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This is a great short movie detailing the hidden impacts of that T-shirt that looks so good on you. Watch it here. Kristian Labusga tells the tale of this style icon that walks with a heavy footprint. When we take into account all the activity that goes into producing a 250 gram shirt we can be wearing 4tonnes of resources on our backs. Literally carrying the world on your shoulders.
Wouldn’t it be good if everything we bought came with the stories of all the people and places it involved in its creation, all the many extras that made it happen. For your t-shirt that would be the cotton farmer, the truck driver the ship captain the weaver the dyer the sewer. It would mean the water, the pesticides, the chemical, bleaches, inks and packaging, the fuel oil. But all we care about is the designer and the design.
And that is just a T-shirt, what about a television, a car, a mobile phone, or in fact a phone call. When it only costs a few cents or dollars the impacts are easy to ignore, but they are just as real. What answer would you get if you asked your retailer to tell you where the cotton came from in that new shirt, the leather in your new shoes or the gold in your new phone. If we knew there were real people toiling to make our lives happen would we be more concious of the power of our money?
How aware are you of where the things you have come from, how they get here and what will happen to them when you are done?
