Commemorating Rana Plaza with a Different Kind of Fashion Show

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This tragedy ultimately killed more than 1,100 people, many of whom had been pressured to continue working to produce apparel in a building that was visibly unsafe.

The anniversary of this event is commemorated each year by Fashion Revolution Week, which prompts each of us to ask “Who made my clothes?” and hold brands accountable for their supply chains, wages and working conditions.

Two local brands in Indianapolis, Liz Alig and People for Urban Progress, celebrated the spirit of Fashion Revolution by hosting a Slow Fashion Runway Show. All garments and accessories presented in the show were made of repurposed, handwoven or natural textiles and were produced ethically.

Designers from Liz Alig and PUP were recognized at the end of the show



Display of PUP's products

People for Urban Progress specializes in creating bags and wallets out of repurposed materials



People shopping in a warehouse setting

Guests had the opportunity to shop both brands after the runway show



I’ve written about Liz Alig before, as the brand is not only local to Indianapolis, but is truly one of the most consistent brands I’ve ever encountered in terms of demonstrating its social and environmental values. Liz Alig uses upcycled fabrics & handwoven textiles and partners with fair trade cooperatives around the world to produce their garments, with the goal of providing employment and opportunities for women.

People for Urban Progress is an Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization that creates products using discarded materials that contain a piece of Indy’s history. Some notable materials they repurpose are the covering of the former Hoosier Dome and outdoor signage from Super Bowl 46, which was held in Indianapolis. Each product is handmade in Indy by local artists.

Check out the galleries below to see the collections that were on display at the Slow Fashion Runway Show.

Liz Alig’s Collection


People for Urban Progress’ Collection

How to Start Spending Ethically

Woman holding three shopping bags over her shoulder

Recently a friend reached out to me about her goal for 2018. She wants to focus on making her spending more ethical, and she asked if there were any tips I could provide.

My friend is already an incredibly thoughtful and globally-conscious person, so I didn’t need to start at the very beginning. (“You may not have realized that the products you buy are manufactured by people, and they’re made out of natural resources provided by our planet…”) I remembered a post I wrote a few years ago called The Beginner’s Guide to Ethical Shopping, which focuses on how to evaluate the ethical qualities of a specific brand. While that information is still helpful, I realized I hadn’t written a holistic post about how to change one’s shopping routine overall.

After thinking about what practical tips I could give my friend, here are the steps I came up with for how to start spending ethically:

1. Buy less

The best way to reduce the environmental impact of your shopping habits is simply to buy less. This graphic created by my friend Elizabeth at The Note Passer was incredibly helpful to me when I began my ethical lifestyle journey:

Flow chart: Do I really need it? Does it need to be new? Can I buy it ethically?

This graphic is from 2013, so some of the secondhand companies listed are out of date, but the thought process remains the same.

The most important purchases to curtail are those of brand new items. New items have the highest environmental impact because they use new natural resources and require energy to be produced and distributed. Products made with recycled materials have a lower impact, but recycling still requires a great amount of energy and often some new resources to be combined with recycled material.

I was never a big shopper even before I began focusing on ethical consumption, but I found that as I’ve focused on cutting down on new purchases over the years, my purchases of even secondhand items have gone down as well. I’ve gotten much more into the habit of asking myself if I truly need to own something, or if I can borrow it or make do without.

This adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into the Buyerarchy of Needs, designed by Sarah Lazarovic, has also been a helpful guide for me:

Pyramid from bottom to top: Use what you have, borrow, swap, thrift, make, buy

Now, you may have rightly realized that in the short-term, the strategy of buying less may not provide direct economic benefits to people employed by manufacturing. However, the culture of rampant consumption leads to long-term effects I consider far more harmful and significant, effects which require a significant economic pivot in order to be resolved.

Constantly growing consumption leads to pressures for factories, and therefore workers, to produce more products faster and cheaper, leading to lower wages and more stressful and dangerous working conditions. Unbridled production also leads to environmental degradation, often in locations with minimal environmental regulations. (Rivers running red and purple with dye in India come to mind.) This kind of poorly regulated manufacturing can lead to unhealthy or unpleasant living conditions. So rather than providing direct economic benefits, the idea of buying less is about creating a cultural and economic shift that realizes both human capacity and natural resources have limits, and that a system based on endless expansion is not sustainable.

