NEXT TIME YOU BUY YOGA PANTS CONSIDER SELF-IMMOLATION INSTEAD (Updated with better math)

//I’ll prime my posts with disclaimers to avoid any confusion. Again I don’t really care what people wear, nor do I want anyone to light themselves on fire. This measly post is just for humor. //

“The current fad on campus for most women is to be lazy and wear exercise clothes all the time. While I could bemoan male basket ball shorts and gym culture’s take over of fashion on campus it honestly doesn’t matter that much. A single note on pure fashion before I begin. Do not wear yoga pants with a skirt and pretend your are wearing tights; we all can tell when women do it. It is not formal and looks trashy.

Now onto the issue at hand. Other than offending good fashion sense yoga pants are a problem for sustainability. To put it bluntly the ugly things are made out of Spandex and Nylon, some even have cotton weaved into it. Spandex and Nylon are made from oil. It has to be refined and processed to make the thread.

A kilo of polyester, and ingredient in spandex  the material that makes yoga pants stretchy makes up 85% of the material for them. It takes 125 Megajoules to make a Kilogram of Polyester, and nearly twice that for nylon. If a yard of Spandex weighs 1 pound and a set of yoga pants takes 1.25 yards of fabric. 1.25 yards of fabric would weight 1.25 pounds, converted that equals .56 kg of polyester. In terms of embodied energy that’s 70 Mega Joules in a set of yoga pants, or 19 Kilowatt hours. Considering that it only takes 6 Kilowatt hours to make a gallon of gasoline 

This high level of embodied energy shows roughly how bad these ugly things are.

Lets also assume you are 5’&7″ and weigh 140 pounds (too many trips to Starbucks, who has time to workout anyway) . Here we’ll use the Du Bois Body surface calculation. We’ll need to convert the units to metric. W=63 kg H=170 cm

BSA= .007184 X (Weight^.425) X (Height^.725)  = 1.74 m^2

If your body has a surface area 1.74 meters squared and a Gallon of gasoline covers roughly 250 square feet converted to square meters that’s 23m^2. Well hot dog! A pair of yoga pants could net you enough gas to burn all night. 

From these calculations it would use way less petroleum to light yourself on fire than make a pair of those pants. Naturally there is more petroleum in the thread in Spandex than pure fuel, solids are denser than liquids.

There is another problem. Yoga pants aren’t very functional in the cold central Pennsylvania winter. Women’s thighs have been freezing so fashion geniuses at North Face and the rest of the copycats decided to make longer coats.

 

These longer gown coats cover the cold thighs of the yoga pant wearer. Not only are these people not helping the environment by buying synthetic yoga pants, they now need more Gortex or some other petrochemical coating to water proof their jacket. The red area highlights the wasted material. Also this person is walking in the snow when the sidewalk is completely clear next to her. Clearly she makes bad life choices.”

Bet you numbskulls thought yoga pants were “Hot”

-Francis