Last week I wrote about the potential environmental problems with detergents – this week is a summary of the laundry products I think are the best. I warn you now, that as a trained scientist, I am aware that I have carried out a number of shockingly unscientific and wholly subjective tests. But I have trialled many products literally for years and have recently had the help of a number of my ecologically-minded neighbours. My problem is that LFM* and I do a lot of exercise so we’re concerned with sweat and mud. I realise people with children may well be more bothered about milk vomit and grass and others might be fixated on Shiraz stains. The bottom line is that if you want totally clean, sweat-free clothes, most eco detergents don’t cut it. It’s not surprising, says Phil Patterson, a textile consultant and founder of Colour Connections. He points out that to clean clothes you need hot water, lots of it, and detergent. Modern washing machines are designed to operate with less water and at lower temperatures than they used to do, which means you’re heavily reliant on the cleaning power of your detergent. Here’s my take on the best environmentally-friendly ones:

Soap pods– the nut of the Indian sapindus tree. They naturally contain soap (saponin) and work pretty well. Put 5-6 in a little bag, tie firmly, use three times and then compost. A totally free option I’ve read about is to use peeled conkers.

£10.50 for 500g

Ecoballs – they contain mineral salts and work by ionizing oxygen, which lifts out the dirt and grime. They’ll only work if you use all three and don’t put any detergent in with them.

£34.95 for three

Ingredients: Anionic surfactants, calcium carbonate, sodium carbonate, sodium metasilicate

On the plus side, these are both very green options: you can reduce fabric conditioner (and don’t need it for the balls) as well as the length of the rinse cycle and you’ll be releasing almost no chemicals. Also, per wash, they’re pretty cheap – Ecozone, the manufacturer of the original ecoballs, claim that they cost 3p per wash; soap pods are meant to be 50% cheaper than conventional or alternative laundry products. The balls are made of plastic but you can refill them with mineral pellets after 1,000 laundry cycles. However, neither option shifts stubborn stains, like make-up, or ingrained sweat, and the ecoballs made the colour run in my sports tops. The laundry doesn’t have that fresh (chemically-produced smell) we’re used to; the manufacturers suggest you add essential oils. Five drops didn’t do anything, fifteen made LFM smell like a flower and stained his shirts, which didn’t go down too well (eight seems to work).

Ecover stain remover  - recommended to me by a number of people. You paint it onto your clothes before you stick them in the wash. The eco balls also come with a stain remover (and a 30 day money-back trial period). Ecover is not recommended for wool or silk but is supposed to remove grease and protein stains such as blood, egg, grass, mud, milk, sweat, ice cream.

£2.89 for 200ml

Ingredients: Alkyl poly glycoside C10-16, sodium lauryl ether sulfate, sodium chloride, ethanol, perfume, cellulase, citric acid, subtilisin 2-bromo-2-nitropropane-1,3-diol linalool

Daylesford organics laundry liquid (concentrated) – the ingredients are all natural, organic and are not tested on animals. The detergent smells gorgeous as it is scented with either geranium or lavender essential oils. Good for wool, silk, cold or handwash cycles – don’t expect it to get rid of dirt and sweat in a normal wash. Plus it’s relatively expensive.

£4.75 for 1 litre

Ingredients: Vegetable oil soap, aqua, glucose-derived detergent, ethanol, natural anionic detergent, citrates, citric acid, geranium oil

AlmaWin heavy duty laundry powder (concentrated) – this was the best of all the environmentally-friendly alternatives I’ve tried (although, in general, modern machines work better with liquids rather than powder and you need to put the powder in the drum, not the drawer). The power contains no brighteners, petrochemicals, phosphates, chlorine, bulking agents, or colour-additives. It’s not the cheapest or the most eco option (compared to pods and balls) and it does contain biological enzymes (protease). Like enzymes in any detergent they will get your clothes cleaner, but they don’t just dissolve stains, they also go to work on fabric so your clothes will not last quite as long, and some people have an allergic reaction to them. Smells quite fresh, although not of lavender, which is what it contains. AlmaWin points out that the protease enzyme is the only one on the market that is not created by genetic engineering… AlmaWin was on a par with conventional detergents like Ariel and Persil, with the added benefit of containing no nasty chemicals, fewer allergens and is not tested on animals.

