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Ultraprocessed clothing is bad for the environment and bad for you.
News broke in early November that the U.S. federal dietary guidelines might soon warn Americans against eating “ultraprocessed food.”
It’s far from a done deal — an advisory committee is merely examining the issue, with no action expected before 2025. But it’s still somewhat of a duh moment for the millions of people who, over the past two decades, have turned away from food that comes in instant packets, boxes, and cans, and toward things that come from the produce aisle or the farmers market. Recent research makes a strong case that — more than individual villains like sugar, corn syrup, trans fats, and salt — it’s the way all these ingredients and more are pounded, mixed, extruded, and stuffed into shelf-stable forms that lead to health problems and weight gain.
Michael Pollan — the author who brought you the mantra “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants” — is arguably one of the biggest catalysts for the real food movement. In a lesson from his Masterclass on intentional eating, he warns against foods with “very long ingredient lists,” saying that “the simplest way to think about an ultraprocessed food is you can’t imagine making it at home.”
You’ve heard of fast food and its linguistic child: the environmental scourge that is fast fashion. I would like to add a new term to the health and environmental zeitgeist:
Ultraprocessed fashion.
In the early 2010s, I saw my own health and happiness vastly improve after overhauling my diet to eat whole, farm-fresh foods. But I wanted to take it further. I figured that if it matters to the environment and our health where we buy our food from, it might matter where we get other things, like beauty products, home goods, and fashion.
Still, for a long, the argument for U.S. shoppers in favor of buying more sustainable fashion — the kind of classic, durable pieces skillfully made of natural fibers by artisans and American factories — was largely an altruistic one. Sustainable fashion purchases were meant to benefit a cotton farmer in India you would never meet, to protect a river in Kenya you would never see, or support a community of craftspeople in Thailand you would never have the privilege of knowing.
Even more nebulous, arguments that purchasing this instead of that would prevent the release of (super rough estimate) a few pounds of invisible climate-polluting gas into the atmosphere have not proven to be a very strong motivator for shoppers. In survey after survey, consumers swear up and down that they care deeply about sustainability … as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them, cost more money, or look too crunchy.
That’s an impossible standard. Sustainable fashion, whether it takes the form of a 100% wool sweater from California, a hand-block-printed cotton sundress, or a naturally dyed button-down, is always going to be more expensive than its synthetic counterpart made in a sweatshop somewhere where the workers are cheap and the laws are loose. Neither does slow fashion keep up with TikTok trends, by definition.
I initially had a hard time connecting sustainable fashion to Western shoppers’ well-being beyond the argument that an overstuffed, chaotic closet full of fast fashion can’t be good for your mental health or time management. After all, we’re not eating our clothing, right?
That all changed in 2019, when I first heard that Delta Air Lines attendants were suing Lands’ End, the maker of their uniforms, saying the new clothes were making them sick.
If you could call any clothing ultraprocessed, it would be these uniforms. While old airline outfits were made of traditional wool suiting and cotton button-downs in staid colors, the uniforms introduced in the past decade or so at Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, and Southwest all were made of synthetic blends. They came in super-saturated colors and were coated in layers of performance chemicals: flame retardants, Teflon for stain resistance, and formaldehyde-based wrinkle-free finishes. They were made fast and cheap by suppliers in countries with lax environmental standards.
As I reported in my book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick – and How We Can Fight Back, at every single one of those four major airlines, up to a quarter of the attendants reported having health reactions, including rashes and skin burns, breathing problems, hair loss, blurry vision, brain fog, and extreme fatigue. Some attendants had to be taken off their planes and brought to the ER. Though the lawsuit by Delta flight attendants didn’t move forward, in November of this year a jury awarded over $1 million to four American Airlines flight attendants who said their Twin Hill uniforms made them sick.
The next question that arises is: Is this happening to regular folks, too? And the answer is yes, but in more subtle and insidious ways. For example, the kinds of dyes used on synthetic materials like polyester (disperse dyes) are well-known to dermatologists to be common skin sensitizers. But many people may not know it’s clothing exacerbating their toddler’s eczema or setting off their own skin problems.
But the issue is more serious than just rashes, though rashes are often the first sign that something is wrong. Researchers and advocacy groups have tested fashion from well-known brands and counterfeits alike and found heavy metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium; endocrine disruptors like Bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); biocides, pesticides, and fungicides; and known carcinogens like benzene, certain azo dyes, and formaldehyde. (This is an abbreviated list, by the way.)