2. Prioritize your values

If you want to shop more ethically, chances are you already have one or more issues in mind that are motivating you to make a change. Whether it’s a desire to alleviate poverty, support women, reduce your carbon footprint, prevent deforestation, or any other motivating factor, when it comes to creating a practical shopping strategy, it helps to prioritize your values from most to least important to you. Having an idea of what’s most important to you will help you make decisions when choosing from products with varying ethical/sustainable claims.

After prioritizing your values, determine what characteristic of a product goes along with that value. In other words, what “counts” to you as meeting that value? This will help you understand which product labels, certifications, ingredients, etc. correlate with your values. Here’s an example using some my values:

  • Workers treated ethically – label from Fair Trade USA, Fairtrade, or Fair Trade Federation; or a thorough and transparent statement from the company about their practices
  • Organic/chemical-free – label from an official organic certifying body such as the USDA or Oregon Tilth; or for local small producers, assertion from the producers that their products are chemical-free
  • Palm-oil free – ingredients list does not include any of the palm oil root words that I know about

You might need to create a couple of different rankings based on different broad product categories. For example, for clothing, accessories and other non-consumable goods, my priorities generally go in this order:

  1. Secondhand
  2. Fair trade/workers treated ethically
  3. Zero waste/minimal packaging/no plastic microfibers
  4. Recycled materials
  5. Organic materials
  6. Local

However, for food, my priority list looks more like this:

  1. Fair trade/workers treated ethically
  2. Organic/chemical-free
  3. Palm-oil free
  4. Zero waste/minimal packaging
  5. Local

Sometimes these values will shift around depending on the circumstances. You might find a product that meets every value except your #1 value, or you’ll find yourself comparing a product that meets two of your values with another that meets three totally different values. It’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis in situations like this, especially when you factor in other characteristics of a product like price, style, and quality. To help with this, you may want to include price in your value rankings as well. Which values are you willing to pay more to get, and which are just nice-to-haves if they fall within your budget?

Despite the occasional fluctuations, being clear on your values and how to tell if a product meets those values are important steps to shopping more ethically.

3. Change your routine

Now that you know what types of products you’re looking for, you need to figure out where to get them. The hardest part of changing your shopping habits is changing your routine. If you’re a “get everything at Target” person, it will take some adjustment if you need to go to different stores to find the values-based products you want. However, I’ve found that now that I’m in a new routine, shopping by my values comes naturally, pretty much automatically. It doesn’t occur to me to shop in the mainstream, conventional way, because I’ve created a routine that’s both convenient and personally fulfilling to me.

Start by getting into a routine for the products you buy most often, which for me is food. With how I shop now, I’ve found that I shop at more stores for food than I did before, but fewer stores for everything else.

I’ve gotten familiar enough with the stores in my area to know that for organic, zero-waste peanut butter, I need to go to Fresh Thyme. I get organic bulk foods at the Good Earth, Fresh Thyme or Earth Fare, and I get organic packaged goods at Kroger (their Simple Truth store brand has a lot of organic bargains). I get chemical-free, zero-waste produce at the farmers’ market, Kroger or Fresh Thyme.

For personal care items, I start at the Good Earth, but I also get some items on Etsy because they have a bigger selection of palm-oil free products. Kroger is my stop for inexpensive recycled toilet paper.

For non-consumable goods, my first stop is always Goodwill, then usually Amanda’s Exchange consignment store, or sometimes Craigslist or Facebook. If I need to get gifts, my first stop is fair trade store Global Gifts, then other locally-owned boutiques and gift shops.

4. Cut yourself some slack

Just because you’ve decided to change your shopping habits, that doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly have enough time in the day to perfectly follow your new system for every purchase from day one. I’d say it took me about five years to really develop a comprehensive ethical shopping routine, and it’s still growing and changing. I started in college with the items I bought most often and that had high levels of worker mistreatment: clothes, shoes, chocolate. Once I moved into an apartment, I started being more conscious about other food items. As my interest in sustainability grew, I started favoring used items and products with less packaging. And just within the last year, I’ve started avoiding palm oil and plastic microfibers.

