season 5, episode 2 - “to dye for” by alden wicker
in today's episode, we review to dye for: how toxic fashion is making us sick - and how we can fight back by investigative journalist, alden wicker. the tl;dr: of this book is that everyone needs to read this book! truly, it is one of the most compelling, terrifying, and action-inspiring books about the fashion industry i have read in a long time. no matter whether you make all your own clothes, buy all your clothes, or fall somewhere in between the two extremes, i am confident you will walk away from this book making different decisions when it comes to your clothing.
other things mentioned in this episode:
learn natural dyeing with the exploring natural dyes series and natural dyeing 101
come see nature’s glamour in person this october in winnipeg
fashion revolution’s most recent report on the state of global fast fashion
learn more about the one year one outfit project from fibreshed
bring the magic of natural dyes into your home and classroom with the exploring natural dyes series, written in age-appropriate language for ages 4+. step into your conscious life with a little help from ash and yarrow atelier, where we build slow sustainable living crafted around everyday magic & ritual. never miss a thing by joining ash's newsletter.
transcript
snort & cackle - season 5, episode 2 - to dye for by alden wicker
ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast, the podcast where work and ritual intersect. I'm your host, Ash Alberg of Sunflower Knit and Yarrow Atelier, and I'm an artist and educator specializing in natural dyes and slow fashion. This special season, we'll be diving deep into some of the research I'm doing on both of these topics. Consider it an extended version of the Snort and Cackle Book Club. Follow us on Instagram @SnortandCackle, #SnortandCackleBookClub, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and find your complete show notes and transcripts at ashalberg.com/podcast. Looking to bring the magic of natural dyes into your home or classroom? Check out the new Exploring Natural Dyes series, a full K-12 curriculum written by Ash with the support of Manitoba Arts Council's Artists in Schools program. Teach natural dyeing to kids aged four and up and learn alongside them with hands-on activities, dye recipes, and more resources. Find the full curriculum at ashalberg.com/natural-dyeing-with-kids.
Welcome back to Snort and Cackle. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the podcast. This is the podcast where work and ritual intersect.
And in our past seasons, the episodes have been a combo of me interviewing other magical folks and workers and makers and ritual makers, which honestly is all of us. Ritual, both formal and informal, is a very kind of key part of the human experience. And sometimes we build entire systems around ritual and other times, we aren't even aware that we are doing it.
And I love to kind of interrogate that and see for the folks who are creating beautiful things in the world, where their intentional ritual and unconscious rituals kind of come into play with that work and with that magic that they are making and bringing to the masses. And then also looking at my own rituals. I am your host, Ash Alberg.
I am an artist and educator, and I work quite extensively slash have devoted my life to natural dyes and slow fashion and the places that those intersect. I started my business Sunflower Knit as a knitwear designer and natural dyer of yarns, and that has snowballed into becoming a whole life in fibreshed advocacy, looking at local textile economies and relationship with place and the that we can make from that place, and in particular, natural dyes. And I live on Treaty One territory in central Canada.
So that is where my experiences largely lie. And I love chatting with folks about their relationships with their materials that they work with both living and otherwise. And, and yeah, seeing what it is that we make of these things.
So as a natural dyer, and as an artist, I make worlds for folks to enter into. I sell products for them to make their own worlds through my business Sunflower Knit. I teach classes through Sunflower Knit and host an online community where folks have access 24 seven to a lot of those same things, and also have opportunities to come together virtually via the magic of zoom.
And, and then I also teach in person and online. I work with kids in schools and teach natural dyeing through that. The natural dye curriculum that I've written for that is now available for folks.
You can check out my website for that. And I make textile art and multidisciplinary art. I come from a theater background, which is also where the world making comes into play.
And, and yeah, that's, you know, what I have been doing recently. And longer term, my goal is to someday have a physical space that folks can come and visit and interact with gardens and be learning on site, and be able to host folks in a more, more land based way than what I currently do. And the someday home of that will be Yarrow Atelier and currently Yarrow Atelier is lives in an online way.
So I spend for being such a land based, space based creature and maker, I spend a lot of time in the digital world. And I'm very interested in the way that those spaces intersect and where they don't intersect. I think that is also deeply interesting.
