BENU COUTURE

The whole story of BENU COUTURE

A walk in the woods in the north of Luxembourg. It's wonderful, the birds are singing, there, a deer between the trees. And then, yes, then the trousers crack. Suddenly and without any warning. My jeans, not yet 10 years old (hehe), tear not at the seam, but of course right in the middle. It is immediately clear to me that it is not done with one or two stitches.

This is when the story of BENU begins.

What options do I have? Only a few days before, I watched an undercover report by French investigative journalists in a large textile production plant in Asia. I was stunned and cried a lot when I saw the worker being beaten with a wooden club because she dared to talk to her neighbour. Twice a day, within 10 working hours, they are allowed to go to the toilet. Talking is not allowed because of the then supposedly reduced concentration and work speed. All this so we can find trousers for 15 € on the shelves of our shops? Have we lost our minds?

Thus, it is clear that new trousers coming from the corner shop are out of the question. So maybe trousers with a label, organic, of some supposed sustainability, OekoTex, Fairtrade ...?

I’ve learned in my life not to trust any label without analysis. All textile labels, even the best ones, cannot hide the fact that we are on the wrong track worldwide, especially in the production of clothes, including cultivation and processing.

Child labour

Good labels guarantee that the youngest children are not allowed to work, but the slightly less young children are. This is announced in a media-effective way as "Child labour free". But what does this statement actually mean? Take Bangladesh, for example: If children in Bangladesh "only" work from the age of 12, the garment can receive the most highly respected labels such as GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard, global-standard.org ) and IVN (Internationaler Verband der Naturtextilwirtschaft naturtextil.de ).

Drinking water resource

Other labels ensure that much less water is used in cultivation. The most optimistic and strictest of these, however, still assume that a freshwater consumption of about 1,000 litres is still needed for producing a t-shirt.

To summarise, new goods always leave a large to enormous, unacceptable socio-ecological footprint on our world.

Recycling

What about recycled clothes, clothes that are not made from new yarn and new colours? After intensive research, I found that the terms "recycling" in general and "textile recycling" in particular, are used very generously and often deliberately with little precision.

Despite long research and discussions with experts and industrialists, it was simply impossible for me to find recycled clothes. There are many reasons for this: Europe allows the burning of clothes to be called "recycling" (technical term: thermo-energetic recycling). Shredding clothes is also called "recycling" when we produce insulation mats for the automotive industry, for example. Although the quality of the mats is lower than that of the original clothes and, moreover, the mats are only used once. After that, they are rubbish.

The specialised industry explains to me that the clothes are simply made of too many different qualities of fabric, which make it impossible to recycle them (by type). In the best case, and this is the current state of the art, about 3 to 4 times the amount of fresh polyester (a plastic derived from oil) would have to be added to the recycled material to stabilise it. So, even more microplastics in the wastewater, even more mixed fibres that make later recycling even more difficult?

Is this what the green future of clothes looks like?

No. Let's stop kidding ourselves. Clothes recycling does not exist de facto. The term is consistently misused by politicians and industry to either argue unobjectively or to conjure up a good conscience. This is unsavoury, suggestive and dishonest.

So no label, no recycling after all. My question remains unanswered: where do I get another pair of trousers without seeing people or our environment suffer?

I am serious about sustainability. I am looking for a solution that is socially and environmentally just. A (perhaps small) answer to the most serious issues of our time: social justice and a way out of the climate crisis that awaits us all. A pair of trousers, then, with a socio-environmental footprint close to zero.

Old clothes

What is it with old clothes, where do they come from and where do they go, how are they further used? I have devoted myself intensively to this question, evaluated figures from all over Europe, studied reports and analyses from international sources. The result is as simple as it is sobering:

The world is suffocating in old clothes. Luxembourg collects almost 10,000 tonnes per year. This amount corresponds to almost 42 million t-shirts, collected by a population of about 640,000 people. In Germany alone, people dispose of 150,000 kg of clothes. Every single hour. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. 1.7% of our old clothes end up with needy people. In other words: no, when we throw our clothes into the charity's container, we are definitely not helping the child with the brown googly eyes who is smiling gratefully at us on the container. 31% of the clothes are burnt, 36% are sold to countries where they ruin the local textile industry, 20% are made into mats and 10% end up on the second-hand market.

I'll let that sink in. Almost all the clothes collected (over 98%) do not go to the poor, to people who desperately need clothes. That's tough.

And then it dawns on me that this must be exactly the starting point for BENU COUTURE. So, if we select parts that are basically of good quality from the countless clothes that people give away (dispose of), I can put together a new pair of trousers. For this we need qualified fashion designers and tailors who work locally under decent conditions. Then we can separate the collected clothes and use the resulting fabric parts as raw material for newly produced, modern clothes. Everything local, no endless transport routes (an average pair of jeans travels 20,000 km before it ends up in our shops). All high quality. Lifetime guarantee. Greatly reduced leaching of chemical products compared to new clothes (about 2,400 chemical products are used in industrial textile production, of which about 250 are considered explicitly harmful to humans and the environment). Creating local jobs under socially correct conditions. In this way, we create work locally, bring transparency back into one of the oldest professions in the world and offer, besides selling second-hand clothes and renting clothes (in preparation at BENU COUTURE), probably the only option for a truly sustainable use of clothes.

Thus, BENU COUTURE hatches out of the egg ... and into the first ecovillage of the Greater Region, BENU VILLAGE. Because, of course, it is important to us to have not only a sustainable concept but also a sustainable way of working and an equally sustainable working environment.

You can find out more about our thoughts and solutions to socio-ecologically sustainable issues at BENU COUTURE in our chapter ABOUT BENU COUTURE.. You can find relevant explanations about the ecovillage and our working environment on the BENU website (benu.lu).