Why Ugly Christmas Sweaters Aren't Very Sustainable

The ugly Christmas sweater has come a long way, but not necessarily for the better.

No longer an embarrassing gift from a well-meaning but aesthetically challenged relative, it’s now something many people choose to buy as a source of irreverent holiday cheer. You can purchase an ugly Christmas sweater that shows Santa using a chimney as a commode, a sweater with Taylor Swift’s face, or a sweater featuring a beer-slinging snowman. If you’re feeling fancy, you can clean up in an ugly Christmas two-piece suit.

Before they were commoditized, however, ugly Christmas sweaters were something to be endured. Think Mark Darcy glowering at Bridget Jones in a reindeer jumper or the Weasley children tugging at their custom-initialed homespun sets. Today, tacky knitwear is just another mass-produced trend, albeit with caroling kittens and three-dimensional T-rexes.

As with most novelty items, they’re also terrible for the planet. Hubbub, a London-based nonprofit, calls ugly Christmas sweaters “one of the worst examples of fast fashion.” Most of them are derived from plastic, it says, and 40% of Britons wear them only once. Yet people can’t get enough of them. Hubbub estimates that U.K. shoppers will purchase roughly 12 million sweaters this year, despite owning some 65 million from Christmases past.

Indeed, ugly Christmas sweaters are “big business” this time of year, says Venetia Fryzer, an analyst at Edited, a retail analytics platform. Offerings at mass retailers like Macy’s and J.C. Penney, she says, have spiked 42 percent from last year. Licensing opportunities abound: You can buy ugly Christmas Star Wars sweaters and ugly Christmas Fortnite sweaters. Even companies you don’t associate with clothing, such as Whataburger and Popeyes, have released their own versions. Red Lobster offers one with an insulated kangaroo pocket for stashing its famous cheddar bay biscuits. Maruchan’s juxtaposes snowflakes with ramen cups. And Brita is using its sweaters to call bottled water a “ho ho hoax.”

To be sure, the appeal of such sweaters is undeniable. Despite the “Christmas” part of their name, they are, for the most part, religiously and politically agnostic. A lala-llama with a Santa hat and a waggling tongue isn’t likely to incite arguments at the dinner table. Most of all, they’re meant to be humorous. Surely in today’s volatile sociopolitical landscape, we could all use a little laugh? A little relief?

“Many people see them as a bit of festive fun,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at analytics firm GlobalData. Brands may be cashing in on the trend, he says, but they too are just looking to connect with consumers in a “fun and engaging way.”

It was with the idea of fun that the Christmas sweater first gained prominence after the bleak austerity of World War II, says Moya Luckett, a fashion and media historian who teaches at New York University. In the beginning, their hideousness was subjective; they were based on traditional, often elaborate Nordic and Fair Isle patterns. Then people started adding bobbles. And tinsel. In Luckett’s native Britain, TV presenters often wore garish alpine toppers, also known as “jingle bell sweaters,” in a “kind of jokey way” to appeal to families and distinguish themselves in a pre-social-media world. A similar ripple happened across the pond. Certainly Andy Williams, the crooning host of many a televised Christmas special, never saw a snowflake sweater he didn’t like (or couldn’t wear).

Ugly sweaters hit the mainstream sometime in the ’80s, thanks — or not — to the hapless sartorial choices of pop-culture dads like Clark Griswold. With the hunger for nostalgia showing no signs of slowing and normcore fashion experiencing a revival, Fryzer says, it’s no wonder these sweaters have returned with a vengeance.

Today, a Google search for “ugly Christmas sweater” pulls up 19 million results. Ugly Christmas sweater parties are all the rage, as are ugly Christmas sweater days in workplaces and schools. Jimmy Fallon, host of The Tonight Show, has a recurring spot called “The 12 Days of Christmas Sweaters.” The charity Save the Children holds an annual Christmas Jumper Day to goad people into wearing their most embarrassing sweaters to raise funds. (Its slogan: “Make the world better with a sweater.”)

Ugly Christmas sweaters, in fact, have become a veritable cottage industry, with dedicated websites such as MyUglyChristmasSweater.com and TipsyElves.com filling any gaps a drive to the mall can’t resolve.

But while the statement jumpers of yore might have been knitted by someone’s great-aunt, this current crop is more likely to hail from countries such as Cambodia or Bangladesh, which have anonymous cheap labor, lackluster worker protections, and worse oversight.

Neither are these sweaters (or sweatshirts, printed with faux knit stitches) made with longevity in mind. Because of their subpar quality, many of those that flood the secondhand market don’t end up resold, says Rachel Kibbe, a circularity and textile-waste consultant. Most, she adds, are “destined for the trash.”

The world’s landfills are overflowing with unwanted clothing. Of the 53 million metric tons of fiber used to produce clothing every year, 73 percent is either landfilled or incinerated. Annually, the average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing. Most of it is shoveled underground, where it slowly decomposes to release methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 30 times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Already, the apparel and footwear industry accounts for 8.1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, which is as much as the total climate impact of the entire European Union and greater than all international airline flights and maritime shipping trips combined.

If we continue with our pump-and-dump mode of consumption, textiles production could eat up more than 25 percent of the world’s carbon budget by 2050, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts.

An ugly Christmas sweater, worn for a giggle and then chucked aside, may not make or break the climate crisis, but it’s a microcosm of a larger problem.

There’s also the issue of microplastics. Contemporary Christmas sweaters tend to be made of fossil-fuel-derived synthetics, such as acrylic, polyester, and nylon, which slough off microscopic fibers when laundered. Because they’re smaller than one-fifth of an inch, these minuscule fragments of plastic slip past wastewater filters in sewage plants to enter rivers, lakes, and oceans.

As many as 51 trillion microplastic particles — “500 times more than stars in our galaxy” — permeate the seas, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme. More than a third stem from synthetic textiles.

Researchers have uncovered microplastics in drinking water, sea salt, Arctic ice floes, and the gastrointestinal tracts of just about every species of fish, whale, turtle, and seabird. One 2011 study found microfibers in 85 percent of human-made debris on shorelines across the planet. Not even human poop has been spared.

When it comes to shedding, acrylic — the most popular of ugly Christmas sweater materials, according to Hubbub — is by far the worst of the bunch. In 2016, Plymouth University scientists discovered that acrylic discharged nearly 730,000 fibers per wash, roughly 1.5 times as many as polyester and five times more than blended polyester-cotton.

If you must avail yourself of a Christmas sweater (or a Hanukkah sweater or a Kwanzaa sweater), Annie Gullingsrud, a circular-design strategist, recommends cruising charity shops such as Goodwill, which are inundated by festive castoffs and frequently haul out racks of the things this time of year. (eBay, Poshmark, and Etsy, too, are troves of secondhand and vintage sweaters.) Or you can go the old-school route and knit or sew your own, preferably out of natural fibers, which are more likely to degrade when they escape into the environment.

And should the spirit move you, you can even put a bell on it.

“Looking for old, really cool sweaters is an act of creativity,” she says. “Buying something at a store is a bit soulless.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue