Oct. 5, 2011 (ShapeShiftas) -- Today I plan to stuff some new pillows to bring to Art in the Park this weekend (http://www.chaffeeartcenter.org/art_park.html - booth #68). So naturally I thought, "what else can I do besides stuffing pillows?"
It's not that I dislike the work. I enjoy working with my hands, shaping the pillows and giving each one character and personality. It's just that I can't help thinking about the petroleum we are using up by filling each pillow with polyester fiberfill.
I've spent a lot of time researching filling for ShapeShiftas. I've tried fiber made from corn, bamboo, cotton -- too limp, too expensive, not enough loft, not washable. There was the fiasco that was trying out kapok -- I stuck my hands in the box & began to fill, only to find tiny fibers flying all over that made me sneeze, itch, and weep. Only polyester fiberfill has the shaping, handling, and hypo-allergenic qualities that I want.
I'd feel a little better if we could use recycled polyester. I am still looking for a supplier. It's made from soda bottles that would otherwise go into landfill. Alas the companies that made recycled fiberfill stopped -- they couldn't sell it because it was more expensive than new polyester fiberfill. I guess no one cares enough about our dwindling oil supplies to pay a little more for their pillows and stuffed animals.
When ShapeShiftas gets bigger, I hope we can mill our own recycled polyester fiberfill. I suppose then we could also use those huge machines that blow fiberfill into a shell, you may have seen them at Build-A-Bear Workshop, if you've ever been dragged into this money-pit by your 6-year-old. Rich kids in New York would have birthday parties there!
We're not big enough (yet!) to buy such a (six-figures) machine or to subcontract to a factory that has them. I'm not even sure that such a factory still exists here in the USA. Just like all other consumer goods, especially sewn products, about 98 percent of all pillows are made elsewhere, usually in China. There are some that are sewn in China and filled in the United States, just because you can't cram enough filled pillows into a container to make it cheaper than paying workers here to operate the fill machines. But most are totally Chinese-made, from the fabric to the fiberfill or foam to the completed pillow.
I don't exactly have a problem with Chinese production of goods, except for the trillions of corporate dollars spent there instead of here, the labor practices that make it nearly impossible to be competitive if you want to pay your workers a fair wage and provide benefits, the lack of environmental regulation and intellectual property protection, or the huge carbon output from running all those factories and shipping all those containers around the globe just so we can buy cheap T-shirts at Wal-Mart.
Like every other apparel manufacturer, I too have produced goods in China, because it was cheaper, and everyone else was doing it. A sweatshop is a sweatshop, in China or in Chinatown. Now, the big retailers just do it themselves, hiring a technical designer & sending spec sheets to their factories in China. Many retailers won't even buy goods made in the USA, because they think they will be too expensive and of poor quality. Scores of small apparel manufacturers, including mine, have gone out of business.
But when I first started working in the Garment Center, there were still apparel factories all over, and we still produced a large part of the apparel sold in the United States within those several blocks. The apparel industry was one of the top employers in New York City then. We could go to the cutting rooms and actually see the fabric being laid out, and to go to the factories while they were making our styles. Talk about quality control; if something wasn't right, you saw it while it was still "in the machines" and could correct it right there. If you needed zippers or buttons to finish a lot, you could pick them up & run over to the factory with them. You could take a reorder on Monday & ship it Friday. Those were the days!
I loved how involved, how "hands-on" we were with the making of the goods we were selling back then. I like overseeing every step of the process it takes to make my designs come to life. I am committed to working locally to make ShapeShiftas pillows and cushions. Perhaps we are offsetting our fiberfill petroleum usage by choosing not to have our goods shipped from across the globe?
We can only try our best to be aware of the issue of Peak Oil and to make changes as we can to reduce our petroleum consumption. Because I want to make pillows, not war!
peace, Deborah