Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Those of you who’ve been reading along for a while will know the now almost legendary story of our stripey socks. If not, you can read about it here.

Over the four years that we’ve been rescuing them, we’ve diverted well over a thousand socks from landfill. As an added bonus, Richard the podiatrist and his gorgeous wife Karen have become our friends over that time. Until 2020, when COVID concerns halted donations, we were distributing a lot of these to charity groups, but this year, they’ve been handed out to family and friends. That’s not a bad thing either – as a  donation to homeless services, the lifespan of the socks was often limited by a lack of washing facilities, whereas my friends will happily wear them over and over again.

So…why would I mend free socks?

It’s because I understand that even though these socks were free to me, they’re actually very valuable.

Yes, they cost my podiatrist a few dollars. But they also cost the planet in terms of resources – the cotton had to be planted, watered extensively, harvested, and processed. A tiny bit of elastane – a non-biodegradable synthetic fibre made from petroleum – was woven in to make them fit. There was dyeing involved, with its associated pollutants. Industrial machinery needed to be built and subsequently powered by fossil fuels, and human hands were involved in every stage of growing, spinning, manufacture, packaging and shipping. In addition, the plastic sleeve they originally came in had to be manufactured, machinery and labour were involved in transportation, and every process required yet more fossil fuel generated energy.

So…I keep mending them.

Otherwise they’ll end up in landfill, where the cotton will spend months decomposing, creating methane in the process, and the elastane will take hundreds of years (if not more) to break down. And then all the water, nutrients, ore, coal, petroleum, infrastructure and human labour that has gone into this single pair of socks – all those resources will be lost. Worse still, throwing them away contributes to a variety of environmental problems – from towering mountains of trash, to greenhouse gasses, to chemicals leaching into the soil and waterways.

Interestingly, once we can train our eyes to see the things we own in this way, rather than judging their worth purely in dollar terms, we start to understand that everything is expensive and should be preserved for as long as possible. Even a free sock. ♥