Going green -- and not just for St. Patrick's Day!

Happy belated St. Patrick's day! So I may have forgotten to wear the color green yesterday... (don't tell my Irish ancestors!) but at least my clothes were "green" because I've been sticking to my rules!

I found an incredibly cohesive how-to about greening your wardrobe:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/11/how-to-go-green-wardrobe.php

It's from a great online resource for all things sustainable: www.treehugger.com. TreeHugger describes themselves as the leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream.  

I've listed some of the scary facts from the article below...
(The article is from 2006, so it's a little old, but I bet these facts are still mostly accurate)

• The average American throws away about 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per year.

• It takes almost 1/3 of a pound of chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) to grow enough cotton for just ONE T-shirt

• Seven of the fifteen pesticides used on cotton are considered “possible”, “likely”, “probable”, or “known” human carcinogens (acephate, dichloropropene, diuron, fluometuron, pendimethalin, tribufos, and trifluralin) according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

• Pesticides are suspected to be responsible the severe drop in honeybees, the increase in frogs with extra legs and eyes, and annual death of 67 million birds.

• The U.S. textile "recycling industry" (which actually re-purposes rather than recycles), with some 2,000 companies, removes annually from the solid waste stream 2.5 billion pounds of post consumer textile product waste.

The one about the honeybees and birds is particularly sad :(