And so on this particular podcast, I've spoken with folks about those topics. I've spoken with folks about completely unrelated different topics that have opened up whole new worlds to my idea of what life can look like and what the world could look like in some really beautiful ways. And we also get a little nerdy.
And in past seasons, we have had the Snort and Cackle Book Club, where for each season, we identified a book about specific ritual around the world from different areas, and read a book about that ritual, and or witchcraft and magic. And then at the end of the season, there would be a kind of like a book report. For those of you who lived through the Scholastic Book Fair period of time, think of it sort of like that.
And and book reports, but like a fun one. I always thought they were fun. So that might not be a particularly helpful reference point.
But yeah, we are going to have a slightly less structured format to this special season. Snort and Cackle has been a bit on hiatus over the last couple of years. The first three seasons were supported by a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council during COVID lockdown period.
And then we were able to get another season out. And so there was a full year of episodes, which you can find in your podcast feed, wherever you are listening to this, the full catalog is available. And then it's been a little haphazard.
And I've had other things that have been more pressing. The reality is that making these podcast episodes takes quite a bit of time, honestly, between organizing folks and getting things recorded, and then getting things edited and transcriptions and getting them then out into the world. It is a lot of work.
And so it did have to go on hiatus for a chunk of time. And I'm not going to promise anything longer term than this special season that we are currently embarking on. But it is also the thing that I have heard the most positive feedback about over the last number of years.
And folks are asking when the podcast is going to return, because they love it so much. So if that has been you, thanks so much. We are back for at least this chunk of time.
And if this is your first time joining, thanks for joining. These episodes are generally on the longer side. So if you're looking for something quick and snappy, that is not this.
If you are looking for something that you can listen to while you are on a nice long road trip, that is this. And so yeah, I hope that you are maybe exposed to some new thoughts, some new ideas, some new rituals, maybe you start thinking about the rituals in your own life that you kind of build in. And this season in particular, we're going to be focusing on natural dyes and their role in history and their role in our current world and their role in our future worlds.
And like I mentioned, I've recently written curriculum for natural dyeing in the classroom. It's written for grades K through 12, early nursery through 12. And so if you are working with kids and youth of any age at that kind of primary, pre-primary level and onward, then there is some curriculum for you.
And if you don't work with kids, but you're interested, honestly, the grade 10 to 12 package is a really great starting place. It has everything that you need to really dive in, start doing a lot of hands-on exercises, start thinking about natural dyes in a more nuanced way than just let me add this plant into that pot with this cotton t-shirt and I will end up with that color. That's a fine way to get into natural dyes and also they are so much broader and more nuanced and more engaging than that.
And so the curriculum kind of gives you extra ways into starting to think about that no matter matter where you live. Of course, where I live, I'm particularly focused on a northern color palette, but you can be applying all of the exercises and also all of the thought experiments, I suppose, to that. And then you can also check out the books.
There's a list of books in each of the packages that are age-appropriate, so basically kind of building a broader vocabulary in the classroom slash home slash wherever you are working and playing with these things. And so the grade 10 to 12 has five pages of book recommendations. So yeah, great place to start if you are not working with kiddos.
If you are working with kiddos, then find the age-appropriate ones for you and them and then you can add on whatever else you might need. If video learning is more your vibe, then you can totally check out Natural Dyeing 101, my online course, which is pre-recorded videos and extra resources. And yeah, there's lots of ways into the world of natural dyes.
And right now, so I've written the curriculum, it is out now. I also am currently, I'm recording this in August of 2024, so you might be listening to this maybe this fall, maybe it's in the future. In October of this year, I will be doing a short pop-up of my art installation that I've been working on for the past couple of years called Nature's Glamour, and that is taking our northern natural dye color palette and building an entire world.
Again, I come from theater world. When I left theater world, I was making interactive installations, and I am now returning to that through the lens of my fine craft work these days. And so it's a multi-sensory installation that you can move through and you can experience using all of your senses, including taste and smell.
It's going to be delightful. And so there will be a pop-up experience of that in Winnipeg this fall in October. You can get on my newsletter if you want more details about that, whether you are local or maybe looking for an opportunity or an excuse to come visit.
