Everyone knows about the fast, innovative, imaginative, trendsetting, fabulous and oh-lala side of the fashion industry. The side that has you skipping dinner for 2 weeks just so you can afford a designer coat; the side that graces our magazines, our televisions… and disturbingly often even our dreams.
This fast paced industry is not only one of the most competitive and lucrative; but unfortunately also one of the most filthy and unethical.
The Kahvarah team had a talk at a local school on Tuesday, around the issue of sustainable and responsible fashion highlighting our initiative to encourage an environmentally and socially friendly industry. While putting together our presentation we furthered our research since the last time we actively went looking for dirt (haha…ok that’s a bad joke), we found True Cost, which is a documentary every fashion conscious person should watch by the way. Anyway, to summarize what we found, here are some fun facts for you to digest:
- China produces +-54% of total worldwide clothing with that has about 3 billion tons (over 300 billion KG’s) of soot per year. Yikes
- Throwing away your clothes made of synthetic fibres adds to solid waste as these NEVER decompose as opposed to natural fibres such as cotton and hemp that do.
- “In 2010, the textile industry ranked third for overall in Chinese industry for waste water discharge amount at 2.5 billion tons of waste water per year.”
- Over 100,000 South Africans have lost their jobs in the industry in the past 10 years as result of textile mills and clothing factories shutting down due to clients opting cheaper production elsewhere (mainly china).
- The textile industry employs approximately 10 million people worldwide; majority of these people are underpaid and work in hazardous buildings for prolonged hours and are constantly exposed to health and safety risks because the owners need to keep production prices low.
Just a week ago on Sunday April 24, marked the 3rd anniversary of an 8 story garment factory collapsing in Dhaka, Bangladesh. And with that the lives of 1,134 were taken and hundreds injured most people working for less that $1 (R15) an hour. It is shocking that this event went by with the bare minimum being done by large fashion companies to not only bring awareness to unsafe factories (and modern day slave labour) but also work to change these working conditions. But, alas, glitz over gore and forward a few years and clothing brands still push for cheap cheap production prices… but at what cost? Other people’s health, safety and lives?
Being a part of this industry, especially as a growing brand, it is important to practice ethical, responsible and sustainable business. It is important to care about the working conditions of your production team, it is important to support textile mills and fabric stores within our cities and our continent. It is important to donate, exchange and recycle clothes.
Fashion, truly is a beautiful thing, the ability to express ourselves through what we wear emanates not only our personalities, but our culture, our generation, politics, music, art… Let us all be aware of what we put on our bodies as much as what we put in it and bring back the magic to the craft of making clothes.
Sources:
http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-fashion/25-shocking-fashion-industry-statistics.html
http://www.inchem.org/documents/iarc/vol48/48-13.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1964887/
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