£7.80 per 1kg

Ingredients: saccharoidal surfactant, fatty alcohol sulphate, vegetable soap, phyllosilicates, soda, sodium bicarbonate, sodium percarbonate, poly aspartic acid, rice starch, citric acid, natural proteases, TAED, organic lavender essential oil

Bio-D concentrated laundry liquid (concentrated) – this doesn’t smell great in the bottle but has a nice, fresh, faint clean smell when the clothes are laundered. Shifted both dirt and all but the very worst sweat and does not contain enzymes. Bio-D comes in a recycled plastic bottle. Junky Styling, London-based designers who create fantastic garments from old suits and shirts, warn that soap can leave a scum stain on your clothes, although I haven’t found this so far. Since the ingredients for both Bio-D and Daylesford Organics are identical (apart from the essential oils) I’m concluding that it must be the amounts of the ingredients that varies.

£3.85 per litre

Ingredients: Vegetable oil soap, aqua, glucose-derived detergent, ethanol, natural anionic detergents, citrates, citric Acid

Good luck!

*LFM – Lovely Frisbee Man

 Photo of Eco balls courtesy of Ecozone

Believe it or not, the majority of the damage your clothes do the environment is not when they’re being made but when you get hold of them. On average, a typical garment is washed twenty times and this uses six times as much energy as it did to make it in the first place. A T-shirt, for example, if washed at 60°C, tumble dried and ironed, will lead to the release of 4kg of C0² - the equivalent of flying for 17 miles. If you forgo tumble drying and don’t iron, you can cut the carbon emissions and energy consumption of your laundry by half (I hang up my tops and dresses as soon as they come out of the wash to try and minimise ironing). And as we know, washing your clothes in an A rated machine and reducing the temperature helps massively (your energy consumption is reduced by 10% for every 10^oC reduction in temperature). So reducing the temperature, reducing the number of times you wash your clothes, forgoing tumble drying and cutting back on ironing will be better for the environment - but what damage is your detergent doing?

It’s really hard to find out exactly what’s in your laundry detergent – manufacturers aren’t obliged to give more than a cursory nod towards the ingredients – nor is it easy to work out how damaging these chemicals are. Basically, your washing powder contains surfactants, bleaches, builders and enzymes. Surfactants are what get your clothes clean; builders are added to make surfactants work better in hard water areas, bleaches release peroxide into your washing machine to remove stains like coffee and enzymes digest stains (and your clothes too, over time). There may also be a whole host of other things as well, such as optical brighteners to make your whites look whiter, dispersing agents to hold removed dye away from the fabric and Ph adjusters that alter the acidity of the water.

Unsurprisingly the detergent industry firmly maintains that there is nothing wrong with the chemicals they use and equally unsurprisingly fervent greenies think there is. Overall, some of what is released from your washing machine into the sewage system is efficiently mopped up by our treatment plants. However, around a quarter of all detergents sold in Europe contain phosphates (they’re a ‘builder’) and about a quarter of all the phosphates in our waterways come from our laundry (the rest is the run-off from farming). The consequence of this is eutrophication, where water weeds and algae thrive on the excess phosphate, grow wildly, suck up all the oxygen and smother aquatic life. Plus some surfactants are broken down to a chemical called nonylphenol, which is toxic to fish and causes ‘oestrogen activity’ in mammals. Oestrogen, as you know, is the hormone that helps women grow boobs. According to The Chemistry of the Environment by Bailey, Clark, Ferris, Krause and Strong (published by Academic Press 2002), it’s not clear whether there’s enough nonylphenol in our water to be fish-killing and breast-forming.

But just in case – you might want to try using an eco-detergent! Unfortunately, not that many are that good – so next week I’ll let you know the results of my eco-laundry trials…and tribulations.


Photos copyright Sanjida O'Connell

The trouble with shoes is that if they look fantastic, you can’t walk in them. More seriously, shoes can have up to 30 components, which means it’s hard to make a totally sustainable pair. As I’ve written before, there are ethical issues with leather. No longer simply a by-product of the meat industry, demand now outstrips supply and 14% of UK leather comes from non-bovine sources, such as foetal lambs, kangaroos and reptiles. Leather requires serious amounts of processing using a wide variety of chemicals including chrome, which is highly toxic and can cause cancer. Buying vegan shoes can be tricky: there are only a few good designers out there, you’re often forced to shop over the Internet and the materials used are either oil-derived polyurethane or fabric, which is neither particularly hard wearing nor waterproof. Another option is to go for an ethical leather shoe designer such as Timberland or Terra Plana. Terra Plana, which means flat land in Spanish, was bought by that stalwart of the British shoe shopper, Clarks, in 1998, and is now run by  young Clark, Galahad.