And we will hopefully be able to record some really good stuff to give at least some version of a digital version of the experience and archive that and make that available so that if you aren't able to experience it in person, then you can at least see what it is and hear what it is, even if you can't engage those other senses in quite the same way. And hopefully it also is able to have a wider life than just in Winnipeg and just at this event, and it is able to tour, which it is able to tour. So hopefully it ends up in, you know, many galleries over its lifetime.
But we're getting started with that right now, this fall. And I'm also working on something else that I won't share quite yet. It might be announced by the end of this season.
I'm not 100% sure. But again, get on my newsletter. And that is the best place to see what is happening.
You can also follow me on Instagram and Pinterest and YouTube and of course here on your podcast feed. But the most regular spot that the algorithms are not going to mess with is going to be in your inbox. So yeah, I'm steeped in natural dyes these days and thinking a lot about natural dyes and also doing a lot of research into contextualizing why natural dyes matter for folks who have absolutely nothing to do with this.
And that is where we circle ourselves back around to for today's episode. Even though we are not having a formal Snort and Cackle book club, there's going to be a few book reports this season to kind of help structure and share my thoughts from the research that I am doing. And so you can kind of consider this your informal Snort and Cackle book club.
And if you want to read the books, this one in particular, I think everyone should read whether you are a natural dyer or not. I think it's a really important book that actually every single person should be reading and thinking about and implementing what they learn in this book. Because I, you know, I spent the last 10 years of my life steeped in this, like deeply steeped in it.
And I've been engaged in it longer than that. But the last 10 years, I've centered my life around this, this work of fiber shed and local textiles, and natural dyes in a sustainable way where we are thinking about what is our role in climate crisis, and how can our relationship with our clothing, and our relationship to fashion more broadly, play a role in that. The reason that I got into what I do now is because I come from a background of grassroots activism.
And in my early 20s, I was, you know, one of those queer kids who would go out to every single protest and be involved in all of the things and led multiple, you know, groups, and it burnt me out hardcore. And then I was burnt out. And I was not of use to anybody because I was not even of use to myself.
And as I kind of came back to myself after a period of time of being completely unengaged, as far as like external work, I was trying to figure out how do I do this in a more sustainable way, like this is a marathon, it is not a sprint, these things are so much more complicated and nuanced, and how am I going to do this? And clothes were where everything came back. All of the environmental causes that I cared about, all of the animal welfare causes that I cared about, all of the social and labor causes I cared about, all of the gender based violence prevention that I cared about, everything centers back to clothes and to fashion. And so because we are humans, we have evolved to have not that much hair on our bodies, even if we have a lot of hair on our bodies, we think.
And whether you remove that hair or not, we cannot survive our climates completely naked. If we do, we will end up burnt and scarred and scratched and stung and calloused. And we we are not made for the elements, even if you live in a pretty comfortable, relatively temperate space.
So we need clothes, it's just a reality. And even if you buy very few clothes, or even if you add very few clothes into your wardrobe, the reality is that you do need new clothes as your body grows and changes through your life as your clothing wears out, as you encounter different scenarios that cause your clothes to be more or less worn through more or less quickly than other pieces of clothing. As the climate around you changes, where I live, that climate changes on a regular basis, we go from minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter to plus 40 degrees Celsius with the humidity in the summer.
It's, it's an extreme version compared to where some folks live. And also even if you live in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, you still need clothes. And you definitely need a rain jacket.
So with all of that in mind, the fact that we don't have ingredient lists on our clothes is actually terrifying when you think about it. And so that is where we come to today's book. It's called To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back. It's by Alden Wicker. And again, I'm going to heavily recommend this book to everyone. Part of it is that it's so engaging, you learn so much even if you are not somebody who wants to read really dense, heavy, you know, notes and stats heavy books.
I've recently been flirting with the idea of returning to academia. And I have a light love hate relationship with academia, I love the rigor of the research, I do it on an ongoing basis myself with my practice, and with my work. And I also deeply hate the institution of academia, I think it is archaic, I think it is stuck, it is classist, it is elitist, it is full of itself. And it is also not flexible enough to respond to the realities of the individuals who are trying to engage with it. And the research that comes out of it, which is incredibly important, universities are heavily resourced spaces in our world. There is incredible work that gets done at universities. And very few people have access to it because the structure of universities and the structure of academia is frequently that you're going to do all of this research, and then you're going to write a paper, and it's going to go into a peer reviewed academic journal. And then nobody is going to read it. Because that peer reviewed academic journal is only available if you have a subscription. And the only people who have a subscription are some universities that have a vested interest in it. It's not even every university. And so it's not a good way, in my opinion, of sharing valuable, important information with the masses.
