A lovely customer of ours recently sent me some shots of her bras almost completely eaten by worms, it literally made my week!
As you see in the image below, the worms love an organic cotton bra as much as a tencel bra. There's a lot of greenwashing out there and I hear so much rubbish about what a 'sustainable bra' is. Anything made with recycled polyester is 100% plastic, nothing 'sustainable' about it. A cotton bra or bamboo bra blended with spandex and sewn with polyester is also not a sustainable bra as it can't be recycled (we can't separate spandex from other materials) and it can't go back to the earth, it will end up in landfill.
Our bras are 100% plastic-free and so worms love them. They accelerate through the body fabric very quickly but the natural rubber can take a little longer and can always be switched into your compost to break down more slowly and get out of your worms' hair.
Worms are very discerning about their diets. Our good friends at Wormtech described how they munched through cotton T shirts sewn with polyester thread, and all that was left were strands of looped thread that looked like DNA. Where they've been faced with a poly cotton T shirt sewn with cotton thread, they eat the thread and leave the T shirt!
As you know, a clean exit for my bras is a major passion of mine. We have our first meeting scheduled for next month, with a bunch of academics and experts, starting our work to develop a world-first Australian Standard for textile composting. Super exciting.
As part of that, we currently have one of our nursing bras in a controlled composting experiment at Deakin University under Australia's most senior textiles academic. Within 14 days there's a lot of bacteria to see and also holes already appearing. I can't wait to see the progress over the next few weeks and look forward to sharing that.
Until then, if your bra is nearly at an end, make like Ruth and as below:
- Chop it up small
- Remove the metal
- Wait for the magic to happen!