If you wished (and particularly if you have a vegetable box) you could find out which farm produced your meat or cheese, where your vegetables came from, who grew your fruit and how they all reached you. You could even ring up the farmer and have a chat. You would be hard pressed to do the same with any item from your wardrobe. You can buy organic, Fairtrade food in the supermarket, in your local corner shop, at motorway service stations, in farmer’s markets, from veg boxes; any coffee you pick up in Dunkin’ Donuts or at the Hilton will be Fairtrade, as is every banana on sale in Sainsburys and Waitrose, along with every chocolate chip in a Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip ice cream. But if you want the clothes on your back to be organic or Fairtrade you have to work a little harder. I estimate that the state of ethical clothing today is where food was 15 years ago.

When I started my year of dressing ethically, I did the obvious and headed to the charity shops. It was a miserable experience; years of shoppers purchasing polyester at Primark have meant that many stores are packed with poor quality garments. The rise in obesity rates have resulted in fewer small sizes and the majority of the shops are laid out with Alice in Wonderland logic minus the Carroll charm. No wonder we need Mary to queen over the charity shops. Finding a pair of knickers and a dirty tissue in a handbag was the sartorial equivalent of watching a cockroach scuttle across the floor in a restaurant.

Yet second-hand is the way to go - it’s estimated that we throw away over a million tons of textiles a year, half of which could be recycled. Synthetic fibres take years to decompose and natural ones, like wool, release methane and contribute to around 2% of global warming emissions. If everyone in the UK bought one reclaimed woollen item, we would save 371 million gallons of water and 480 tons of chemicals. I thought I’d try vintage shopping instead.

Last week I blithely ended my column by saying that to be fashionably ethical what we need to do is to buy fewer clothes. Yeah right. I bet even the people we know who are not interested in clothes have more than they need. I am and I most certainly do. There is something intrinsically hardwired in us, in our craving for novelty, the buzz we feel when we buy a new outfit, the feel-good factor from a fantastic frock or very sexy jeans.

I asked Tony Juniper, ex-director of Friends of the Earth and Green Party candidate, how he believed we could protect the planet by consuming less when most of us want more. He said, “We need to study psychology and find out more about the brain. Deep within us we have an innate desire for comfort, for security and for status. We need to get to grips with this and start crafting alternatives that get the same brain reaction.” Scientists have even found the part of the brain that we use when we want to buy something new (it’s the nucleus accumbens in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain).

Recently Phil Patterson came to have a look at my clothes. I was a little anxious – not because he’s a McQueen-esque fashionista (oh no, he wears anti-microbial socks for three days running) – but because he’s invented a tool for assessing how environmentally-friendly your wardrobe is. As someone who generally scours all the ethical clothing websites but can rarely find anything that suits, fits or is of fantastic quality, I sometimes end up in Gap and Nike. I wondered whether to hide my tops and track-suits under the bed and just show Phil my hemp dress from eco-chic store, Enamore.

Phil is refreshingly down-to-earth and makes me feel a lot better about some of my choices. He says, “All too often the focus is on the fabric, so if people buy a T-shirt made of organic cotton they think they’ve saved the world, but if it’s dyed in the same way as a normal T-shirt, it can be just as bad as using non-organic cotton.” His Eco-metrics tool is web-based and allows you to input how many clothes you buy in a year, what they’re made of, how you dispose of them as well as your washing and tumble-drying habits, before showing you how many Environment Damage Units you’ve accrued.

Fashion’s elephant in the room is so obvious it’s often overlooked: “The relationship between fashion and consumption conflicts with sustainability,” says Dr Kate Fletcher. Kate, a sustainable fashion and textiles consultant who lectures at London College of Fashion, is one of those rare people who make you feel as if your brain is expanding as you speak to them and who has a lateral, idiosyncratic take on the thorny oxymoron that is sustainable fashion. She writes in her book, Sustainable Fashion & Textiles, “Fashion cycles and trends contribute to very high levels of individual material consumption that are supported by the apparent insatiability of consumer’s wants. Yet the products themselves exploit workers, fuel resource use, increase environmental impact and generate waste.” Her definition is that, “Sustainable fashion is about creating a strong and nurturing relationship between consumer and producer.”