And so that's where I'm currently at with academia. I would love to figure out a way to work with it, it being the institution of it, not any specific institution in particular. Because I think that there's really cool and important things that come out of them. I just get deeply annoyed by them.
And then I started reading this book. And this is a more rambly episode than I meant for it to be.
But I think also it's helpful to get the context of coming back into Snort and Cackle generally. And also why this book I think matters so much. Alden Wicker is an investigative journalist who spent years studying the people, interviewing the people, doing the research, going to places all around the world to pull together the information that ended up making this book.
So take that rigor and that drive and that passion for a specific topic and the scope of that topic and then condense it down into 250 pages of engaging, clever, smart words that are clearly more eloquent than I am being right now. And you get this book to die for. Die being D-Y-E, of course.
And this book, it goes into, you start with a story. You start with the story of flight attendants who worked for Alaska Airlines and ended up sick because they got new uniforms and those new uniforms caused a very large portion, which was still a small portion, but a very large portion of the attendants started having quite severe reactions. And in some cases people actually died because their clothes were poisoning them.
And that is the book starts and it ends honestly with not, there's not like a happy ending because the reality is that that is how fashion is still working. The Alaska Airlines situation wasn't even that long ago. It wasn't even 10 years ago and it has happened multiple times since with other airlines.
And the reason that Alden uses that as the entry point into this story is because flight attendants end up being this canary in a coal mine in a lot of ways because they're like the perfect controlled study out in the real world over an extended period of time because it's the same people working the same jobs in the same environments and it's about as controlled of a scenario as you can get without actually being in a lab and restricting people to only existing within the lab. And so with these clothes it's terrifying what happened to them and also what was involved in making their uniforms is also what's involved in making everybody else's clothes. And as you move your way through the book Alden visits where the manufacturing is happening both domestically in this case in the United States and then over in Asia and in Europe and goes through the whole industry and identifies as much as possible the number of toxins that are in our clothes these days.
And I say as much as possible because one of the things that becomes extremely clear very quickly in this book and just keeps getting more and more reiterated is that the chemicals involved in making our clothing both in the dyes and in the manufacturing of the textiles themselves they are heavily unregulated through most of the world and even when they are regulated they're very very very tightly protected as proprietary trade secrets by the companies that manufacture them to the point where even with the companies the manufacturing fashion companies who care and want to be able to provide as as transparent a process as possible for their customers they can't even get all of the information because the chemical companies refuse to share that information. And what is also made very clear through this book is that even in the countries that have very strong um legislation a lot of times it's not enough to cause enough change and also that legislation is the only thing that forces the hand of these companies and so we need more of it. Um and I mean it it's as I think about like my own clothing but also I'm looking towards into the future when I'm going to have a kid and the clothes that I would want on their body where they are much more sensitive and I think about the clothes on the bodies of the people who I love and it's terrifying to read the extent to which these reactions can be and and not everybody's going to have as extreme of a reaction.
Um some bodies are obviously more sensitive than others and that is also a through line through the book where Alden follows people who uh they end up with a lot of different diagnoses and in some cases they don't get the diagnoses that they need and that is part of the problem. Because again, with the exception of flight attendants, most people it's very difficult to identify what is this specific thing that is causing this person to be. And especially where we are often looking at um the particularly heavy manufacturing happening in low income and or disadvantaged areas where there are less stringent controls put in place to protect those folks, that is not the only thing that is at play in their lives. It's also often poor access to health care, poor access to good nutrition, um there's a lot of other really big things and so to say, “well definitely the reason that this person developed this illness or died from this thing uh is solely because of this or largely because of this,” it's hard to do that in most cases. Which again is why that flight attendant example becomes such a um kind of a turning point or or an illumination point maybe. But also Alden points out that for those of us who are wearing the clothes we might end up with sensitivities and there are definitely folks who are going to be more affected than others and sometimes in like very catastrophic life-changing ways um and in some cases in death.
