Sustainable Creativity: How Creatives Can Make Their Practice More Eco-Friendly
From the materials you use to the way you work, every creative choice can be a step toward a more sustainable future.
You probably consider your environmental impact when you put your empty glass jars in the recycling bin or choose to walk to meet your friend for dinner instead of driving. So, while sustainability likely has a place in your day-to-day life, it can also fit into your life as a creative person.
For you, this might mean choosing to work with sustainable materials, exploring ethical production methods and being aware of waste reduction. Outside of your artistic process, you can incorporate sustainable creativity into your business strategies, goals and potential business partners.
If being eco-conscious is something that interests you, you might set some time aside in your schedule today to rethink your creative process and how you can better align it with your sustainability goals. By exploring sustainability’s place in whatever creative field you’re in and the common roadblocks to building an eco-friendly creative practice, you’ll be on your way to reducing your environmental impact without sacrificing your artistic quality.
Greenwashing and Defining True Sustainability
If you’ve ever asked yourself what sustainability really means, you’re not alone. Sustainability is a spectrum, which means some actions have a bigger impact than others. It is also not uncommon for businesses to participate in greenwashing, which is when they give the impression a product is more sustainable when it isn’t really.
Companies greenwash by making their packaging physically green, which gives the illusion that something is more sustainable or healthy or that their product is more sustainable than it is. Keurig was accused of greenwashing when it claimed its single-use coffee pods were recyclable but couldn’t be recycled in most Canadian provinces.
Sustainability is the ability to maintain or support a system, lifestyle or process continually over time. General examples of living more sustainably are:
- Considering your carbon footprint
- Reducing food waste and experimenting with vegetarian options
- Reusing and upcycling objects you no longer need
- Buying secondhand
- Recycling your glass, paper and plastic products
The goal of any sustainability initiative should be to reduce consumption and boost opportunities for reusing, repairing and recycling. When it comes to being sustainable in creative fields, you can transfer many of these ideas over to your creative process and choice of materials.
Creative Fields and Sustainability
It’s hard to find an industry that doesn’t hurt the planet in some way, and creative industries are no exception. Fast fashion is one of the most environmentally damaging industries in the world. The constant production of clothes causes a huge amount of carbon emissions, ninety-two million tonnes of textile waste per year and an influx of microplastics from polyester-based clothing.
Logging and wood harvesting required to build homes and furniture contribute to deforestation. Art materials can also contain toxic chemicals and plastics. Activities connected to the art world, like air travel, can also contribute to a work’s final carbon footprint.
Artist Michael Wang once hosted a one-week exhibition where he shared small cubes he created that imitated famous works of art from the past twenty years. He sized and priced each cube depending on the amount of carbon emissions released in the creation of the original work of art.
He found Richard Serra’s steel creation Torqued Ellipse IV used 109.4 tons of carbon to create because of the sheer amount of raw materials needed. Chris Ofili’s Confession (Lady Chancellor)’s carbon footprint included the flight he had to take from his home of Trinidad to London to see his piece included in a show at Tate Britain, which amounted to 1.76 tons of carbon total.
Artists, designers and general creatives can address the biggest environmental challenges in creative industries by using recycled, renewable or recyclable materials, avoiding materials that are known pollutants like plastic and considering the long-term impact and durability of their creations.
While creatives are increasingly considering sustainability in their work, artists like Thornton Dial Jr. and Tim Noble and Sue Webster have been making eco-friendly choices for decades. By using found and repurposed materials in their work, they reduce waste and consumption.
Fashion
The clothing and textile industry is one that everyone in the world interacts with. People use clothes for function but also as a way to express their individuality and personal style. You might work in fashion as a seamstress, a designer or in the marketing department. No matter which part of the creative process you play a part in, you can make a difference through sustainable choices.
Sézane, a French fashion brand, adheres to sustainable commitments, such as ensuring that 75% of all materials are eco-friendly, 75% are certified by either GOTS, Oeko-Tex Standard 100, FSC, LENZING ™ ECOVERO ™ or RWS and RMS and stay B-corp certified. The brand also uses 100% recycled cardboard shipping boxes and powers its brick-and-mortar stores with renewable energy, such as hydroelectric and wind power.
The College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel University hosts an annual “Garbage Gala,” where student designers use only recycled and repurposed materials in their designs. With the future of sustainable fashion in mind, the event celebrates creativity, collaboration, and environmental consciousness and encourages sustainable practices like upcycling a new garment from recycled and repurposed materials.
