Patagonia has long been near the Alpine pinnacle of green-leaning businesses. The outdoor clothing company leads the way with eco-friendly offices, conscientious sourcing of materials, environmental campaigns, and its 1% for the Planet program. Patagonia has also exhaustively researched the environmental footprint of its gear -- both where its material comes from and how products are made, as well as the impact once they're sold, which includes laundering and ironing clothes, as well as their eventual disposal to landfills and incinerators.

After all that research, the company last week launched its Common Threads Initiative, which asks potential customers to pledge to cut consumption of the stuff they don’t really need -- a message both radical and conservative. Then, after pondering your heart’s desire, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard seems to be saying, go ahead and buy our stuff, because it will last a long time and does less environmental (and social) harm in its manufacture than similar products made by other companies.

The initiative also asks customers to fix their Patagonia products before buying new ones (Patagonia repairs goods under warranty and offers free advice for fixing things such as waders, in the field, on the cheap), then reuse or resell unwanted Patagucci through the company’s new partnership with E-Bay. Surely this is the first time a major retailer has actively encouraged its customers to seek used products instead of slapping down cash for new ones. (Apple goes in the opposite direction, actively thwarting repair and upgrade of some items with nonstandard screws.)

Recycling, of course, is at the bottom of the three-R hierarchy, and Patagonia years ago began accepting old and presumably unmarketable Capilene undies (through the mail or hand delivered to their stores, preferably by bike), then shipping them to Japan, where they’re washed, deconstructed, and remanufactured into fluffy new Capilene baselayers. (It doesn’t seem like this has been a crashing success: in five years, the company says it has taken back 45 tons of clothing for recycling and made 34 tons of that into new clothes. No word on how many tons of Capilene it stories annually sell.)

I’m a firm believer that one of the most important things an individual can do to cut his or her environmental footprint is to buy less stuff, because mining, milling, manufacturing, packaging, and transporting new consumer goods generates far more pollution and waste than the tiny fraction we actually see on the curb come garbage day. We all need to rethink what we actually need; buy used; repair the old; borrow; rent. E-bay is a big help here (three cheers for its reusable packaging program); so are Craigslist and Freecycle.

But I’m not sure I’d buy used fleece anywhere. One of the textile’s most visceral attractions is its primordial purity and softness. I wouldn’t wish my old Patagonia fleeces on anyone: they’re stained, stiff, their cushy loft worn away by more than a decade of hard and happy use. I can see how the Common Threads model might work if garments are in great shape, but otherwise it seems like a bit of a fig leaf -- not quite greenwashing (because of its solid educational component) but still managing to evoke in me a longing for something shiny and new. (Don’t get me started on the wanderlust inspired by Patagonia’s catalogs, website, and even its E-Bay site, the quest for peak adventures in pristine locales, and their attendant carbon footprint ...)

I applaud Patagonia for focusing on these issues. I think Chouinard, who has grappled for years with the meaning of “sustainable” business, has his heart in the right place. But I can’t get over the duality of a clothing company banging its eco drum and also continuously changing its styles. Sure, technologies and designs improve, but change for change’s sake is the fundamental driver of the fashion industry. If colors and shapes, hyped by the fashion media, didn’t go in and out of style, surely we’d desire considerably fewer clothes. Style obsolescence, invented with mass production technologies in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was a key driver of consumption and its attendant waste.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Patagonia, as their clothing holds up exceptionally well: that’s why we’re willing to pay more for their products. (One of the most important ways the fashion industry could help the planet -- and garment workers -- is to do away with cheap, disposable fashion.) But the company persists -- damn them! -- in enticing me with fresh colors and intriguing shapes.

So far, I resist: I’m still wearing my Patagonia Stand Up shorts twenty years down the road. The Velcro on the back pockets is shot, but otherwise they’re doing fine. And yet: I may have aged out of their mid-thigh length. Does anyone want to make an offer?

Images coutesy Patagonia