Shantha Bloemen’s T-Shirt Travels explores recycled clothing as another aspect of the clothing industry. Although recycling t-shirts seems like a positive environmental step to take and a safe alternative to expanding landfills, T-Shirt Travels reveals some of the negative economic, social, and environmental consequences of clothing recycling as it documents an African study of the history of a t-shirt as viewed by a volunteer working in a Zambian village. Where did all these clothes come from? According to the film, in the U.S., t-shirts and other clothing go to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and other charities where 95% of them are not unpacked. Instead, they are sold to distributors, who, once free trade opened, ship them to Africa where sellers buy bales at 10-15 cents to the pound and take them to factories. The largest export from the U.S. is used clothing.
This process explains why there are no new clothes in Zambia. In 1991, when the country’s markets were opened to free trade, clothes began arriving in Zambia by the container load, so local clothing factories went out of business. Zambia was colonized by companies that forced locals to work on colonial plantations and mines, driving citizens to famine. These colonizers built economies outside the African continent, so Zambia did not gain any of the financial benefits from the exploitation of their valuable commodities. Every American t-shirt has become a metaphor for Africa’s dilemma: Who will be left to make good on the debt? According to T-Shirt Travels, globalization has exacerbated disparities between rich and poor and encouraged economic and environmental injustices that may destroy a country and its people, the film asserts.
Most would agree that fashion is fun, and “fast fashion,” clothing available at such a low price that consumers may see it as “disposable,” has become the norm, especially for young women. As Luz Claudio explains, fueled by fashion magazines, “disposable couture appears in shopping mall after shopping mall in America and Europe at prices that make purchase tempting and disposal painless.” With clothing production and disposal, however, come environmental costs, “with each step of the clothing life cycle generating potential environmental and occupational hazards” (Claudio). Polyester, a widely used petroleum fiber, requires intensive energy and crude oil amounts during the manufacturing process, in which “emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride” and wastewater that includes volatile monomers, solvents, and other by-products are emitted.
Cotton production is “one of the most water- and pesticide-dependent crops” (Claudio). During the cotton fabric manufacturing process, “effluent may contain a number of toxics” which flow into stagnant ponds. Not surprisingly, “The EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators” (Claudio). The globalization of the clothing industry and the rise in consumption associated with it has also increased the amount of clothing disposed as waste. According to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, “Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year,” translating to four percent of municipal solid waste in 2007.
Environmental justice seeks to address these dire conditions in the clothing industry. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, educational level, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws. Environmental justice seeks to ensure that minority and low-income communities have access to public information relating to human health and environmental planning, regulations and enforcement.” The Ohio Environmental Council explains this definition further, asserting, “Environmental justice ensures that no population, especially the elderly and children, are forced to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the negative human health and environmental impacts of pollution or other environmental hazard.”
This broad definition breaks down into three categories of environmental equity issues. As Robert D. Bullard explains in his discussion of “Waste and Racism,” these categories include the following areas: 1. Procedural Inequity, which addresses “the extent that governing rules, regulations, and evaluation criteria are applied uniformly”; 2. Geographical Inequity, which focuses on where factories and waste disposal facilities are placed, suggesting that some areas receive direct benefits, such as jobs and tax revenues, while others, such as waste disposal, are sent elsewhere; and 3. Social Inequity, which highlights how and where noxious facilities are located sometimes mirrors racial and class bias, so that low-income areas become “sacrifice zones.”
These categories serve as the basis for the UN Draft Principles on Human Rights and the Environment, which states
(1) Human rights, an ecologically sound environment, sustainable development and peace are interdependent and indivisible.
(2) All persons have the right to a secure, healthy and ecologically sound environment. The right and other human rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights, are universal, interdependent and indivisible.
(3) All persons shall be free from any form of discrimination in regard to actions and decisions that affect the environment. (Cifuentes and Frumkin 1-2)
T-Shirt Travels illustrates what happens when these principles are violated.
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