• humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    You can indeed. But growing cotton has already resulted in environmental changes beyond my comprehension.

    I guess the first step should be to adapt a habit of clothes repair

    • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Growing cattle has also had a massive impact on the environment. And you often need more land for animal based materials because you both need land for the animals and the land to grow food for the animals. With cotton at least you just need land for the cotton.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Hemp and also linen are even harder to grow than cotton, though much of it is due to not as advanced machinery for harvesting and processing. Hemp also sucks as a material for clothing, to make it wearable you have to treat it quite heavily or it’s scratchy AF.

            Taking production out of the equation linen is the best material of the three: Much better moisture regulation than cotton, only real downside is that it crinkles easily but it also crinkles elegantly so wear it with pride and you’ll be fine.

            Production-wise the best alternative right now is modal, that is, basically, synthesised cotton, raw material is anything that contains cellulose. Nasty chemicals are involved but in modern processes it’s all closed-loop, the nasty stuff all stays within the factory.


            Oh, one often overlooked factor: Seams. Modal is better than cotton at being yarn because the cellulose fibres are much longer but nothing compares to the likes of polyester when it comes to not coming apart. I don’t think there’s an alternative yet, either you use polyester and make the whole garment non-biodegradable or you use modal and live with the reduced durability. Though one idea would be to aggressively get rid of seams, you can knit yarn into any shape whatsoever. Wait: Silica thread is a thing. Usually only used for extreme applications (think firefighter gear), also uses some chemicals to make it usable in sewing machines and it just won’t ever hold a knot so when it comes apart it comes apart completely, but it’s essentially fancy stone, just like computer chips: Doesn’t really biodegrade but it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t, either.


            Another overlooked factor is stretch. There’s no natural alternative to elasthan, so no yoga pants or stretch jeans. Tons of stuff nowadays contains elasthan, often just a bit for a tiny bit of stretch simply because it’s more comfortable.

            • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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              7 months ago

              It is more resource and space efficient than cotton, and can grow in a wide variety of climates. It grows kind of like, idk, a weed. It can be made into comfortable textiles and used in the same application are cotton. Robust plant. The difference between hemp and cannabis is the THC content.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Why is this always brought up, stop spreading this. Animals usually are not fed grain unless it’s harvesting time. We also do not grow food just to feed them. The grain we feed animals is shit you cannot eat. It’s roots/stalks/stems/bad/rotted plant matter. It’s the leftovers from the greens we can consume. Most animals also are raised on land that is not suitable for crops, rocky/hilly/weak topsoil land.

        • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 months ago

          Mate, I have three chickens at home and I feed them a scratch mix that is mostly grain. I think you’re talking out of your arse, and I strongly doubt you have any actual animal husbandry experience.

        • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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          7 months ago

          Animals products are less efficient for a simple energy reason. Animals produce heat which radiates away as lost energy, and they rely on consuming autotrophs. All life gets its energy from the sun, we as animals get it one or two down the food chain from plants or other animals (which are also eating plants). Animal-based products are simply less efficient.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            You can think this all you want, but you cannot consume what they do, you also cannot grow crops usually where livestock are raised. Crops need a pretty flat chunk of land, livestock don’t.

            • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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              7 months ago

              Except for the deforestation needed to increase pasture area and for growing more feed. Destroying habitats and pushing indigenous people further from their homes. Meat on a large scale doesn’t work because it is energetically less efficient. Farmed animals produce waste products like methane which are large contributors to global warming. Even if the land used by livestock was completely unusable for other purposes, they would still be polluting the environment through eutrophication and destroying locally endangered species.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Everything you just said…is the same shit that happens for plants as well. Deforestation isn’t something that happens only with livestock. It also only really exists now in poor countries for people who are trying to survive by any means. You also are assuming that plants don’t use nutrients from the soil or that the ground has to be fertilized or sprayed with pesticides or that large machinery has to be used to harvest it.

                • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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                  7 months ago

                  You forget that the food required to make even small quantities of meat is much higher than just growing plants for human. Better to directly eat the energy produced by autotrophs. Deforestation doesn’t happen in “poor countries” just so people can survive, it happens because corporations lobby the government of corrupt countries like Brazil so they can destroy habitats for feed and pastures.

                  Meat production is a simple maths problem to see that wasted energy used by livestock (to survive and grow) is lost energy.

                • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  7 months ago

                  Ok but we use twice as much land to grow animal feed than we do human food and it has all the same drawbacks. And then the meat we get still only provides 18% of our calories.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    No we do not. Provide a source that shows we grow crops directly to feed livestock in any meaningful amounts.

        • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Why it is true that you’ll graze non-butcher animals on the leftover stalks and such, we absolutely finish beef and pork on grain and a big portion of the grain harvest is for animal feed.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Almost all of the grain we feed is what I just explained. All of that is ground up and a binding agent (usually molasses) is applied. We do not grow crops just to feed to animals, it’s a complete waste of land. We grow crops for our consumption and use first and whats left over is turned into grain to feed to animals we then butcher and eat.

        • uncertainty@lemmy.nz
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          7 months ago

          Food is grown specifically to feed livestock though, it would be a pretty weird trophic pyramid for them to survive on our waste unless you went back to a time where people killed their one pig for the year and salted it away. In our country, the land degradation from clearing hill country for grazing has led to enormous biodiversity loss and a self-fufilling prophecy of eroded weak topsoil that people claim isn’t good for anything else (though it could still be rewilded and in other cultures and times would be terraced and swaled to support plant crops).

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            ??? But it’s not, we do not grow crops for livestock in any meaningful amounts. It’s miniscule what is grown to feed livestock only.

            • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              Stop making stuff up, please. Idk what you do on your farm but globally we absolutely grow a lot of food for animals.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Please provide a source that shows that we grow crops directly for livestock consumption in a meaningful amount. So far no one has shown anything that states otherwise.

                • uncertainty@lemmy.nz
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                  7 months ago

                  Over a third of crops are grown to feed livestock, and that’s if you’re not counting pasture as a crop, which it absolutely is - arguably our first solar powered factory floor. Even areas that were grazed in the past have had the relative proportion of native flora and fauna severely reduced to minimal levels through introduced grasses and overgrazing. To get a feel for land use against calorie production, you could have a browse through https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/ for an overview.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

                    86% of the global livestock feed intake in dry matter consists of feed materials that are not currently edible for humans

                    But it also makes an important contribution to food security through the provision of high-quality protein and a variety of micronutrients – e.g. vitamin A, vitamin B-12, riboflavin, calcium, iron and zinc – that can be locally difficult to obtain in adequate quantities from plant-source foods alone

                    We already make enough food to feed the planet multiple times over, the issue isn’t how much we’ve got, it’s how to get it to people. Distribution is the issue.

                    But no, 1/3rd is not grown for livestock, this isn’t true at all.

        • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          It’s brought up because it’s true.

          research

          edit: link doesn’t appear to be working, but it’s the paper by Emily Cassidy called ‘redefining agricultural yields’

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            But it’s not, these papers and studies all assume the land that cattle graze on is suitable for crops. You cannot grow crops on a massive hill properly. It’s why the all the states that are flat usually have crops grown and all the hilly/dryer states raise livestock. No one is saying livestock can fully replace plants, but to many think we can replace everything with plants only. This is complete junk science.

            • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              This has nothing to do with grazing land. This is crop suitable land being used to grow crops that is then fed to livestock. There are no assumptions being made and it is not junk science, you’re just not very good at reading.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Except it’s not, we are not growing crops just to feed to animals, as I’ve explained multiple times now, grain is created from the shit we cannot consume. Why is this so difficult to understand?

                • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  7 months ago

                  It’s difficult because it’s just very untrue and wrong. This is very widely documented, grains are absolutely grown just to feed animals. The majority of corn and soy in the US is grown to feed animals. I’m not sure why you’re so insistent on something that can so easily be looked up, you don’t even need vegan sources, the animal ag industry reports this stuff.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    Please provide the numbers then. Pretty sure someone already posted the numbers, in which only 5% is grown for livestock only.

          • pine@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            7 months ago

            That 46% is land whose biodiversity and ecosystems have been intentionally crushed for the meat industry.

            • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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              7 months ago

              100 % or this chart is made up of food we got by intentionally crushing land for the meat Industry. It shows how the food we feed livestock is spread across different feeding sources, not the land uses by said food source.

              I poated it because the person I replied to insisted that most of the food animals are fed is just the uneatable byproduct of agricultural products made for humans. This chats shows its defnetily not the main source used to feed animals, as it only makes up about 5 %

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I mean you can make leather from all kinds of skins. And there’s one… animal… that we have a particularly large amount of on earth and we regularly have to get rid of a significnat number of deceased of without currently re-using their skin. Hrm… cool idea for an industrialist horror movie…

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This. We need to get back to repairable shoes and patching clothes. It’s fine to keep a “good set” that doesn’t have patches, but we wear clothes like no humans before us. It wasn’t uncommon to see patched clothes just 60 years ago.