But for the folks who are actually doing the manufacturing who are those frontline employees handling the chemicals working in the factories where this stuff is being most directly concentrated and and uh kind of first contact, um they suffer at a much higher rate. And that is of course happening in areas where there is less legislation where there are fewer um fewer consequences for the companies that choose to not protect their workers. uh Alden also points out and I've read in other um reports as well especially from Fashion Revolution. They recently came out like very recently came out with a new report looking at the state of the fashion industry right now and its impact on its workers and what often ends up happening is that these big fashion brands who are, you know, they're they're working with suppliers. If a means the brand needs to change their their product what they are using because a new legislation has come in or alternatively something has loosened and so they're able to go and save money somewhere else, they leave the suppliers high and dry. They will just drop them whether or not they've even finished paying their bills. And they were moved to a different supplier and the ramifications on these supply houses is massive. The workers are just thrown away like they are garbage um and like they don't matter and it's it's not- nothing about that system is holistic, nothing about it is supportive or sustainable. And so there needs to be more legislation and more major consequences, not tiny little fines, not things where it's like oh well in 50 years if you have not changed your uh your processes then you're going to face a big consequence. That's not enough. It needs to be now, it needs to be direct and it needs to be targeting the biggest players. Because yes as individuals there are things we can do and Alden lays those out at the back of the book.
You go through the book, you read all these things it's terrifying you're like, “Oh my god what am I going to do?” Even I am thinking that and I am somebody who spends most of my time dyeing most of my clothes and sewing most of my clothes, um and I still I'm like, “Oh what am I going to do about this thing?”
The reality is that unless you're a billionaire- and if you are a billionaire you absolutely should be doing more and you absolutely should be part of the solution here because you have the resources to be part of the solution. If you are not a billionaire, maybe you're a millionaire, in that case you can make some better choices for your clothing for sure on a personal level, maybe also for your employees if you have employees um depending on how you became a millionaire.
But for the vast majority of folks, that's not feasible. It's not reality. And and even if you were to completely take control of your clothing and know every single thing that has gone into it, that is what we call uh in fibershed world the “one year one outfit challenge” and the reason it's called one year one outfit is because the reality is that it will take the average person about a year to make one outfit and that does not include the growing and harvesting of whatever thing you are making, whether that's the dye plants and/or if you're working with a plant crop like hemp or linen, or wool from a sheep. A sheep gets shorn on average once a year. So even if you're like I'm gonna handspin and weave and then dye this item and then sew it into a piece of clothing, you still gotta wait a year prior to that for the sheep to actually grow enough wool to be shorn. Same with the hunters who are then getting the hides tanned. Tanning can happen in not too long of a time. It's very labor intensive. It's very fun uh in my opinion, but um you you're not just taking any animal at any age out of the environment. When we start looking at the life cycle and the ecosystem involved in our clothing and in our textiles becomes very clear very quickly that even if you have all of the skills and all of the access to those things, those raw materials that you need, to then turn into a finished piece of clothing, uh it's going to take too long to make an entire wardrobe. And that's assuming that you have the time and the energy and the ability to gather all of those things and make uh make something. If you are raising small children, if you are working all of the time, if you are just living a life that is not solely devoted to the making of your clothing, um it's it's not sustainable. And when we look historically, the reality is that a lot of times we we were doing these things in community. It wasn't up to any individual to make every single part of their process. Like that sometimes happened, but even then it was usually a family unit was involved in the process. It wasn't, again, it wasn't an individual doing it. But there is definitely a space in between going that full-on “one year one outfit, i'm going to control every single aspect of this process” and where we currently are with most of fashion, which is that you have absolutely no idea what is in your clothes, what was involved, where it came from, any of that.