We’ve known for a long time these chemicals end up in our water and environment. PFAS, a toxic class of chemicals used for imbuing synthetics with water resistance, has been found all over Mount Everest’s summit, for example. But what we’re increasingly seeing is that our fashion, like our diets, affects our physical health.
Take microfibers, which in Heatmap’s recent survey were deemed to be a problem by 61% of respondents, and an “extremely serious” problem by 25% of respondents. When microfibers come off our clothes in the wash or break off our clothes and become part of our house dust, they bring with them everything that is in and on clothing. Given that we’re ingesting microfibers every day, we are eating our clothes. We’re also breathing in their VOCs, and our sweat is pulling those chemicals out of fibers onto our skin, where they can be absorbed into our bloodstream.
One of the main reasons fashion has turned from a field-to-closet endeavor to a chemistry experiment is the same as for food: It’s more profitable to sell highly processed, branded products made exclusively from petrochemicals and with a lot of marketing promises than it is to sell traditional pieces made from natural materials.
This happens at both ends of the fashion spectrum. At the low end, as Shein has shown, you can grow your company at an unprecedented speed by sourcing huge volumes of $5 polyester minidresses from garment factories with dubious working conditions, according to numerous reports.
At the other end, a company can add proprietary, brand-name chemistry like Gore-Tex to outdoor gear and sell it at a huge markup. Just observe a bit currently going around on TikTok where a spouse or partner requests you wear your most expensive clothing to an event or to meet the parents, so you show up in hiking gear.
Sure, if you’re a professional fisherman plowing through rough seas for your catch, a first responder, or a scientist living in the Arctic, you may well need high-performance gear. But for the rest of us, it’s just aspirational marketing, kind of like drinking Gatorade while you’re on the couch watching football.
Like the food industry before it, the fashion industry’s focus when it comes to safe and non-toxic fashion has been on individual chemicals or classes of chemicals instead of the holistic picture. The (completely voluntary) standards used by some fashion brands and certifications will test a textile for a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of possible chemical substances in circulation, and if each is under the (often arbitrary) limit, the fashion piece will be declared safe.
This approach, however, doesn’t take into account how chemicals can mix to have synergistic effects on the same organs or cause the same health effects.
For example, it’s completely within the realm of possibility for one clothing item or outfit to have BPA, phthalates, and PFAS, each of which by itself wreaks havoc on our hormonal system, even in tiny, tiny amounts. Some of these chemicals are used to process fibers. Some chemicals such as finishes, dyes, and glues are used deliberately and are meant to stay in and on the fashion. Some chemicals are accidental contaminants, as fabrics and components flow through an opaque, unregulated, and just plain sloppy supply chain.
That then can affect everything from our reproductive system and energy levels to our skin appearance and weight. And all this while you’re trying to take care of your health by taking a hike or hitting the gym. It kind of reminds me of when cereal brands will brag about the vitamins they’ve added to their sugary, processed cereal.
What’s more, unlike food, cleaning products, and beauty products, clothing doesn’t come with a complete ingredient list. Anything under 5% of the weight of the product doesn’t have to be included. So what kind of finishes, dyes, threads, or contaminants are present in any piece of fashion is somewhat of a mystery.
When people ask me what they should buy or what they should clean out of their closets, I usually give them a list of things to look for and things to avoid — yes to natural fibers like cotton, wool, linen, bamboo rayon, and silk; no to toxic “vegan” leather polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and other synthetics, which are more likely to contain hazardous or sensitizing chemicals; avoid neon bright colors and buy naturally dyed or undyed products when you can; don’t dry clean your clothes.
But a simpler way to think about it would be to avoid clothing and accessories that your grandparents would look askance at, just like Pollan has encouraged us to do at the grocery store. Wait, what is Pertex® 20D Diamond Fuse Ripstop nylon? Or a polyester Lycra® elastane blend with anti-odor technology? What does it mean when something has Durable Water Repellant? What is actually in Memory Foam™ or the smelly glue that bonds it to the bottom of a sneaker? Do you really believe that a piece of clothing that smells like gasoline out of the box is okay for your health — or for anyone’s health? Which sounds better to you: chromium-tanned leather or vegetable-tanned leather?
Sure, it may take a bit more time, skill, and investment than buying synthetic clothing that you drop off at the dry cleaner. But then again, so does making a nutritious meal from ingredients you get at the farmer’s market. And, I would argue, both are a core part of cultivating a healthier, more vibrant, community-oriented, and nurturing life.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.