Her latest project, kicking off on 6 June is a sustainable fashion photo shoot using ordinary people. Called Local Wisdom, people are invited to turn up (between 10 and 4 at Birdwood House, 44 High St, Totnes if you want to go) to tell the story of their outfit and be photographed. The catch is that the garment must be sustainable in some way, for instance, it’s shared between people, it’s never been washed, it links you with the natural world or perhaps it’s enjoying a third, fourth or fifth life. “It’s a classic piece of performance,” says Kate, “but what I’m trying to do is make sustainability real to people, to make them see it as fantastic and show that sustainable fashion can be empowering and transforming.”

Her first model is a man wearing a hand knitted Arran jumper inherited from his father-in-law and shared with his wife, who wears it in the garden. It has never been washed and he says, “I've shrunk a lot of things over the years and it would also lose its fantastic smell - a mix of fresh air and wood smoke. It's like part of the family. I could never throw it away.” The event will be followed by one in Bollington on 5 July, and hopefully many more.

Kate’s own approach to sustainable fashion is admirably frugal. When we meet she is elegantly dressed in a Chartreuse Merino wool top by John Smedley (whose knitware is made and sourced in Britain), dove-grey Vivienne Westwood shoes, which she says are unique, slow-designer pieces that she’s had for five years, and a wool skirt, plaid with quirky, tailored angles, from B-store, a shop she has such a close relationship with the assistants select items they think she’ll like. She only buys one or two pieces a year and spends a long time choosing exactly what she wants. “I’m wracked with guilt if I buy more,” she says. “I have plenty of clothes so I put some of them away, then get them out later, look at them with fresh eyes and rework them.” She adds, “Fashion is very important to me, I have a real passion for clothes, so I’m trying to find a new way for it to work for me.”

Photos by Fiona Bailey

I was in the dentist the other day when the hygienist rounded on me fiercely about the state of my teeth. I said I thought they were just fine, after all, they’re pretty white, clean and enable me to chomp apples. She said, “Look around you. You live in an impoverished neighbourhood. Compared to the poor people here, yes, your teeth are fine.” I have no idea about the state of their teeth but I am surrounded by people in clothes so cheap the polyester crackles with static, the acrylic is bobbled, the nylon shiny. An old Jamaican man sits opposite me in thread-bare black trousers stitched in blue thread at the crotch and cracked shoes with worn down heels.

Once, when all clothes cost a lot of money, people would save up, spend a month’s salary on a coat that would last a lifetime. Now we’re surrounded by fast fashion and the prevalent attitude is that we can buy as many garments as we want without regard to cost or consequence. But these people sitting next to me, Somalis, Afro-Caribbeans, Bangladeshis, do not look like the kind who would buy a new outfit to wear on a Saturday night and throw it out on Sunday morning. Nor do they appear as if they could afford to save up for months for a coat they’ll wear for decades to come when their children need food and they need dental care right now. My sister defends the right of the citizens of Hackney to shop in Primark; she says, We’re poor too and we still want to look nice.

            It is no secret that ethical clothes are expensive and a niche product. How many people in my dentist have heard about People Tree, Bishopston Trading Company, Adili or Enamore? Or for that matter in the general population? If the culture and consumer behaviour in our country is going to change, ethical clothes have to be available to everyone everywhere. So if you do shop on the high street, where are the best places to go?

Trying to find beautiful dresses for beautiful occasions in ethical fabric can be trying – particularly if the only place you can find a frock is on the internet and you would rather try it on. Eco Age will be hosting the best eco chic party dresses starting tonight with cocktails between 6-9pm. The dresses, slinky, show stopping numbers in organic cotton, hemp silk, peace silk (made without harming silk worms) and recycled cotton, are by designers Edun, Ciel, From Somewhere, Julia Smith and Elena Garcia and will be at Eco Age for a month.

Eco Age, in Chiswick is an eco design store founded by Nicola Giuggioli with Colin and Livia Firth. Every month it hosts a Pop Up shop, providing a snap-shot of the very best in ethical fashion. Called 12 degrees of Ethical Fashion it’s been set up by Orsola de Castro, of From Somewhere, Guardian journalist, Lucy Siegle and Jocelyn Whipple, a sustainable fashion specialist. As Siegle said, “I am besieged by women who love clothes asking me why they can’t find garments that fit with their ethical principles on the high street and who don’t always want to buy online. We’ve designed 12 degrees to help correct his and to give them the opportunity to engage with the very best of ethical fashion.”

