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Rant
Don’t Tell Me You Care About The Environment If You Wear H&M
Enjoy your $10 tees while Cambodian workers beg for a $160 wage.
Yesterday, I watched a documentary where a Cambodian woman wept into a camera. Pleading for $160 a month, a living wage. Tired of making clothes for American and European consumers at the expense of her life, health and dignity.
On any given day, a fresh-faced teenager will gush into a camera. You know the conspiratorial tone, the you guys, the giggling and rattling of shopping bags like maracas. The you’ll never believe what I got from H&M! And they’ll proceed to trot out their purchases like show ponies and tell you why they just had to have a sweater with embroidered purple hearts. What you don’t see is how quickly the sweater is discarded in favor of that new, shiny object. The cute top from Zara. The pants from Joe Fresh.
What you don’t realize is 17 million tons of clothing waste pilling up in landfills, which will take two centuries to decompose. In New York alone, 400 million pounds of clothing is discarded each year — even the items we so virtuously donate to charity, which goes unsold and ceremoniously trashed.
And we’re not even talking about irreversible damage to our woodlands, water pollution, dangerous chemicals…
