We have closets full of clothes and never know what to wear.
We are overwhelmed with the choices and low-cost clothing items. We have 5-10-20 identical white T-shirts that we got on sale without giving it a second thought, what was the real cost of a 5$ T-shirt? Who pays the real price?
Everything is connected, and my choice today might affect hundreds of thousands of people somewhere in Bangladesh, China, India, Sri Lanka, or Cambodia.
By making impulse purchases in fast fashion stores like H&M, Zara, Forever21, Gap, TopShop, Uniqlo, Mango, Joe Fresh, and many others, we contribute to climate change, resources depletion, animal suffering, water pollution, air pollution, soil contamination, human rights abuse.
It's a bitter pill to swallow.
"We buy things we don't need, with money we don't have to give it to people we don't like." WHY?
By buying a piece of clothes for 10$, you get a feeling that you are wealthy, it's nothing for you. You can wear it for 3 times tops and throw away without giving it a second thought. But in fact, this purchase makes you poorer and will only make the owner of the fast-fashion brand more prosperous.
Just some numbers:
Fashion is the number two most polluting industry on Earth. Just behind the oil industry.
Instead of 2 seasons a year, now we have 52. So, something new can come every week. Fast fashion has created this so it can essentially shift more products.
Only 3% of all clothes are made in America, 97% is outsourced to developing countries around the world.
There are roughly 40 million garment workers in the world today.
85% of all garment workers are women.
Their average salary is 2-4$ for 10-12 hours working day.
The fashion industry is a 3 trillion dollar a year industry.
I don't believe in "being a good or a bad person." I believe in the choices we make every single day. You can choose to make it right or to be better than yesterday. And tomorrow you can choose again.
I highly recommend to watch documentaries "River Blue," "The true cost," and the movie "Greed."
"A lot of resources that we use to make our clothing are not accounted for in the cost of producing those clothes.
So one has water that's used to produce clothing. Land that's used to grow the fiber. Chemicals that are used to dye. Those things are all inputs. And as inputs, they cost something. And they also give outputs. In some cases, those are good outputs: jobs, the clothing themselves, but in other cases, bad outputs, like harmful chemicals, greenhouse gas emissions.
And those things have cost as well."
When everything is concentrated on making profits for the big corporations, what you see is that human rights, the environment, workers' rights get lost altogether.
The workers are increasingly exploited because the price of everything is pushed down, and down, and down, just to satisfy this impulse to accumulate capital.
And that's profoundly problematic because it leads to the mass impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
I believe that a small change in many people can turn into a big change for the planet.
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