Let’s not beat about the bush. Buying only ethical fashion can be a pain in the *%$@. It’s expensive or time consuming and frequently both. You can’t just nip into Topshop when you need a new top. So to remind myself why I’m doing this, I’ve looked at how much a T-shirt really costs. The cheapest tee in Asda right now is £3. You don’t have to be a mathematician to calculate that these figures don’t add up. Someone, somewhere bought that cotton seed, planted it, irrigated it, pumped it full of pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, harvested it, sorted it, baled it, shipped it to another country, carded it, spun it, cut it, sewed it, packaged it, shipped it and sold it. For £3. If we’re not paying the price of a simple cotton T-shirt, someone, somewhere is.

I’ve just had an e-bay splurge. Increasingly frustrated with charity shopping, where I could never find what I wanted in a decent fabric and in my size, I’ve turned to the online auction site, e-bay. You can put in - black, roll-neck jumper, Armani, size 12, say - and usually several items will pop up (not necessarily always what you were looking for). Even better you can purchase in the privacy of your own home without having to trawl round the charity shops. And then, of course, there is the frisson of excitement – will you grab a bargain from under the noses of several other bidders, the smugness of sealing a good deal, as well as the feel-good factor: you are buying another person’s hand-me downs, thus saving them from landfill. When I told one of my friends what I was doing, she said gleefully, “And the beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter if it was made by small children in Bangladesh – you’re completely excused when you shop on e-bay.”

Sellers, however, may not be harmless neighbour-types trying to declutter their wardrobe; many are professional power sellers selling brand new items. Others are flogging designer knock-offs. The main two reasons non-profession female sellers give for hawking their wares are putting on weight / becoming pregnant or because they want to save up for a new shopping splurge. Granted it's better to recycle than chuck out, but surely we should be limiting both what we buy and send to landfill, particularly if, like most garments today, they originally involved an unpalatable cocktail of chemicals and child labour? Right this minute there are 3, 307,931 clothes, shoes and accessories for sale. What I have tried to do to get around this minefield, is to look for vintage, good quality material like wool and to go for classic, timeless designers that hopefully I won’t have to bin or re-e-bay.

After my brother read my first column he sent me a text saying I wasn’t coming to his wedding unless I bought a new dress. Unfortunately, he’s had the temerity to pick October and a big, old abbey. Draughty knaves and autumnal winds don’t tend to go with nice frocks and keeping warm so instead of buying a new dress I’ve bid for a cream wool Vivienne Westwood jacket and I’m going to wear something I’ve already got (thermal long johns perhaps?). After all, my brother (who was joking) doesn’t normally see me in anything other than jeans so it’ll all be new to him. And as long as I manage not to spill my veggie pie down the front, I’m hoping, that should the situation arise, I’ll be able to dust it off for the Christening.

On Monday May 11 I’m having a book launch for my novel, The Naked Name of Love, in Bath at Toppings & Co independent booksellers. I’m going to be suitably ethically attired in fabulous shoes by Izzy Lane, a tailored jacket by Anatomy Fashion and a quirky dress by Brighton-based company, Get Cutie. Since the central character in my novel is a Jesuit priest, I thought I’d go for Get Cutie’s heretical print, which has the Virgin Mary emblazoned down the front.

What these clothes have in common are not only that they are ethically made, but also that they’re made in Britain. Get Cutie was founded by Fiona England in 1998. As a single parent with a young daughter she was looking for work that could fit in around her lifestyle and originally opened Get Cutie in the basement of the shop she has now taken over in Kensington Gardens. Fiona’s background is in catering but she was always interested in clothes, rummaging around in jumble sales as a child. She was inspired by her love of prints, which she sources from all over the world. They’re a mad eclectic range, from a Mexican-esque jumble of skulls and roses, Liberty-like birds and flowers, through to Batman, Elvis, retro guitars and cheeky cowgirls.

For Isobel Davies it’s all about the sheep: “I am emotionally attached to my sheep but I’m sensitive to all animals.” Isobel is the founder of designer label, Izzy Lane, an ethical company launched in 2006 whose trademark knitware, tailored clothes and glamorous vegan shoes are all made in Britain.