And so somewhere in the middle which is most of the time i find it the answer is usually somewhere in the middle of two extremes somewhere in the middle we as a community especially here in the west could be doing so much better and we could be demanding so much more from our legislators and from the brands who we are giving money to um and so there are suggestions that are provided in this book uh at the end the last section uh is is basically what can you do you now have all of this knowledge you are terrified you are like oh my goodness i don't want to add any new items of clothing in my house and also what do i do with all of the things that are currently in my house um and on my body and all this uh and alden says it's okay just wait here are some things that you can do and these things are easy enough for most folks to at least start implementing in some capacity uh i i don't think that any individual unless unless you are jeff bezos and i highly doubt that he is listening to this podcast and if he is i highly doubt that he is listening to this particular point in today's episode um but if you are you should be doing so much better because you actually have the resources too but for the vast majority of us that is not our experience um and so i don't want i i never want anyone to feel like they are solely responsible for fixing all of the messed up systems in the world uh been there done that it's not possible and also it's a really great way of burning yourself out and becoming unhelpful to the cause uh it's a really great way of just paralyzing yourself and and making yourself unable to make any significant change or decision um so small steps are helpful because it's at least a step one step is better than none uh and two steps is better than one and you know we we slowly go step by step and the more that you know the better decisions that you can make which again is why i think this book is really important because you will learn so much from just one book and the book is fun to read i am a reader and i also read a lot of really dense books these days that are not always fun to read but this one is fun and even while it's fun i learned so much if you could see my copy uh i have little sticky notes that i put uh where quotes are because again i'm doing research i'm writing some stuff uh and so i went back into university mode where you know i'd put notes down and then i open up a document and i am typing the so that i can cite them later and this book is full of them uh because there's so many important notes um so i'm not gonna dive into specific specifics too much because there again we would be here forever because i would just sit here and i would read the entire book word for word for you and uh that's what audiobooks are for not what this podcast is for um but i do think that uh if you read this book you are going to be forced to make some changes just because i don't think it's possible to read it and not feel deeply that you need to do at least something for me again i spend all of my time involved in these books one of the major themes in this book is talking about the impact of these um chemicals on our clothes on fertility and i i'm not personally planning on having kids biologically uh not interested in that personally somebody else can do that and i will take them from there um but uh i do think that it's very important and and realistically hormones with our fertility like fertility is one part of uh a much broader body system that is really important and regulates all of our things like we we are healthy fertility is a really good indicator in a lot of ways of your larger scale of health um and there are very common chemicals on a lot of our clothes that very directly are impeding that and that is terrifying and so as i was thinking about it one of the areas where i do not adhere to the same kind of stringentness when it comes to like natural dyes and natural fibers and being as biodegradable as possible for my clothing the area where i don't adhere to that in the same way is with my undies and that is because i love lingerie and also realistically lingerie requires um a certain level of not like performance level fabrics but they're specialty fabrics that you kind of need um that you can get away with some things but also your clothing will wear out that much faster uh and the fit of the of the um underwear regardless of what type of underwear you wear uh is more important than with looser fitting clothing um there are elastics there's just there are things that are involved in those particular garments that are not necessary with a lot of other pieces of clothing that we put on our bodies um and also i really like lace like a really good lace just makes me happy and again one year when outfitting by like hand making lace maybe i would do that once in my life and then i would very rarely wear that piece of lingerie because i would not want it i would have so many hours of labor involved um and so you know with that in mind what is like a really simple way of reducing the potential chemical exposure to my body where i am like having this directly touching my skin all day long sweating into it all of that um you know right up in like all of my glands around my body there's there are lots of things about uh underwear that are make them even more important in my opinion than other pieces of clothing um and so one of those things is to be purchasing higher quality items uh materials that have been manufactured in countries where there are more stringent rules and regulations so that i'm not like i and it made me think as i was reading through of a bra that i had purchased from a company that i thought was better in the way that they did their manufacturing and then realized after purchasing from this from them the once uh that nope they are not as like where where their manufacturing is done they are not uh using particularly high quality materials um and so even though i might in like the cut or look of something that does not mean that i necessarily want to then be purchasing something from them maybe it means that i take that inspiration and find a sewing pattern where i can make something similar myself um but i i bought this bra and i immediately had a reaction to the elastic uh and and i do have more sensitive skin so also reading through this book