Last weekend while in Seattle I dropped by the Patagonia store to pick up one of their Down Sweater Full-Zip Hoodies, which I have worn every day since I purchased it. For me buying a piece of clothing, especially an outerwear piece, takes some time and thought as well as deciding if I really need the piece and if I will get good use and wear out of it, which leads me to the subject of this post, the ‘Common Threads Initiative’ program from Patagonia. The ad seen above was run in the New York Times on Black Friday to address the issue of consumerism and to promote the company’s new project, the Common Treads Initiative. The Program has been set up in an effort to promote smart consumerism, and as a consumer and company to have as little environmental impact as possible.
“The most challenging, and important, element of the Common Threads Initiative is this: to lighten our environmental footprint, everyone needs to consume less. Businesses need to make fewer things but of higher quality. Customers need to think twice before they buy.”
“Why? Everything we make takes something from the planet we can’t give back. Each piece of Patagonia clothing, whether or not it’s organic or uses recycled materials, emits several times its weight in greenhouse gases, generates at least another half garment’s worth of scrap, and draws down copious amounts of freshwater now growing scarce everywhere on the planet.”
The Common Threads Initiative promotes you to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle our garments and rethink the way we buy them. The company encourages you to buy as little as possible and wear for as long as possible, repair what can be repaired, reuse what can be donated or shared, recycle by giving back your old garments and finally rethink the way we buy and make our products. This is a really solid move from a company that I have always had respect for and makes me happy to support in ways that I can. So head over to the Patagonia site to find out more about the Common Threads Initiative and take the Pledge…
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