Last Updated on April 23, 2024
Do you read the tags on your clothing? It’s a good idea to get into the habit of it: Doing this can tell you what materials your clothing is made from, and where it was made.
This matters, considering most of our clothing is made from polyester, aka a form of plastic. Polyester is made from non-renewable petroleum (crude oil) that’s extracted from the earth unsustainably.
Some of the links below may be affiliate links. For more information please see my disclosure policy.
To create polyester, 70 million barrels of oil are used annually, and turning this oil into polyester fabric releases a lot of toxins into the environment.
However, even if you choose more natural materials, like organic cotton, chances are it’s never just 100% cotton. Depending on what clothing item it is, there’s a good chance it’s combined with another fabric, like elastane.
For example, if you’re going to buy a nice pair of organic cotton leggings, there’s a high probability a small percentage of those leggings will also be made up of elastane.
This is because elastane is often used in combination with other materials to create stretchy clothing.
But what is Elastane? And is it sustainable? Here’s everything you need to know regarding elastane and if you should look for this material or avoid it in your next purchase.
is elastane natural or synthetic?
Elastane is a synthetic material that has qualities like that of rubber and is made from polymers, specifically polyurethane. This is a form of plastic and was invented to replace rubber in the 1950s. Rubber was somewhat hard to come by, and was subject to fluctuating prices, whereas elastane was cheaper to make.
Because of this, elastane does not biodegrade. That also means it is not compostable.
Also of note, elastane goes by several names: In the US and Cananda, it goes by the brand name Spandex. You may also see it labeled Lycra.
how is elastane made?
1. First, production of a prepolymer is needed. This is accomplished by mixing macroglycol with a diisocyanate monomer within a special type of reaction vessel.
2. Then when the dry spinning method is used, the prepolymer is reacted with diamine acid.
3. Next the solution is diluted with a solvent to make it thinner, which thusly makes it easier to handle. It’s placed inside a fiber production cell.
4. The cell spins to produce fibers and cure the elastane. Within this cell, the solution is pushed through a spinneret.
5. The fibers are then heated within a nitrogen and solvent gas solution. This transforms the liquid polymer into solid strands.
6. These strands are then bundled together as they exit the cylindrical spinning cell using a compressed air device.
7. To treat the elastane with a finishing agent, magesium stearate or another polymer is used. This prevents the fibers from adhering together.
8. Last but not least, the remaining fibers are spooled and then ready to be dyed or woven into fabric.
is elastane a good fabric?
Elastane is a good fabric in terms of its use to make clothing stretchy and form-fitting. It’s often found in activewear such as yoga pants, leggings, and sports bras, alongside any other kind of garment that may be used for physical activity.
Elastane is almost never used by itself, but typically blended with other fabrics, like cotton. This material is resistant to body oils, perspiration and sunlight, which makes it durable.
However, in terms of the environment, elastane isn’t the most sustainable material out there. Elastane is made from plastic, which is derived from crude oil, a fossil fuel contributing to climate change.
Manufacturing elastane is energy-intensive and requires the use of a variety of toxic chemicals. If these chemicals are not disposed of properly, they could harm the environment.
Synthetic dyes are often used in elastane production, and these are known to pollute the environment as well. These dyes affect not only aquatic plants and animals, but the water supply humans depend on.
Additionally, as mentioned above, elastane is not biodegradable, nor compostable. At the end of its life, it cannot return to the earth like a natural fabric could, because it is synthetic.
It’s worth noting that synthetic fabrics tend to shed over time, which produces microplastics.
Recently, a new study found we could be ingesting 11,000 microplastics per year. Microplastics have been found in our lungs, feces, and even our placentas.
It’s unknown what the health effects of this are yet, but polyurethane, elastane’s precursor, is a known carcinogen.
The good news is that only a small percentage of elastane is typically used in clothing production. So, for example, most leggings will likely be mostly cotton and perhaps 2-7% elastane.
The best solution is to limit the amount of clothing you have that contains elastane. Save it for your workout sets, if possible. And opt for clothing that has a smaller percentage of elastane in them if you can.
what is the difference between polyester and elastane?
The main difference between polyester and elastane is that elastane is used to add stretch to a garment. Polyester fabrics are almost never stretchable, unless the garment has added elastane in it.
That said, both polyester and elastane are synthetic materials not found in nature. They are petroleum-based fabrics.
what is the problem with elastane?
The problem with elastane is both its manufacturing process and end of life: They have a large carbon footprint. The material cannot biodegrade and is manufactured unsustainably, using energy-intensive practices and harsh chemicals.
Because these clothing items cannot biodegrade, they will likely end up in a landfill somewhere, contributing to pollution for years to come.
There’s also the issue it may shed microplastics over time with every use and wash. The health impacts of this are still yet to be determined.
Unfortunately, many clothing brands use this material, including sustainable ones, so it’s hard or nearly impossible to avoid, especially in athleisure.
Here are some solutions:
- Reserve elastane for workout clothes only
- Use what you already have, instead of buying new
- If you must buy new clothes that contain elastane, choose from sustainable brands
- Look for smaller percentages of elastane used in the product makeup, if possible
sustainable brands that use elastane
Yes, even sustainable brands use elastane. However, you can offset elastane’s environmental impacts by choosing to buy from brands that blend elastane with more sustainable materials, such as organic cotton.
For example, purchasing a pair of organic cotton leggings that contain elastane is better than ones containing conventional cotton. Conventional cotton is a water-intensive crop and heavily sprayed with pesticides.
While both leggings will likely utilize elastane in the materials, one has significantly less of a carbon footprint.
Not to mention the brand you’re buying it from matters too: Some brands reduce their overall impact in other ways, like prioritizing plastic-free packaging, or donating to environmental non-profits.
You’ll also want to choose clothes built to last a while, since elastane does not biodegrade. If you’re thinking of buying something with elastane in it (like leggings), be sure you will use them for years to come.
Here are some eco-friendly clothing brands that use elastane in some of their garments. All of these brands try to reduce their environmental footprint through using organic materials, low waste packaging, and achieving eco certifications.
I’ve gone ahead and highlighted some of my favorite features of each brand, but it isn’t an exhaustive list. Be sure to check out their websites for more information.
1. organic basics
- Clothing basics for men and women
- Made from organic cotton, Tencel, recycled nylon and LENZING ECOVERO
- Manufactured in trusted, certified factories where workers are paid a living wage + in a safe working space
- 1% For The Planet member
- B Corporation
2. pact
- Clothing basics, underwear and socks for both men, women, kids, and babies
- Made from organic cotton which uses up to 95% less water than conventional cotton, and doesn’t contain the harsh chemicals, bleaches or dyes that conventional cotton uses
- Manufactured in fair trade certified factories that are sweatshop and child-labor-free
- Recyclable paper bags for packaging products
3. tentree
- Relaxed clothing for men, women, and kids including both clothing and accessories
- Utilizes recycled poly, organic cotton, hemp, cork and other sustainable materials
- Manufacturing partners have ethical labor rights + safe workplaces
- Plant 10 trees for every purchase
4. girlfriend collective
- Basics and activewear for women
- Made from recycled materials like post-consumer water bottles
- Manufactured in factories that are SA8000 and WRAP certified which promises workers are paid a living wage + have safe working conditions
- Garment recycling program “ReGirlfriend”
- Packaging is 100% recycled and recyclable
5. toad and co
- Men and women’s clothing for everyday and outdoor use
- Uses organic cotton, hemp, Tencel and recycled materials
- Takeback program for old clothes (from any brand)
- Member of The Renewal Workshop, repairs and resells old Toad clothes
- LimeLoop partner, reusable shipping—made from recycled billboards
What do you think about this material? Will you be buying it, or avoiding it? Let me know in the comments!
The post What is Elastane? And Is It Sustainable? appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those innovators so they can imagine their uses in practice.
So I actually see them as very complementary, particularly when it comes to solutions in the energy and climate space that require rapid adoption of technologies in markets to have impact. Just having an energy solution or a climate solution is not valuable unless it can be de-risked and connected to markets to scale for impact. And that’s what the prize is actually very good at doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 05:22
That comes through in the impact report that you all published recently. About 1,300 different organizations were catalyzed. The groups came together, apparently, because of their desire to compete in the competition.
What I’ve found in my work with public-private partnerships, in particular, is that impact investors are looking for that initial traction, and to a degree, the prize and the distribution of money within the prize group is that catalyst that says there’s a real opportunity for an impact profit, something that both does good and is profitable. How does the organization consult with the financial communities that are going to back these companies once your prize has been awarded? Is there a backroom conversation about that, for lack of a better way of putting it?
David Babson 06:10
Not an explicit backroom conversation about it, but the prize itself brings attention to the innovations that are coming out to win the competition. Oftentimes, as you’re noting, these impact investing communities exist, and they are looking for technologies to invest in to have impact.
What the prize is effective at doing is casting a wider net and surfacing the best solutions across the board, where there may have been silos in the past, or there may not have been transparency to individual investors about where to put their money. The prize is capable of elevating all of them, creating better visibility, and therefore, just by its inherent operation, creates better opportunities for investment capital to flow to the right types of teams to have greater impact more quickly.
So we don’t have explicit discussions with those types of investor communities to have them directly connected to individual prizes. But we often consult with investors and experts in industry to inform the metrics that we would want to have demonstrated, so that we know that when teams are winning our competitions, the demonstrations that they do are de-risking capital to flow to those innovators so that they can be translated to market.
Mitch Ratcliffe 07:47
We’re talking about growing industri