i was like oof this feels like much of my life um and often it's with skin skincare stuff but skincare has ingredients that are listed um clothing does not uh and so i ended up cutting that uh elastic off and purchasing other elastic from a company that i purchase materials from more regularly uh and and i didn't have a reaction to that um because it was a higher quality elastic so that in and of itself and she alden mentions it uh in the book as well that one of the things that you can do is just avoid purchasing avoid purchasing knockoffs for sure this was not a knockoff but it was a lower quality um piece which i didn't realize when i was purchasing it uh because i was buying it online um and so when you are buying lower quality or more fast fashion things their chances are definitely higher that uh you're gonna have even more chemicals involved than you realize uh so you know one of the things is buy better things like spend more money on something that is better made and made in a country where those regulations are stronger and where their supplies are also being sourced more locally and where uh what they are bringing in if they are importing supplies is held to a higher standard dollars don't automatically mean that you are getting something that is a higher quality but it is at least a starting point as far as um looking into it um and as you learn more then you can make better choices like i did i won't purchase from them again um but the other thing that i thought uh of as i was reading through this and thinking what can i do with particularly um the lingerie that i sew for myself and one of the easiest uh was when you are adding a gusset into underwear regardless of what the rest of the materials are the gusset is is touching your body very directly um and so an undyed organic cotton fabric for that is even if the rest of it is totally different sources you don't actually need any sort of dye right next to your bits you just don't it's unnecessary and because that's an inner piece of cloth it's not even going to impact the visuals of uh of what you know the rest of that underwear looks like if that is something that you care about um and i say this as a dyer who loves the color that comes from natural dyes who spends their life uh you know working with color and dyeing different types of materials and figuring out ways where i can add more color this is an area where you don't need to add color having an undyed organic cotton as that piece of fabric right next to your body is one really simple way of controlling your exposure to chemicals um and so in terms of the themes in the book uh as far as the health care goes uh like i said it opens with the story about these flight attendants who have these really extreme reactions to their uniforms there are some running themes of folks who experience autoimmune diseases and then like i mentioned the fertility issues and that is largely because of these endocrine um endo what is the word uh endocrine um targeting uh chemicals um which have now been banned and also are still seen all over our clothes and so you're you're kind of following through the story of these chemicals through these health um stories and then also simultaneously through the way that the industry is involved and and different parts of the industry so alden speaks with consumers and then is speaking with people who work on the buyer's end in the fashion houses then is speaking directly with frontline staff who are doing the actual manufacturing of the raw materials and then ends up on the very far end of that uh engaging with ocotex which if you're a knitter and listening to this and or if you are somebody who purchases clothes online and you're looking at more um eco-conscious uh brands and purchasing from more sustainable brands you've probably come across this term ocotex and it's a certification it is o e k o dash t e x um and it is a german company that basically tests clothing and accessories and looks at the chemical breakdown and identify something as being either safe or not safe and it's one of the more well-known and respected certifications it's one of our best tools currently to identify how safe an item of clothing is and also one of the final chapters uh involves alden working with them and engaging with them and trying to find out like okay if this is one of our best tools how accessible is it to the average person and it is not it is tens and tens of thousands of dollars it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars and alden did not have that kind of a um budget uh and so ended up sending a few items that got tested on a very slim panel of major uh likely um chemical analysis and it still cost ten thousand dollars so that was part of of the kind of study was pointing out how difficult it is for the average person to actually be able to control these things or to do this research if they wanted to find this out and also for the small and medium companies that are also involved in this like i i'm a natural dyer if i wanted to send my items out so that i could go and get them tested and say like yes for sure i can get these things certified i don't have that kind of budget either i also don't need it in the same way because most of the things that i'm working with or at least the things that i'm selling i know their origins um but it it's still like to have that certification is so expensive that even if i wanted to or even if i felt like i needed to i i can't i actually do not have the funds to do it um and and most small enterprises are not going to have the funds to do it uh and honestly most of the folks who care deeply about and are trying to do the the major roles of really truly slowing down fashion they are small groups uh they are small businesses they are micro businesses they are maybe considered medium size but very few of those are like it truly is big industry and big brands that have the resources and should be the ones driving this change because they're the ones that actually have the profit margins to drive the change um and or could be driving the innovation that could make these tools become more accessible to the to the average person um so there's that but then also even with that test being done alden's experience made it really clear that in fact even though this is one of our best tools it's woefully