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Ask Mr. Green

My company recently decided that we should all wear shirts with our corporate logo in the booth. Where can we find sustainable options?

Choosing apparel to enhance your company's image is important, but the range of styles is as varied as the event industry itself. Suits and ties are expected at aerospace shows, but warm-up jackets are the rage at the International Health and Racket Sports Association show.

We see it in our industry, too. An exhibit house clothed its staff in Armani at EXHIBITOR one year, while another donned coveralls as part of a service-station theme. Your apparel choices will depend on your market, your brand, and the image you are trying to convey.

That said, today's range of organic, recycled, and recyclable fabrics can fit almost any brand.

The Fabric of Our Lives
Cotton is the most widely used natural fiber in the world. It practically defines what clothing looks and feels like. This is especially true if you plan to dress your staff in promotional polo or dress shirts. People expect cotton to be comfortable and breathable, and you can expect cotton shirts to be affordable.

But cotton is a water-hungry crop and, in the 1990s, it accounted for 25 percent of all agricultural pesticides used in the United States. It also took one-third of a pound of fertilizer to grow a pound of cotton – enough to make one t-shirt.

Since then, cotton has gone through a revolution, along with a well designed PR campaign. Today's cotton is more drought-tolerant and pest-resistant, but it still relies on generous use of herbicides. The reason is GMOs – "genetically modified" cotton. GMOs are increasing crop yields for the 7 billion of us on the planet now, but they are highly controversial due to concerns about environmental impacts and the social fairness of their manufacture and sale.

Organic cotton clothing is a Greener alternative, since organic farming avoids toxic chemicals and helps promote healthy ecosystems on and around farms. Organic promotional clothing is widely available in everything from T-shirts to polos, sweaters, and dress shirts. When it comes to cotton, organic is the Greenest choice.

Back to the Future
Hemp has been making inroads into promotional clothing too. Hemp is a natural fiber that needs far less water, fertilizer, and pesticides than conventional cotton. In fact, before the 1920s, most clothing was made from hemp. It tends to be less white and a bit less soft than cotton, so it is often blended with other fibers. Again, a full range of styles are available and, as with organic cotton, organic hemp apparel is colored using low-impact dyes.

The Bamboo Forest
Bamboo is the world's fastest-growing grass, which makes it a highly sustainable natural material that can be grown without toxic chemicals and can be harvested frequently. Fabric made from bamboo is so soft, smooth, and luxurious that it is often compared to silk and cashmere. But turning strong, woody bamboo stalks into a gentle fabric relies on one of two processes, and only one of them could be called Green.

The natural process, which involves crushing, soaking, and combing fibers out of the mush for weaving into yarn, yields a fabric called "bamboo linen." It's eco-friendly but rare and difficult to find. Unfortunately, most bamboo fabric is made using a process that involves cooking crushed bamboo in toxic chemical solvents that are unhealthful for textile workers and the planet.

As a result, while bamboo is a Green resource, very little bamboo clothing could be called sustainable.

Recycled Dinosaurs
If your brand image leans toward outdoor or athletic apparel, you might consider donning a soda bottle. That's the source behind Eco-Spun: polyester fabrics made from PET, the soda-bottle plastic. Outdoor clothing company Patagonia was the first to make outerwear from Eco-Spun, and the fabric has caught on all across the outdoor and athletic industries. Today, any clothing style that says fitness is probably available in recycled polyester.

Perhaps the best feature of recycled PET is that it can be recycled again after it wears out. Several outdoor and athletic clothing companies offer recycling programs to encourage you to return worn-out apparel.

As always, finding your Greenest option means matching sustainable resources to your brand image and practical requirements. Very few companies outfit their booth staff in Armani, but with today's fabrics, it's easy to make Green choices that enhance your company's image.

Tom Bowman, president of Bowman Global Change in Signal Hill, CA, works with national institutions on climate change and sustainability communications and is a frequent speaker on improving public engagement in climate and energy issues. As a green business consultant, he advises companies on cost-effective sustainability actions and has won multiple awards for developing and implementing his own firm's successful green business plan. [email protected]