True Cost - The Fashion Industry

One of the most eye opening documentaries I have seen yet.

This has to be the most raw, honest film about the fashion industry and the true cost it has on our economy and peoples lives and even our world. If you haven't watched it I highly recommend it, it makes you question your decisions and where you shop, how to change things, what is right and what is wrong and how you can make a difference.

Questions I asked myself when watching this.

Are sweatshops good?

They are excused as a better option to worse jobs.

Personally to have to create an excuse for them means that people know and are aware that it is not an acceptable means of creating clothes or jobs but will not admit it because it does not affect them other than advantaging them with more money and materialistic items for consumers and themselves. The fact that we are accepting to this and allowing this to happen is disgusting.

Fair Trade creating solutions, is it the way forward?

Anything creating a solution to the barbaric way people, human beings, are being treated in sweatshops and garment factories is a solution.

Sweatshop and garment factory workers work for less than 3 dollars a day. That’s £1.98 English pounds.

To keep up with fashion, cotton plants are genetically modified using pesticides, and the land is treated as if it is a factory. They spray the land with chemicals. What is the actual impact that that has on the environment and on the human race?

These chemicals create birth defects, disabilities, cancers. Increased profitability from pesticides causes farmers to buy pesticides and seeds, which then leads to them being in debt and inevitably losing their land. £250,000 farmers to commit suicide by drinking bottles of pesticide in the last 15 years. http://blogcritics.org/fast-fashions-consequences-the-true-cost-a-film-by-andrew-morgan/

This needs to stop.

Advertising makes consumers feel that they can solve their problems no matter how big or small by consumption. Fashion is getting cheaper while the necessities are getting dearer, even when money is tight, people will still buy fashion. Fashion should never be thought of as a disposable product. The average American will throw away 82 pounds of textile waste - non-biodegradable a year.

As a consumer you’re part of the problem of consumption. Can you see that?

The workers in sweatshops need to be treated the same as we would treat our children and ourselves, they are human too. They matter. They aren't slaves.

Alternative ways are the way forward. Deal with the system, not just the conditions. That’s how we’ll beat this.