to be a problem for the planet. We all know that by now. We consume too much. We travel too much. We simply are too much for poor old Mother Earth. But it isn’t too late. We can cut back. Stop flying. Stop eating meat. Stop buying clothes.

Five years ago, I had a year off buying clothes. Before I started, on the advice of a minimalist lifestyle website, I took the somewhat counterintuitive step of emptying my wardrobe of the things I no longer loved. It seemed like an odd thing to do. I was going to give away clothes when I’d just committed to not buying any new ones for 12 months. However, getting rid of the items of clothing I no longer wore – too small, too big, too tatty – helped me to see that I still had a wardrobe full of perfectly good stuff. Discovering that I definitely didn’t need to go shopping helped me to stop panicking that my self-imposed ban would be any kind of hardship. Of course, it wasn’t a hardship. To my shame, I found three dresses that I had barely worn, each of which had seemed like the answer to everything when I handed over my credit card.

At the end of my year of not buying clothes, I fell off the wagon and went slightly mad in the sales but it definitely changed the way I shop in the long term. Limiting my clothing choices made life easier, not harder. While I occasionally yearned for the new, new thing – I didn’t stop looking at fashion blogs – I enjoyed the freedom of having a sort of uniform. I saved a lot of time that I would have spent trawling the high street.

A washing bag will help prevent microfibres escape your clothes (Langbrett/Guppyfriend)

This year more and more people are putting a stop to their fast fashion habits as the “no buy” movement continues to gather pace. First time around, my own clothing fast was inspired by a personal financial crisis rather than any ecological concerns but now I’m on a clothing diet again in an attempt to make my footprint on the Earth just that tiny bit daintier. However, the problem with having fewer clothes is that it means they’re worn on higher rotation.

As a student, I regularly put my clothes through the “sniff test”, stretching the time between visits to the college laundry to a fortnight at least. These days, nothing seems to pass that test. One of the strange things about getting older has been that my sense of smell has become much more acute. (Or maybe it’s just that I smell worse.) Anyway, suffice to say, I do a lot more laundry now.

Designer Stella McCartney recently caused a small uproar by telling an interviewer that suits should not be cleaned, rather the dirt should be left to dry and then brushed off. McCartney went on to explain that while she considers herself to be “very hygienic”, she is not a fan of dry cleaning, or even of sticking stuff in the washing machine. She doesn’t wash her bra every time she wears it.

This last was a brave admission. While I’d bet that most of us have worn an intimate item of clothing for two days in a row at least once in our lives, it takes a courageous woman to admit it in the pages of a national newspaper. But it turns out that McCartney is not alone. A quick online search throws up a huge variety of answers to the question: “How often should I wash my bra?” There’s a strong argument for washing it every single time you wear it since it sits right under your armpits. But Readers Digest prescribes once every four wears and thirdlove.com recommends once every one or two weeks. It strikes me that there is a huge difference between wearing a bra seven days in a row and 13 days but… the more you investigate it, what seems like an unacceptably low hygiene standard is in fact a virtue because it isn’t just the manufacturing of our clothes that is putting a strain on the planet, it’s the maintaining of them too.

A city the size of Berlin releases a wash-related volume of microfibres equivalent to 500,000 plastic bags every single day

You may have eschewed the £1 bikini that Missguided launched to a mixed chorus of hysterical delight and clanging doom back in June, but every time you wash the synthetic bra or T-shirt you bought for a fiver 10 years ago, you’re contributing to another problem. When they’re washed, manmade fabrics shed minute fibres that get flushed out of the machine with the dirty water and ultimately break down into microparticles that find their way into the sea and thence into the food chain. Plankton is particularly partial to a bit of microplastic. Fish eat the plankton, we eat the fish and suddenly, “There’s a hint of old polyester bra to this endangered cod”. It also ends up in the sea salt that you put on your chips.

While earlier this year the EU’s Scientific Advice Mechanism admitted in a review of the latest research that “little is known with respect to the human health risks of nano and microplastics, and what is known is surrounded by considerable uncertainty”, the concern remains that these microparticles might act as vectors for other nasties. Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, which is used in the production of polyester, has been implicated in type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Fortunately, there is something you can do, other than give up washing altogether, to stop your undies ending up on your plate. I bought a Guppyfriend laundry bag. It looks like a pillowcase. The self-cleaning fabric bag is made of a “specially designed micro-filter material that filters out the tiniest microfibres released from textiles during washing.”

It certainly seems to work. After emptying out a bagful of mixed-fabric T-shirts, I was astonished at how many fibres had collected in the guppy bag’s seams, to be plucked out and disposed of responsibly, rather than flushed straight into the sea. Of course, added to the bin, they’re still going to landfill but the Guppyfriend doesn’t just catch the fibres. “As a part of a test program, the Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT has confirmed that the Guppyfriend Washing Bag not only reliably retains microfibres, but also protects the textiles: compared to washing without the Guppyfriend Washing Bag, 86 per cent fewer fibres shed from synthetic textiles.” This means that your clothes will look better for longer, meaning the temptation, and need, to buy new stuff will be reduced. A Guppyfriend bag is guaranteed for at least 50 washes. As one would hope. At £25 it was more expensive than half the items in my wardrobe.

It’s an imperfect solution but every little helps. The Guppyfriend website points out the mind-boggling fact that “a city the size of Berlin releases a wash-related volume of microfibres equivalent to 500,000 plastic bags every single day”.

Thinking about all that German laundry, £25 doesn’t look like such a steep price to pay when Guppyfriend is ploughing its profits back into more research designed to address the problem of single-use plastics. In the meantime, there’s the added benefit that if you do use a Guppyfriend bag, your washing machine will never be able to eat a single sock again.