inadequate um and is also very directly tied into the brands and their commerce uh and and that's not okay like they they're even if they're not intentionally doing something um that is untoward just the the um kind of politics and visibility of you are directly being paid by the people who are asking you to prove a test like in in no other space would that be considered reasonable i say that it happens all the time you know just look at the role of lobbyists uh in in government and then getting funds um but that doesn't make it okay and so you know if one of our best tools is out of reach of most folks and also is massively uh limited in its scope and capacity what does that mean for us uh and so i think it is a good kind of reminder for folks as well that just because something is certified as being sustainable or or whatever uh doesn't necessarily mean that it is and so the more transparent you can get your um product lines to be the better and the more that you can demand transparency from the businesses and corporations that you purchase from the better i'm going to caveat that by saying this is not your you know uh your get go like go free card to go and harass every single micro business and small business that is trying to do the best that they can with the limited resources that they have this is where you should be going and getting the major corporations to actually be making change those of us who are on the front lines and are working in tiny teams of one or two or maybe even 10 people that's we're not the ones that have the ability to drive that much change we can do as much as we can and i think our role is largely in educating people and sharing with them ways of them being able to engage better and and in more sustainable and transparent ways you know i i consider it a really important part of my job that i am directly connecting canadian farmers and mills with customers and and i think that that's a really important part of my job um and also it's not my job actually to convince the canadian government that they should be investing more in holistic uh agriculture um that's that's not what i was trained in it's not where my expertise is it's become where i spend a lot of my time and do a lot of my research specifically in the realm of natural dyes but there are others who have a lot more sway and a lot more experience um who could be doing that instead uh and it's the same at that major brand level it is not the tiny company of you know half a dozen folks to go and find out from these massive chemical companies that are often attached to pharmaceutical companies to give the exact breakdown of what chemicals they are selling to their suppliers and then also to update folks every single time they slightly tweak the formula because hey guess what the current chemical that they're producing has just been banned but if they tweak the formula it's not going to hit and be identified until somebody else says nope we need to ban this that is the way that the game is currently being played which is laid out in this book as well um so it's complicated and and also really important and there are things that we can do as individuals and there are other things that we need to do at a much broader level at the industrial level and at the government level um and it's why i think everyone should read this book because it is much easier to convince people when you can actually provide them with the stats when you can give them a clear argument um i think alden does a really great job of making that argument in this book uh i'm going to highly recommend that everybody reads to die for and i will of course link to it in the show notes so that you can get a copy for yourself whether from your library or from your bookstore or wherever um and and yeah uh i look forward to sharing more with you all uh sharing more of the books that i am reading and the resources that i am finding and the ways that they are kind of tweaking my brain and making me think about the work i'm doing and its role in a broader ecosystem uh both the natural ecosystem and also just the ecosystem of our current life under capitalism um so yeah also someday when yarrow atelier has a physical shop i will absolutely have a little curated library of books that i think everyone should read and this book will definitely be on those shelves um so there we go thanks for listening to snort and cackle and if you are enjoying this feel free to go back and binge a bunch of uh past episodes they should all be in your newsfeed wherever you are listening to this episode just scroll back and find more episodes because there's a bunch of them and they are all pretty long so you have many hours of chats to listen to and maybe i'll be able to speak to alden wicker at some point in the future i think that would be very fun um and uh yeah at the very least i highly recommend folks go and read this book uh and you can also check the show notes for some extra resources and also of course to find my uh natural dyeing content after you read this book i think some of you might go my route and just figure that there should be no new dyes synthetic dyes that gets added to any of our clothes that we are able to control um there are a whole bunch of other chemicals that i also am maybe i should be only sourcing certain like it has actually pushed me to re-evaluate the way that i purchase even fabric for the clothes that i am sewing and the quilts that i'm making and things like that so yeah there's that um which i think is a good sign about a book i think it's good when a book that is about a major tricky complicated nuanced topic that also is something that you know quite a bit about to begin with is so compelling that it makes you make changes right away and makes you think about how to do things better i think this book is really powerful so again this episode's book is to die for how toxic fashion is making us sick and how we can fight back it's by alden wicker who is an investigative journalist and we will have more episodes circling around the broad world of natural dyes and how they intersect with the world as we move through this special season of snort and cackle thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
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Recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.