Why buy ethical
clothing
Read about why buying ethical
clothing
is important.
And choose the good story!
- PRODUCTS
- THE STORY
- COMPANIES
Did you know?
- Conventional cotton production relies on heavy use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
- Cotton chemicals can cause spontaneous abortion, still birth, sterility, behavioral abnormalities, and cancer.
- Often, child laborers are spraying the cotton pesticides. Usually with no protection at all (1)
- Dyes used in clothing can contain toxic chemicals.
- Most of the world’s clothing is made in sweatshops where workers earn as little as 1 US cent an hour
- Workers are sometimes subjected to physical and sexual abuse and often work more than 100 hours a week (2)
- It takes 2700 liters of water to make 1 cotton shirt (3)
- Cotton production has virtually made a whole sea (The Aral Sea) disappear (4).
Benefits of ethical clothing
Some companies don’t use sweatshops and produce their products at places like the Pratibha Syntex factory in India who:
- Pays a living wage and provide free medical care, nutrition, and housing.
- Has set up two schools and a technical college.
- Supports another 90 schools and several old age homes and orphanages in the area.
- Has a goal to socially and economically empower as many as 700 women every year!
- Planted over 200,000 trees to offset their energy impact.
- Even offer self defense and yoga classes for the people working there (5).
At an Egyptian cotton farm, organic cultivation has boosted production by more than 30%, and the fiber is processed into textiles without any synthetic chemicals (2).
Hemp can be used as an alternative to cotton. Hemp doesn’t need many pesticides or herbicides because hemp plants shade out their weeds. Three times as much hemp as cotton can be produced on an acre of land and hemp is stronger making the clothes more durable (6) (7).
Check out this on the the benefits of fairtrade cotton!
Sources
(1) http://www.ejfoundation.org.uk/shopforejf/index.php?route=product/product&path=35_36&product_id=71
(2) World Watch Institute: "State of the World 2004"
(3) http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery&product=cotton
(4) http://www.amiiko.com/2010/09/23/can_you_make_a_sea_disappear
(5) http://www.pratibhasyntex.com/
(6) http://www.growandmake.com/hemp-vs-cotton
(7) http://hempethics.weebly.com/what-is-industrial-hemp.html
