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The lightbulb moment came for Stella McCartney and her famous mother and father, Paul and Linda McCartney, when they sat down at their farmhouse table to eat a meal of lamb one day. Through the window, they happened to glance at their own little white lambs playing in their farm meadows. It didn’t take long for them to equate their happily playing lambs outside to the meal that lay before them, and how these care-less creatures were now just lifeless lumps of meat on the plate.
The McCartney family, now strident vegetarians, has of course made no secret of their distaste for the way most use and abuse animals ever since. They’ve put their names to numerous causes over the years to help improve the lot of billions of helpless, exploited animals from Canadian Seals to factory farmed chickens.
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Maria Kirilenko Shows Off The Early Fruits Of The adidas By Stella McCartney Tennis Apparel Relationship - Maximum Style & Compassion With Minimum Cruelty & Environmental Damage |
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Stella Battles With The Fashion Industry To Highlight Animal Cruelty
Stella McCartney has been able to exert some direct leverage in her own profession - designer fashion. This is an industry notorious for fickle beliefs, shallowness and short term greed so she’s had her work cut out, trying to influence the institutional, callous indifference to anything but the aesthetic.
She’s admitted that she’s had to agree to disagree with some to keep arguments to a minimum. Her prowess as a designer, though, has allowed her a degree of freedom to lead by example in the way she designs and produces her apparel, shoes and bags.
Stella refuses to have anything to do with fur, and tries to restrict the use of materials that involve a degree of animal cruelty in their manufacture, (like some wools), and are environmentally costly to produce, like cotton for example.
Tarnished Wool And Dirty Cotton
Though wool production might seem a benign process, about 8 million sheep are ‘lost’ each year in Australia to hypothermia (after losing their coats), drought, lameness, poor nutrition, and flystrike, an appalling condition whereby they’re eaten alive by the maggots of the Blowfly.
Australian farmers reduce the incidence of this condition by a ‘delicate’ procedure known as ‘Mulesing’, where large chunks of skin are carved off the sheep without anaesthetic, a process which were it performed on dogs or cats would rightly cause outrage.
Likewise cotton might seem a clean crop, but it is in fact one of the dirtiest, in that large amounts of toxic insecticides are used to prevent it’s attack. Genetically modified cotton, producing it’s own insecticide can make matters worse, as insects rapidly become immune to the toxins and these new ‘superpests’ can create havoc. Cotton also requires large amounts of an ever more precious worldwide resource - water!
Stella McCartney And adidas Relish The Eco Challenge
Stella relishes these apparent restrictions as to the materials she is able to use in her designs. It’s quite exciting for her to explore new eco-friendly ingredients to her textiles to make fabrics of differing texture and color, that often out-perform the ‘lazy’ old materials other designers find essential to their collections, year in, year out.
Stella joined forces with adidas, back in 2005, and the 'adidas By Stella McCartney' partnership has proved fruitful to both parties. Stella has added extra flair and femininity to the adidas women’s range and adidas has given Stella access to high performance sports textiles, fabric engineering and the reach of a multi-national company.
You might have thought that there would be a conflict of interest, with Stella’s eco attitude being swamped by the all-consuming desire of a big company to maximize it’s profits. But the timing for both was a good one. Adidas by 2005 was already engaged in a total re-think of it’s operation with a desire to massively reduce it’s ecological footprint on the planet. This was in light of the ever more obvious evidence of environmental degradation across the planet, alongside global warming.
Adidas Take The First Steps To A ‘Better Place’
The ‘Better Place’ initiative born out of these ideas is breathtakingly comprehensive in it’s scope, tasked with embedding everyday environmental thinking into every person and process. Adidas seeks to cut out waste, employ sustainable materials, promote recycling and reduce harmful chemical use across the whole breadth of it’s operation from design to delivery.
Every single building they own is required to work more efficiently and effectively with renewable energy where possible, to bring about significant savings to adidas and the whole planet. Such root and branch changes can’t be wrought overnight, so they’ve introduced a 3-tiered strategy to get the process in motion.
The ‘Baseline’ target is for athletic shoes and apparel to have a 5% recycled content or process improvements. The ‘Competitive’ tier requires at least 50%, and the ‘Technically Advanced’ product will have 100% sustainable content. To give some scale to the operation, by the end of 2011, adidas expect to have produced over 56,000,000 pairs of athletic shoes that met the first criterion.
Philanthropic Business Is Back In Fashion
Stella McCartney hasn’t just been animal-centric in her concerns and has been vocal about the need for employee protection as well. Here, adidas’ plans have probably even exceeded Stella’s hopes as they intend to not only protect the workers’ factories and immediate environment from harmful chemicals and toxic waste, but also to provide education and personal development for their employees.
This scheme is somewhat reminiscent of the ideas of the more philanthropic business owners in Victorian Britain, who sought to improve the lot of their workforces after the growth of industrial slums following the Industrial Revolution. One such owner, George Cadbury, a chocolate magnate (sounds like my kind of job!), was way ahead of his time when he asked in the mid 19th century: ‘Why should an industrial area be squalid and depressing?’ He, and his brother, Richard moved their business to a green field site outside the city (Birmingham), so their workers wouldn’t be ‘condemned to live in a place where a rose cannot grow’.
Animal Products Aren’t Eco Friendly, Efficient Or Cost Effective
Perhaps the main factor that now makes adidas and Stella McCartney sing in harmony from the same hymn sheet, is the recent increased awareness that animal farming is such an inefficient use of resources, so it’s no longer only an animal welfare issue. Leather is of course a significant component in many athletic shoes, but the downside of it’s use is enormous.
The industry built around the culling of livestock contributes more to environmental warming (18%) than the whole of the transportation sector. It’s also responsible for a large part of land and water degradation. There are other issues with the chemicals needed to treat leather such as chromium, which has now become a serious pollutant in the US water supply (that’s the same chemical that was central to the film Erin Brockovich).
There’s no doubt that the flexibility of leather is very suited to shoe production, but other natural and synthetic products are now being combined to outperform leather for comfort and durability, and most significantly, are easier to recycle.
Adidas Set To Reap The Eco-Dividend
The biggest surprise in all this upheaval for adidas, is that by taking better care of the earths resources and it’s own employees, it’s going to reap a huge financial payback from increased efficiency and a happier more productive workforce. The promotion of recycling and other efficiencies brought about from this period of introspection, makes much better use of raw materials and is simply more profitable.
That’s good for Stella, adidas and the planet - a win win win situation. |
