I’ve posted before about the true costs of ‘cheap’ clothing, most recently in the ‘Who Made My Pants’ article. Well here is someone doing some great work into investigating those costs in more detail.
From her website:
“Leah Borromeo is making a film about fashion and its real victims. She is on a mission – she wants to make ethics and sustainability in the fashion industry the norm, not the exception, by making the supply chain transparent. And she is on a journey to find out how to make this a reality.”
Leah is crowdsourcing funds to complete a documentary about the real costs of cheap cotton, starting with why up to 300,000 Indian farmers – at one point, up to 26 per day -have killed themselves to escape debt.
See a trailer for the documentary “Dirty White Gold” by clicking the link.
Check out the trailer and the site, and if you are moved/concerned, you can sponsor the film here. Your few euros could make a real difference.
There’s absolutely no reason that sustainability and capitalism can’t live together. In fact they can and should. The clothing industry is a great example. Go to http://www.etsy.com and you will find more original and beautiful vintage and repurposed clothes than you could ever buy just for yourself. The resources and the intellect are out there to produce all the clothes you could need for competitive prices – without the child labor, poor working conditions, wasteful shipping and processing, chemicals, and all the other bizarre things that people support when they buy clothes at a department store.
Thanks for the post – I will check out the documentary.