There will always be some aspect of a product that’s unethical on someone’s standards (unless you live on a self-sufficient permaculture farm and weave fabric out of your own hair). That doesn’t negate the positive effects of the values-based choices you make. Buying less is pretty much always a win. But when you do need to buy something, getting a product that causes less harm in a certain area than the standard option does seems like a no-brainer to me.

If you’re an old pro, what other tips do you have for someone getting into an ethical shopping routine? Post them in the comments!

Eco-Friendly Bedding: Organic Sheets & Mattress Protector

Organic Sheets & Mattress Protector

Check out part one to learn about my quest for a flame-retardant-free mattress.

Having recently upgraded my mattress from a full size to a queen, I found myself in need of new sheets. Like shopping for a mattress, this was new territory for me; the sheets I had been using were nearly as old as the mattress itself.

I looked exclusively for fair trade, organic cotton sheets. My primary reason for preferring organic cotton is that the growing process is less chemically-intensive, and therefore hopefully safer for farm workers. As far as I know there haven’t been any studies about the long-term health effects of organic cotton farming to definitively prove it’s safer, but there have been multiple studies linking pesticide exposure to negative health effects, and conventional cotton is one of the most world’s most chemical-intensive crops.

Sol Organix sheets on mattress

I found this sheet set offered by Sol Organix, and it turned out to be the least expensive organic and fair trade option I came across—other brands can be upwards of $200 for a queen set. Sol’s sheets are certified by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which prohibits the use of various toxic inputs and sets social criteria for the entire production chain. The cotton used by Sol Organix is also certified by Fair Trade USA, indicating that the cotton was produced in accordance with fair trade principles including fair prices and credit, safe working conditions, and the absence of forced or child labor.

(One aspect of Sol Organix sheets I would have liked to see more clearly addressed on their website is the working conditions and wages for the workers who actually produce the sheets. Their website claims that the company believes in “total transparency, from farm to factory to fabric,” but they don’t provide much information about anything after the farm stage. However, social criteria for manufacturing can be found starting on page 28 of the GOTS documentation and is actually much more robust than I expected.)

Upon receiving the sheets in the mail, I was delighted by their packaging: instead of coming in a plastic zipper bag, the Sol Organix sheets came in a reusable fabric bag complete with a long strap, side pocket, and button flap.

Cotton bag used as Sol Organix sheets packaging

Granted, the bag is made of the same fabric as the sheets, so it’s not terribly sturdy, but props to Sol Organix for being super-intentional about the reusability of their packaging. I’ve actually already used the bag twice, once as a laundry sack for dirty clothes on a weekend trip and once to keep a fancy scarf segregated from dirty shoes that were sharing the same luggage. Versatile!

The sheets are incredibly soft and I love the ivory color. One minor downside is that the fitted sheet is designed to accommodate a very deep mattress, up to 17 inches. My mattress is only about 11–12 inches deep, but after washing there actually wasn’t that much excess sheet to deal with, and it all tucks away nicely under the mattress.

In addition to the sheets, I decided to cover my mattress with a waterproof mattress protector. Using a mattress protector was recommended by Holder, the company I bought my mattress from, and until then I didn’t even know waterproof mattress covers existed, other than full-on plastic sheets for children. However, in the mattress shopping process I read a lot about the dust mites and allergens and mold that can accumulate in mattresses over time. Since I intend my mattress to be a 20-year investment, I want to protect it and keep it as clean as possible. I had a brief ethical crisis about using a product that adheres polyurethane to fabric, which I assume negates any recyclability either of those materials might have had on their own, but ultimately I decided that using a small amount of eventual-trash-plastic was worth it to extend the life of a product with a much larger environment footprint (the mattress).

Naturepedic mattress protector in box

I went with Naturepedic’s organic waterproof mattress protector. As with the mattress, the major selling point for me was the absence of flame-retardant chemicals. I’m happy with it so far—it didn’t change the feel of my mattress, and I haven’t noticed it make the bed dramatically warmer (causing a bed to “sleep hot” is apparently a flaw of many mattress protectors, I learned in the shopping process).