As a designer or sewer, you can choose to work with botanical dyes or deadstock fabrics or explore what slow fashion design means to you. If you work in fashion, you might consider how sustainability affects consumer choices. In this study, researchers found that sustainability is affecting consumer choices in a positive way. They discovered that consumers adjusted their buying choices by:
- slowing down their consumption
- choosing high-quality pieces made to last a lifetime
- avoiding fast fashion
- being conscious about the production location
- staying informed about material composition and circularity
Those consumers who didn’t make sustainable choices blamed their lack of knowledge, motivation, knowledge, accessibility and education in addition to higher prices.
If you work in the corporate fashion world, you can make a difference in the fashion world by pushing the company you work for to consider sustainable measures like using GOTS or Oeko-Tex Standard 100 fabrics, choosing recyclable packaging and shipping materials and taking part in upcycling projects. You might even run a marketing campaign that encourages sustainable buying choices.
Architecture
Kirkjubøargarður, seen above, is one of the oldest buildings in the world that is still in use. Located in the Faroe Islands, this black wooden farmhouse has been inhabited since the 11th century. Acoma Pueblo, a village in New Mexico, and its pressed adobe brick houses date back to 1150 AD. These buildings show the power of quality construction techniques and materials.
While pressed adobe brick houses aren’t as common as some other building materials, contractors and builders are making increasingly sustainable building choices. This Cairo-based architecture firm builds homes primarily using rammed earth, which is tightly compacted soil. Relying mostly on natural materials and human resources, they don’t use steel or heavy machinery during construction. The founder, Radwa Rostom, and her team have used the rammed earth-building method to construct a farmhouse, a community school and more.
Earth block masonry, rammed earth, and cob are three of the most commonly used building techniques using natural materials. Each has its own unique benefits, but some of their differences include the amount of labor needed to complete each project, their resistance to cracking and their ability to carry heavy loads.
Natural materials like hemp, straw, clay, lime and soil can all be used to construct buildings. In addition to considering the renewability and sustainability of your materials and building techniques, you can also think about how your final building can be as self-sustaining and consume the least amount of materials and energy as possible.
Paris-based architecture group Littow Architects recently designed a group of off-the-grid holiday homes on the coast of Finland. The cabins were assembled using wooden frame structures and cellulose wool for thermal insulation. They also included rainwater and seawater purification systems and a greywater recycling system.
The cabins also store wind and solar energy, which provides all of the electricity they need. The architects also considered size because the larger a space is, the more materials it will need and the more energy it will need to be heated and cooled. So much of the furniture, like the living room couch and the dining table, can be folded up toward the wall when more living space is needed.
You’ll also find sustainable architecture projects in commercial and industrial buildings and schools, like this California school built for neurodiverse students.
Digital Art
Creative fields pose a variety of environmental challenges, but one of the biggest is finding a way to reduce, reuse and recycle the materials needed to build, sew, paint and more. Because of this, digital art can be one of the least harmful creative activities since it requires almost no materials.
While the resources needed to build an iPad are much more difficult to source and aren’t as compostable as a piece of paper, most of the population already has access to some sort of technology that can produce digital art—whether that be a computer, phone or tablet.
Once you have your digital art tool of choice, you’ll only need a little bit of electricity to charge it. Then, you can be on your way to drawing, painting, sketching and 3D sculpting all without a pen or paper.
Digital painter Zach McCraw created over 4,000 digital works of art, which he has primarily created using his iPhone 7 and a variety of art apps. He chooses to create digital art because he loves to be able to create from anywhere just using the phone he already has in his pocket. McCraw also lives in the woods and enjoys being surrounded by nature, which is why he decided to switch from traditional painting to digital in order to be more eco-friendly and reduce consumption.
Traditional Art
While digital art might use fewer materials than traditional art, there are ways to make traditional art sustainable by using recycled, found or recyclable materials. Eco-dyeing is a creative practice where artists create dyes, inks and paints using foraged leaves and flowers. You can also use flowers to create your own bright watercolor paints.
If you don’t want to make your own paints, you can also try to find paints and drawing materials that don’t contain any harsh chemicals, plastics or volatile organic compounds (VOCs). When it comes to your canvas, artists can choose paper that can be composted or canvases made of natural materials like cotton and linen rather than polyester.
Painter Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar creates his paintings using natural pigments and sustainably sourced materials. He also dedicates some of his art proceeds to environmental causes he cares about. Recently, he started a project called Life Energy, where he created a series of miniature paintings and donated half of the proceeds to marine conservation efforts in the Maldives.
