Plastic is for vinyls
I love vinyl records. I started buying them in the mid-90s, when everyone was getting rid of them and you could find them at flea markets and thrift stores for next to nothing. I listen to them almost every day. Taking the record out of its sleeve, placing it delicately on the turntable, lowering the lever with precision... A small ritual before listening that is in itself a moment of pure pleasure. Sure, it's just a piece of plastic, but it has so much to convey: a history, a culture, an emotion.
This plastic that brings music to life stands in stark contrast to the dull and insipid plastic accumulating in our closets. Indeed, over 69% of current clothing is made from synthetic fibers – a figure that rises to more than 99% for sportswear (1). Polyester, nylon, spandex, polyamide: all different names for the same reality: plastic. Whether recycled or supposedly biodegradable, polyester remains plastic, with devastating consequences for our environment and health that are still too often minimized. Each year, 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills, while our washing machines dump 500,000 tons of microplastics into the oceans (2).
The shocking images of waste stretches floating on the surface of seas or a turtle having a straw painfully removed from its nose represent not even the tip of the iceberg, but barely a snowflake on its surface.
An American study from May 2024 revealed the presence of 0.5% plastic in our brains (3). These particles insidiously infiltrate through our food, breathing, and skin. They've also been detected in the placenta and breast milk, marking the beginning of contamination from the very first days of life. Medicine discovers new harmful effects of plastic on our health daily. And when we know that its production is expected to quadruple by 2050, we understand the scale of the challenge ahead.
While we cannot revolutionize the industry overnight, we can nonetheless act on our own scale. This is the bold bet we made at Cévène: completely ban plastic from our clothes. Our commitment is simple but radical: we only use natural, renewable, and biodegradable materials - wool, cotton, and wood. The challenge has proved more difficult than expected in a textile industry saturated with plastic, where all reflexes and processes revolve around polyester.
Here on this blog we will tell you how we manage to keep plastic on our turntables rather than in our closets.