As for the rest of my bedding, the fair trade Guatemalan quilt that I’ve written about previously was in fact queen-sized, so it still works with the new mattress just fine:

Bed with Guatemalan fair trade quilt

Have you gone organic with any of your bedding? What are your favorite sources? What’s the best reusable packing you’ve encountered, for bedding or any other type of product?

Eco-Friendly Bedding: Shopping for a Flame-Retardant-Free Mattress

Close-up of mattress quilting

I’ve been vaguely intending to get a new mattress for a couple of years. My old one was somewhere between 20 and 25 years old, first having served as a guest bed for a few years, then as my bed since I was about 10. She was trusty and sturdy but starting to get saggy. After moving into the house I decided it was finally time to do the upgrade from full to queen and treat myself to a more supportive night’s sleep.

Obviously for such a large purchase I wanted to make an ethical and sustainable choice, but I wasn’t totally sure what that meant for a mattress. The three factors I pondered were:

  • The presence of flame-retardant chemicals (I wanted a mattress without them)
  • Use of sustainable/renewable materials
  • How and where the mattress is made

Another caveat for my buying process was that I wanted to be able try out the mattress in the store before ordering. This requirement ruled out the many eco-friendly mattress brands available online. (If you’re less squeamish about picking a mattress without trying it, The Good Trade has an excellent rundown of sustainable online brands). My final requirement was staying within a budget of about $1,200 for a queen-sized mattress and box spring.

The mattress I ended up choosing is the Celebrity Soft Top from Holder Mattress:

Celebrity mattress from Holder Mattress

Ignore the bad lighting and focus on the pillowy quilted goodness.

Celebrity mattress label

Celebrity: No longer just *NSYNC’s mediocre final album.

If you haven’t heard of Holder Mattress, that’s because to my knowledge it isn’t a nationally-distributed brand. When I first heard about the company a few years ago, what intrigued me was that Holder has its factory and headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., about an hour north of Indianapolis. In terms of getting a locally-made mattress, you can’t get much closer than that.

Since mattresses are so large and heavy, I like that these finished products aren’t shipped all over the place before reaching their final destinations. Holder has a showroom in Kokomo and another in Carmel, which is the one I visited. I tried out one of the floor models, and then they made my mattress to order and delivered it to my house. Each mattress is handmade, and in addition to the minimal-shipping factor, I liked supporting a fairly small and family-owned business.

As with food, I assume the transportation footprint of a mattress is relatively small compared to the footprint of its production overall, so I don’t wave the local flag as a huge and definitive sustainability win. Rather, I consider it a positive factor that combines certain environmental and community benefits. Following my purchase, I learned that there are in fact many mattress brands that manufacture within the U.S. Holder still seems to be the closest to Indianapolis, but if you live elsewhere you likely have other local mattress options.

The other factor on which Holder Mattress won me over was the fact they don’t use flame-retardant chemicals in any of their mattresses. Why did I want to avoid flame-retardant chemicals? First of all, it’s not 1960; I don’t smoke in bed (or at all). Second, as our guest blogger Travis Nagle briefly touched on in his post about eco-friendly furniture, flame retardants have been questioned as ineffective precautions that are also linked to a variety of health problems. A new study out this month finds an association between certain flame retardant chemicals and thyroid cancer.

One of my early furniture-buying regrets is that I let the salesperson who sold me my sofa talk me into a stain-resistant chemical coating. I hate to think what invisible chemicals it’s been off-gassing for the last five years. I definitely wanted to avoid any unnecessarily chemicals in a mattress that I plan to sleep on every night for the next 10–20 years.

The sustainable characteristic I didn’t really get with this mattress was the use of natural materials. The Celebrity is one of Holder’s lowest models, so it contains less-expensive materials such as polyurethane padding and polyester fabric. I initially felt strongly about getting a petroleum-free mattress—people used to make mattresses before we turned liquid dinosaurs into fabric and foam; why can’t we now? But ultimately, cost is what deterred me from pursuing a more natural mattress. In its higher-end lines, Holder does produce mattresses using wool fabric and latex foam, but their most natural option was $3,600 for a queen set—three times my budget. Depending on the brand, queen sets using latex foam appear to start around $2,000 and go up from there.

