Sustainable Stitches

Being an educated consumer is tough. Being an educated green consumer is even tougher. In the past 10 years or so, the USDA has developed strict requirements for labeling products as “organic.” Truth-in-advertising laws help reassure consumers that products meet the manufacturers’ claims of natural materials, eco-friendly production and use of fair-business practices. But does the all-natural, vegan, eco-friendly bamboo, spun-bywomen’s-collective skein in my hand actually conform to all my assumptions about it? Or is it simply green marketing?

- Beth Whiteside

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 

Yarn fibers can be divided roughly into three categories: animal, plant and synthetic. Sheep, goats, alpaca, llama, yak and the like are regularly shorn of their hairy coats. Cotton, hemp, bamboo and other fiber plants are grown and harvested. Nylon, acrylic, polyester and other polymers are man-made, created by combining simpler compounds containing carbon, hydrogen and either nitrogen or oxygen. Before buying yarns made from any of these sources, consider researching answers to the following questions on company websites.

For animal fibers, it is pertinent to ask: How and where are the animals raised? Are they allowed to range freely or are they confined to pens? Is the grass or feed treated in any way? How are the animals cared for when they get sick? Are the sheep subject to dipping or mulesing to prevent fly strike? Is their use of the pasture or range sustainable (e.g., too many cashmere goats in too little space are turning the Alashan Plateau of Mongolia into a dust bowl)?

Silk is derived from the fiber that silkworms extrude while making their cocoons; therefore, it is an animal fiber, but not a “hair fiber.” Questions to ask are: Are the silkworms allowed to complete their metamorphosis and naturally emerge? Or is the silk one continuous strand (higher quality) which requires killing the silkworm before it emerges from its cocoon? As a point of reference, it takes roughly 2,600 cocoons to produce one pound of silk fiber.