Even art galleries are finding new ways to be more sustainable. Founded in 2020, the Gallery Climate Coalition is a group of galleries that are committed to being more environmentally conscious. The over 900 members of the coalition are working to introduce greener shipping methods, host benefit exhibitions where proceeds are donated to nonprofit organizations and encourage online art interactions rather than in-person ones that require air travel.
Jewelry
Jewelry is a beloved art form found in every country around the world. It is used to declare feelings of love, add visual interest to an outfit and share one’s personal brand. Rare pearls, mined gemstones and melted, reshaped and refined gold ore have been used to make jewelry for centuries.
Because rarity and luxury are praised in the world of jewelry, you’ll often find jewelry made with non-renewable resources. While this doesn’t mean you can never wear your favorite ruby earrings again, it does mean you can potentially make more sustainable choices when making your next jewelry purchase for yourself or a loved one.
First, whether you’re making or buying jewelry, it’s important to know that your gemstones are ethically sourced. Many gem and metal mining operations do not have fair labor practices, safe working conditions or fair wages. Gem, gold and silver mining also contributes to deforestation, pollution through cyanidation and the destruction of natural ecosystems.
After that, you might consider making or buying jewelry using more sustainable materials, such as pearls, recycled gold or silver or lab-grown gems.
If you’re buying jewelry rather than making it, you can also choose to buy second-hand or borrow jewelry from your friends or through sites like Rent the Runway. Jewelers like Ute Decker and Lenique Louis offer more sustainable options to their customers by using recycled silver and fair trade gold and launching only small-batch collections.
Potential Roadblocks
As mentioned earlier, consumers struggle to make environmental choices because of their lack of knowledge, motivation, accessibility, and education, as well as higher prices. Artists and creatives fail to make sustainable choices for similar reasons but also have to consider roadblocks like feasibility, cost and energy and artistic quality.
Feasibility
A fashion brand might start out using only deadstock fabrics but struggle to source them in consistent quantities. Or it might want to run small runs of its newest wide-leg jeans until it realizes that the minimum order qualities are too high with the factory it originally wanted to work with.
Smaller artists or those who live in less populated areas may struggle to access eco-friendly materials like eco-friendly paints, pigments and natural canvases because they aren’t as readily available as classic acrylic paints and polyester canvases.
When Radwa Rostom, founder and CEO of the Cairo-based architecture and construction firm Hand Over Projects, first started working with natural building materials like rammed earth they could not always use natural materials depending on the client’s budget, local building codes and the very strict timelines imposed by real estate developers who are used to mass production and less sustainable building methods.
Cost and Energy
Natural materials tend to be of higher quality than their synthetic counterparts, which can make them more expensive and difficult to find. Eco-conscious fabrics like linen and cotton are usually more expensive than polyester or nylon, natural pigments and solvents are pricier than synthetic options and ethically sourced jewelry will be more expensive than low-cost materials.
These higher prices make sense when you consider that they usually include better wages for the people mining, making and sewing the materials as well as slower and more environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. While you should consider your impact at every step of the creation process, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to try to get everything right.
If you can’t afford high-quality materials at first, try to focus on using secondhand or recycled options. You can also consider creating smaller creations so that you don’t drain your bank account while purchasing your sustainable materials.
Artistic Quality
Natural pigments can create shades of bright yellows, deep oranges and blush-colored pinks but they may not be able to produce some of the saturated colors you’re used to finding with synthetic dyes and pigments. If you’re an artist who is used to bright blues, neon greens and vivid reds, you might struggle to create the same color palettes you’ve worked with in the past.
In the future, you might try experimenting with natural pigments one at a time to figure out how they can work into your current style. You might also encounter more creative constraints when working with sustainable materials, as you won’t have as many fabric options, color possibilities or texture choices when you limit the materials you’re comfortable using.
Today’s Sustainability and Its Future
Sustainability is reshaping creative industries by encouraging ethical practices in sourcing, production and delivery of their creations to consumers. Some brands, like Sézanne, use their dedication to sustainability as part of their branding and a way to connect to like-minded consumers.
Whether you are a creative or are often purchasing within creative industries, you can continue to think about what your clothes, furniture, homes and art are made of and reduce waste and consumption all while continuing to express yourself creatively. While you might not be able to make these changes all at once, spend the next week evaluating areas in your life where you can create more sustainably.
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Calli Zarpas
Producer & Writer by occupation. Ceramicist & Newsletter Editor by avocation.
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