I’m about 80% satisfied with the mattress choice I made, but If I were to do this process again, there are a couple of things I would do differently:

  1. Attempt to find a latex foam mattress to try in-store. One reason I was hesitant to order a natural mattress from an online brand is the fact that I haven’t encountered a latex foam mattress in person before. I don’t know if I would even like what it feels like to lay on one. However, this type of mattress is becoming more popular. I could have tried one in-store (such as the high-end Holder version), and then perhaps felt more secure ordering a less-expensive latex mattress brand online.
  2. Do more research about the benefits of natural materials in mattresses. Once I found a flame-retardant-free mattress I could try out in a store and that was within my budget, I didn’t really pursue any further research into natural materials. In hindsight, I wish I would have done more research about both the individual and systemic benefits of using renewable materials in mattresses, and used that information to decide how much I was willing to spend on it.

Responsibly Disposing of Old Mattresses

Another reason I initially wanted a mattress made of natural materials was to give consideration to the eventual end of the mattress’s useful life. When a mattress is no longer supportive or comfortable to sleep on, what can be done with it? Most mattresses today end up in a landfill, and my thought was that a mattress made of natural materials may be easier to recycle. However, after some light Googling, I’m not immediately finding any programs that claim latex mattresses are any easier to recycle than conventional mattresses. Latex mattresses are indeed recyclable, and so are the majority of components in a traditional mattress. The tricky part is actually finding a facility that will pick up and recycle your mattress.

The challenge of responsible mattress disposal is also one of the reasons I was hesitant to try an online-only mattress brand. Most of these brands offer some version of the “try for 100 nights” plan where you can return the mattress if you end up not liking it. However, I think “return” is a misleading word in these programs, because once a mattress has been in use for 3+ months, the company can’t turn around and re-sell it to someone else. I discussed this briefly with my salesperson at the Holder showroom. Holder also has a try-and-return program, and the salesperson said the company used to be able to reuse the inner components of a returned mattress, but now if a mattress is returned they throw the whole thing away. I’m not sure if this is due to a specific law, concerns about bedbugs, or both, but the fact remains that at a minimum, a significant portion (if not all) of a mattress goes to waste if you decide to return it after trying it.

After being unable to find a local charity that accepts mattress donations, I decided to keep my old mattress and box spring as a combination of lounge seating and a guest bed in my basement (which I affectionately refer to as “the tacky den”). After I set it up I actually got giddy about how awesome it is. Behold the majesty:

Mattress seating in basement den

*cue angelic choir*

I threw my old college bedding on it, and boom! A relaxing and decadent seating area only enhanced by its wood paneling backdrop. The height is perfect for seating but not too awkwardly low for a bed. My roommates John Cena and Frodo approve.

If you aren’t blessed with a room free-spirited enough to have a mattress couch, I did come across 1-800-GOT-JUNK in my research, a company that will pick up old mattresses and purportedly recycle them if possible. You can also check out this directory of mattress recycling locations; however, the facility in Indiana no longer appears to be in operation.

Stay tuned for part two of this post, in which I delight in the eco-friendly features of my new queen bedding.

Have you purchased an eco-friendly mattress, online or otherwise? What brand did you go with, and how did it work out?

Don’t Buy Stuff: The Reduction Approach to Ethical Shopping

Less is more quote on a card on a white table

Long time no see! As you can see from my recent posts, I’ve been hustling hard on the green events front. For a change of pace from sustainable party tips, here’s Bethany with the latest update on her year-long ethical shopping journey. — Julia


Well, I’m seven months into my experiment of a year of only purchasing clothing from ethical sources—certified fair trade shops, items that are made in the US, or thrift shops. The plan was to write a blog post a month about my journey, but that hasn’t happened because I’ve been stuck on what to write about. I’ve found that I’ve stopped purchasing clothing and don’t shop nearly as much as I used to (not that I was ever a big shopper, but it definitely dropped from 2-3 times a month to 1-2 times every few months).

Part of it is laziness. It’s time consuming to do the research and find certified fair trade shops that I feel good about buying from. Even when I find a company that looks good, I find myself questioning it—what if they’re just really good at looking like they’re ethical? What if this is just a way for them to charge me $60 for a top? How do I actually know if this company is what they say they are?