Isobel, with her gravelly voice and dirty blonde hair looks like the ex-rock chick that she is. Originally the lead singer in the Indie band, Edith Strategy, she started Farm-A-Round, one of the first veg box schemes, fifteen years ago in London. It was during the early years carting carrots and kale that she discovered farmers were simply throwing out their sheeps’ fleeces. “I love wool,” says Isobel passionately. In this country it costs more to shear the fleece than farmers normally make selling it; ironically most of our wool is now imported from New Zealand and Australia. In addition, there are welfare issues. Most people believe that sheep generally lead a long and happy life roaming freely over the fells until the day they become mutton. However, the majority of males, ewes that can no longer produce a lamb a year and surplus females are slaughtered. Isobel now has a flock of 600 sheep that she has ‘rescued’.

“I used to buy designer clothes but now all my money goes on sheep,” she jokes. Our woollen industry has all but collapsed so Isobel had to piece together every step of the chain of crafts people and, in some cases, their Victorian machinery, to sort, card, spin, weave and dye the wool. Her jumpers are made by hand by over 100 knitters in the Dales and the Highlands. Isobel had no fashion experience at all but employs a pattern cutter to translate her sketches. “I only make things that I love and would wear myself,” she says. What Isobel loves are timeless classics with a modern twist: A line skirts, boxy jackets and streamlined coats in the soft charcoal and oatmeal of the Shetland and Wensleydales’ natural wool. This year, to jazz up the collection, she has introduced more colour, including a Chartreuse with the zing of green-gold moss.

As for the shoes, they’re made from polyurethane in soft moc-croc or faux armadillo by one of the last traditional East End cobblers. With their platform heels and retro feel they are simple yet subtlely kinky. None of this is cheap or fast fashion: one sheep provides enough wool to make one skirt and each animal costs £60 a year to keep and that’s before factoring in the price of processing the wool, designing and making the garment, dying it and sending it to a customer.

A committed vegetarian since she was seventeen, Isobel rails against the cruelty and unnecessary waste as billions of animals are slaughtered every year. “Why do people have to eat meat?” she says. “I exist in a bubble,” she adds, referring to herself and her flock, pastured up the road from her North Yorkshire home, “pretending the rest of the world could be like this.” The sharp reality is that if allowed to lead a natural life, sheep live for 15 years: “It’s a terrifying responsibility – I have to support them for that length of time.” And that, of course, means we should do our bit to support Izzy Lane.

I used to think handbags were evil and the only shoes a girl needed were a pair of monkey boots. I have two posh equivalents that I bought in 1996 (Calvin Klein) and 2003 (Due Passi) that I’ve worn almost every day since then. That was my excuse for the environmental damage and the dead animals on my feet – maximum wear with minimum pairs. Then something happened. Maybe it was hormones. I won’t humiliate myself or bore you by telling you how many pairs of heels, flats, wedges and more boots I now own (more on trainers another day).

As a vegetarian I used to justify buying leather on the grounds that it’s a by-product of the meat-industry. This is like saying - the pig is already dead so I might as well have a bacon sandwich. But leaving aside dodgy morals, the trouble with leather is that it’s no longer simply a by-product of the meat industry but a business in itself as demand is swiftly outstripping the demand for meat.

My novel (The Naked Name of Love, published by John Murray) is going to be launched in London on 1 April at 6.30pm at From Somewhere, a creative, sustainable fashion label. From Somewhere are not only hosting the launch, they’re kindly giving me one of their dresses to wear for the occasion, so a few days ago, I went to meet the design duo, Orsola de Castro and Filippo Ricci. From Somewhere is at the Ladbroke Grove end of Portobello Road and as I walked from Notting Hill I felt as if I’d stepped through a cross-section of London life, from tourist shops and swanky cafs to cockney traders with jellied eels and pounds of oranges, past second-hand, vintage, antique to designer and back through the whole gamut again. Where the stores grow funkier and the food shops more artisanal, I found From Somewhere and felt like a child in a sweet shop with too many candies and not enough cash.

