Silk

• Leather is a co-product not a by product and is bad for the environment
• Duck Down feathers
• Wool

Great resource: https://www.goodsignal.com/p/unraveling-silk

• Silk is strong, durable, breathable, fast-drying, and water-, wrinkle- and stain-resistant.
• It is expensive and rare, as its production is a meticulous, labor-intensive process. Silk commands a price 20 times that of cotton with a market size of US$17 billion.1 One yard of silk fabric costs about US$100.
• Spiders have escaped the fate of intensive commercial breeding as they are cannibalistic and territorial animals who, in captivity, also produce less silk and take a longer time to do so.
• Silk is produced by boiling silkworms alive inside their cocoons so they cannot hatch, which would rupture the silk thread. Approximately 6,600 silkworms are killed to make 1 kilogram of silk. That’s 1,000 animals for one shirt. The result is that 420 billion to 1 trillion silkworms are killed annually for silk production. Disease alone kills between 10% and 47% of worms, largely attributed to the rearing environment with inadequate disinfection and contamination.8 To optimize silk production, humans have created a domesticated silk moth that is blind and unable to fly. She lays eggs once and is then killed. Her offspring are killed before they mature and grow into a moth so silk can be harvested from their cocoons. Male moths are discarded after they mate.
• Although efforts have been made to create ‘peace silk’ (also known as ‘ahimsa silk’), where silk is harvested from cocoons only after they have hatched, moths are still discarded or crushed after their ‘useful life’ and selectively kept in semi-frozen conditions until breeding season. The process also requires many more silkworms since they produce less silk that is ‘reelable’.9 ‘Wild silk’ harvests cocoons of silkworms that live in the wild and is therefore nonviolent, but like peace silk, it produces a rougher variety of silk due to its short fiber length.
• According to the Higg Materials Sustainability Index, silk has the highest environmental impact compared to all other fabrics, even synthetic ones.
• Silk is a drop in the bucket of the US$1,027 billion textile market.

Peace silk

Peace Silk (Ahimsa Silk): In this alternative method, the silk is harvested after the moths naturally emerge from their cocoons, but the resulting threads are shorter and less uniform, making the silk less smooth and more expensive.