Hemp advocates tend to get a rapturous look when they talk about their favorite plant. And they have some very good reasons for that.
You can make hemp into clothing, paper, wood composites, personal care products, paint, and food, among other things. Hemp yields several times the amount of fiber per acre that trees do, and as an annual crop, is easier to manage. It doesn’t require the huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides that cotton does, and doesn’t come from fossil fuels like synthetic fabrics. Hemp fiber is also particularly strong, meaning that paper can be recycled more times and textiles last longer. And hempseed oil is a great source of healthy essential fatty acids.
But advocates often go a bit overboard when they describe the benefits of hemp. The plant actually
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Want to be a socially and environmentally conscious consumer, but often find it difficult to know which companies to buy from, especially when it comes to clothing? Here is how to find out whether you are buying your clothing from a company that uses sustainable materials and manufacturing practices.
The question is one that is often on the minds of socially responsible consumers. There's good news and bad news, so we'll get the bad out of the way first: As far as we know, there's no comprehensive list of which companies are eco-friendly and which aren't, nor is there any industry-wide standard that clothing companies are held to. This often makes it difficult to find much information on a given company's practices other than what it posts on its own website (which you may want to take
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