Orsola began trading in 1997 with a small capsule collection of second-hand jumpers and cardigans that she customised by adding crocheted trims. What started as a one-season wonder grew into one of the first labels to consistently address the issue of waste within the fashion industry. Her women’s wear (and soon to be launched men’s wear) are made out of the odds and ends from the garment industry’s factory floor. These are the off cuts, the surplus, the end of the roll – but all are high quality fabrics – cashmere, tweed, silk, jersey. They would all normally end up in landfill. Orsola’s designs are quirky, fun and have a playful quality. They look like one-offs but are reproducible. The clothes themselves are beautifully stitched by women in an Italian factory. Each collection is entirely dependent on the scraps she sources: last season’s featured a lot of tweed and so the collection is very fitted but to give it shape, they’re woven with elastic shearing. As a result they are, as she puts it, “an eclectic and original use of colours and panelling.” Normally I would run a mile from patchwork, but these are gorgeous items that feel both comfortable and luxurious. “I am a clothes butcher,” says Orsola, who did not originally train as a designer, but her clothes, a riot of colours and textures, are more indicative of a master surgeon. “My brief to myself is that I want to see my clothes in the office, worn by politicians and working women – they should be accessible,” Orsola tells me.

Luckily (or unluckily for me) I am the right shape for many of Orsola’s designs, which makes choosing very difficult. I love a cashmere dress with a round collar in pinks and mulberries and reds. You can hoik the skirt up so the hem tucks under your bottom and the rest of the fabric bells over to create a mini. Very cute and cosy. Orsola shakes her head. Not dressy enough. I try a shirt-dress, exceptionally well fitted, with buttons down the front that makes me feel as if I’m an adult masquerading as a school girl. Two dresses meet Orsola’s approval and I love them both. The luxury of choice is wonderful since if you want beautiful clothes made with a conscience you are still sadly somewhat limited.

Eco Chic back on 20 April

A bee flies in tight circles around me, closely inspecting my fuschia-pink coat. What would be a normal, Sunday-afternoon-in-the-park-experience is rendered surreal by the fact that I am in a greenhouse on the top of a roof with a view of Canary Wharf and the gherkin building and the bee is a fat, black and yellow-striped bumblebee with a fluorescent green number nine stuck to her furry back. This bee, like her sisters, is learning that the only flower worth visiting in the greenhouse is made of glass and secretes a sugar and water solution when she pokes her tongue through a tiny hole in its smooth, petal-less exterior. These bees are part of an experiment into insect intelligence being carried out at Queen Mary, University of London. “There’s a lot of variation in animals’ ability to learn – dolphins, for instance, are perceived as being quite smart,” says Dr Nigel Raine whose bee colony I have invaded, “People are surprised that an insect is capable of learning.”

Indeed, one might expect that an animal whose brain is the size of a grain of grass would be hard-wired with little evidence for a high IQ. Yet Dr Raine has found surprising feats of learning and memory in these tiny creatures, which could well be as smart as rats and pigeons. He’s found that just as some people are brighter than others, there’s a striking variation in his bees: some are definitely smarter. The result is that colonies with brighter bees can harvest two-thirds more nectar than the other groups of bumblebees. In evolutionary terms, this means the colony as a whole will be more successful, able to produce more males and queens that will lay down fat and hibernate over winter, ready to found new empires in spring.

Read the full story in the Daily Telegraph

Photograph taken by Nigel Raine

 Not everyone is averse to charity shopping. I did a quick straw poll of friends: Lisa, a size 8 personal trainer with two hyper little boys, manages to find stylish clothes suitable for her active life almost exclusively from charity shops. She does do the rounds about once a week, though. Dawn is buying her wedding dress from Oxfam and visits second hand shops in well-heeled towns. My editor’s sister also buys most of her clothes from charity outlets and can spot an Armani as soon as she walks in the door.

To get round my aversion I visit a well-heeled shop instead: Oxfam in London’s yummy-mummy area of Westbourne Grove is their flag-ship store. As I walk in, even I can spot the Armani (sadly not in my size).

 If you want to dress without damaging the environment, your first port of call is a charity shop. I spend two dismal mornings trailing round the ones in Bristol. My sister warns me that I can’t set off with a set idea in my mind like I normally do with normal shopping. I ignore her. I want a cream cable knit sweater and a black handbag (and I have very specific ideas about this bag).

Near where I live in the less salubrious end of town the shops are full of size 22s. In the student areas they’re picked clean. I head to the posh end – Henleaze and Clifton – which is dangerous because the clothes shops are full of gorgeous garments. But I am firm and look and don’t touch much. I