The other part is the expense. Most of the pricing that I’ve seen for fair trade clothing is 10-20% higher than the fast fashion items that I used to buy. I’m not saying that’s wrong—I definitely agree that one should pay more for ethically produced items—but I also just changed jobs and am watching my bank account closely.

Because of that, reduction has been my mantra. I’ve been reducing both the number of items in my closet and the number of items that I purchase. I’ve also been reducing the amount of meat that I eat. That may seem like an odd pairing to go with clothing, but I’ve found that wanting to be more responsible in one area of my life has lead me to examine other areas of my life as well. The meat industry has a lot of the same supply chain issues that the fashion industry has—pollution and environmental devastation as well as ethical issues that with factory farming and the way animals are treated. There’s also a parallel for me with how difficult it is to actually know—how do you know for sure where your clothing is coming from and that it has been produced in an ethical way? How do you know for sure that the cow that this steak came from was treated humanely or that the farmer that raised it doesn’t dump waste in such a way that it pollutes water sources?

It feels impossible to me to actually know for sure if the items I’m consuming are produced in a way that treats people and animals ethically and does as little environmental damage as possible. So I’m reducing and simply trying to consume less of items that I know usually have ethical and environmental issues in their production (like fast fashion and fast food).

It’s hard to write interesting things about ethical shopping when your approach is “don’t buy stuff.” But sometimes it’s as simple as that.

Introducing Bethany, our new contributor!

I’m thrilled that my good friend Bethany Daugherty is joining the Fair for All team as a contributor! She will be sharing periodic updates as she goes on a mission to buy only ethically-made or secondhand clothing this year. Here’s Bethany’s introduction to her quest in her own words. — Julia


Three years ago, I texted a number off of a really sketchy looking flyer that was posted on a bulletin board at the college I was about to graduate from. The flyer was very vague and plain, and said “Looking for a bass player for a bluegrass band. Text Kevin at 317-XXX-XXXX.”

I had just stolen a string bass, and was looking for more opportunities to learn how to play it. Okay, okay, I didn’t really steal it…I actually borrowed it from my mom and then never gave it back (thanks Mom!). I texted the number. This Kevin character texted back, and it was all set up for me to attend the first rehearsal at his house. All I could think was “I’m probably going to get murdered and killed.” Then I got another text asking if I had any food allergies. Murderers don’t care about food allergies! Little did I know that texting a random person from a sketchy flyer would turn out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And guess who was also a part of this band?

Group photo of Juvin: The One-Man Band

Bethany (left) with her quasi-stolen bass and the band

That’s right, none other than the lovely Julia Spangler! Over the past three years, we have become good friends, and I started reading this blog. When she screened “The True Cost,” I attended, and it was really eye-opening for me. Over the past six or seven months, I’ve had a Dr. Seuss quote stuck in my head:

Even though you can’t hear them or see them at all, a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

It really reminds me of the issues that were presented in that film. I can’t hear or see or know the people who are at the other end of the goods that I consume, but I can’t pretend they don’t exist.

In 2016, I’m tackling the sartorial issue head first—I am choosing to take responsibility for every dollar I spend, and committing to not purchase any new items of clothing unless they are fair trade. I’ll be relying on thrift shops, clothing swaps, and fair trade retail…and making do with the clothing I already own! You can look forward to upcoming blog posts throughout the year about my progress, what I learn through this process, and various DIY posts as I spruce up the clothing I own.

Bethany browsing tables of clothing

Bethany swappin’ it up at FairSwap15

I’m pretty new to all of this, and I’m still learning all the ins and outs on my quest to take responsibility for my own wallet. I still make mistakes, and I still occasionally buy something that I’m not entirely sure where it came from. Some of the challenges I’m anticipating are finding work-appropriate pants (that fit correctly and are not giant bell bottoms), blue jeans, undergarments, exercise clothing, and shoes. I’m only one month into this challenge, and it already sometimes feels overwhelming, but at the end of the day it helps me sleep at night to know that I’m doing what I can to treat those invisible and silent people with respect.