Wash Less to help the environment

Sustainable fashion is often described as an oxymoron, how can something at the pinnacle of consumer driven growth with deeply entrenched "planned obsolescence" ever be though of as sustainable? Well maybe there is no such thing as sustainable fashion, however as wearing clothes is an integral part of modern culture, some consideration must be given to this aspect of our lifestyles.
There have been some valuable and interesting contributions to sustainable fashion mainly focusing on the supply chain, low impact materials, shortened supply chains and working conditions. Considering a life cycle analysis of a garment shows that the highest impact is accrued at the use phase.
To focus on the use phase, my research is looking at what happens when people wash less, through a social lens. On the 1st of March 2011, 30 participants will be donning a pair of jeans they intend to wear for 3 months straight without washing, while I document their lived experience.
Interestingly there have been similar studies released in the past month, a Canadian Student Josh Le who didn't wash his jeans for 15 months, and found that there were similar levels of bacteria to jeans that were not washed for 13 days, and a new Levi's campaign aiming to save 16 million litres of water during (Australian) Autumn 2011.

Exploring the relationship between wellbeing, environmental stress and income

A recent paper by Michigan State University's Thomas Dietz et al. in Applied Geography explores the relationship between people's wellbeing, income and environmental stress of 58 different countries. They found that wellbeing for a given amount of environmental stress will be high at both and high and low levels of affluence, and lower at intermediate levels of affluence. This pattern is known as a Kuznets curve.    

ABSTRACT
The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) posits an inverted “U” shaped relationship between the affluence of a nation and the stress it places on the biophysical environment, with increases in affluence from low to moderate levels producing increased environmental stress but further increases eventually leading to a tipping point after which further affluence reduces environmental stress. We hypothesized that the same pattern might obtain for the relationship between affluence and the efficiency with which a nation produces human well-being compared to the stress it places on the environment. The environmental intensity of human well-being (EIWB) was represented as the ratio of a nation’s per capita ecological footprint to its average life expectancy at birth. Using panel data on 58 nations, we find that, on average, the relationship between gross domestic product per capita and EIWB is a U shape, the inverse of the Kuznets curve.

Can status-seeking drive sustainable behaviours?

A recent study by Griskivicius et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has linked peoples' preference for green consumer products to status seeking behaviour. Their experiments showed that people were more likely to choose less luxurious green products after reading a short story that activated their status motive. This effect increased when the choice was made in public rather than in private, and when the green products were more expensive than the non-green products. They explain their findings using evolutionary psychology - costly signalling theory, which suggests that conspicuous conservation behaviours show others in a social group that a person a) is pro-social rather pro-self, and b) that they have the spare capacity to sacrifice resources (time, money, etc) to choose the less personally-beneficial product.

These findings have implications for corporations who are marketing green products - although the idea of increasing prices to make green products more attractive may have undesirable outcomes from an equity point of view! These findings are also interesting when imagining the role of private enterprise in a sustainable society - it may be false to assume that status-seeking behaviours inevitably lead to poor environmental outcomes.