Schools Go green by switching to sustainable school uniform

Schools go green is an important measure to reduce carbon footprint. One of the latest initiatives is to re-think the school uniforms.  On average every student from kindergarten to secondary school requires eight pieces of clothing to wear to school in most Asian countries.  Comfort and durability are both crucial for these everyday wears. Thus, cotton and polyester are common materials to use.  However, the production of virgin polyester (made from fossil fuels) is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

To address the problem, a few pioneer schools in Hong Kong are requesting "green uniforms" for their students.  Take a school shirt for example, by replacing the 65% polyester composition with recycled polyester, we can reduce the green house gas emission from 3.12KG to 1.39KG, a significant reduction of 55%, according to a lab test report sponsored by Hanin Group.

As Hong Kong has about 1 million students and on average they require eight pieces of clothing to go to school, merely replacing the polyester part can help reduce over 13 million KG, or 13 tonne of CO2 equivalent.

Wearing recycled polyester clothes can help offset greenhouse gas emissions in a few other ways which we will discuss later.