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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
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This needless mass-consumption of clothing comes at a cost. Fast fashion is an environmental and ethical crisis. The destructive dumping of fast fashion. Each year, tens of thousands of tons of unsold, unworn clothes are sent to a Chilean Atacama desert to slowly degrade, releasing methane emissions. While deserts may appear desolate and empty, they are ecosystems that — like any other — host a wide array of biodiversity when healthy.
A similar story of destructive dumping plays out across many other parts of the globe. Fashion dumping burdens poor communities. TheKantamanto markets in Accra, Ghana, sees an estimated 15 million garments flow through it each week. These clothes are mostly from fast fashion brands, thrown out or donated to op-shops by people largely in the West. Here, many of these clothes are skilfully refurbished by local people and businesses.“Despite the best efforts of Kantamanto’s entrepreneurs, 40 percent of the clothing leaves the market as waste. Accra lacks the landfill space for this clothing waste, so much of it is burned in the open air, swept into the gutter from where it eventually makes its way to the sea, or dumped in informal settlements where Accra’s most vulnerable citizens live.” This is another case of environmental racism in fashion, where wealthy white people, brands and systems export their problems to those a part of the Global Majority, and those who are poorer.........read on https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/
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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
- Category: Consumerism & Growth
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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
- Category: Consumerism & Growth
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Overconsumption and the environment: should we all stop shopping? One solution, proposed by author JB MacKinnon, is that we should simply buy less. But would that really work? Guardian Jamie Waters 30 May 2021 MacKinnon is too polite to say anything, but he can’t be thrilled by my cardboard companion. After all, the Canadian bestselling author and journalist is on a mission to get us to buy a lot less stuff. The Day the World Stops Shopping, his new book, explores what might happen if the world transformed into a society that does not revolve around purchasing, one in which our primary role is not as consumers and our credit cards are not our most commonly deployed tools. On the hypothetical day the world stops shopping, carbon emissions plummet; the skies turn a deeper blue; and with no ads polluting smartphone screens our minds become as clear as the bottle-free oceans in which whales swim merrily. There’s also chaos. Shops shut, production lines grind to a halt and millions of factory workers lose their jobs. The global economy nosedives so severely it makes the 2008 recession seem like a blip. “It would be a shock so great that it would seem to bend time itself,” MacKinnon writes.
The only thing fantastical about his vision is the timeframe: rather than ceasing all shopping overnight he thinks we should, in reality, restructure society over several years to support a sustained reduction in the amount we consume. He sees this as an obvious, if difficult, fix to a big problem. Consumption – of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted gadgets – has become the primary driver of ecological crisis. We are devouring the planet’s resources at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate. The US population is 60% larger than it was in 1970, but consumer spending is up 400% (adjusted for inflation) – and other rich nations, including the UK, aren’t much better. “Many people would like to see the world consume fewer resources, yet we constantly avoid the most obvious means of achieving that,” says MacKinnon. “When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution, unlike anything we’ve achieved with green technology.” That’s not to mention the impact materialism has on our mental health, inducing feelings of inadequacy and envy, and encouraging a culture of overworking. “This is the best opportunity in the past 30 years to bring consumption back to the centre of the political discourse,” says MacKinnon, speaking from his home in Vancouver. He’s pensive, with piercing blue eyes. Indeed, the pandemic has given people pause to think about “how they consume, what their relationship with stuff should look like and what is deeply valuable in their lives,” he says. “I don’t think anybody is going to say that having a bunch of home-workout gear was as satisfying as being able to have contact with friends, family and neighbours.” [During Covid-] many of us still shopped – Amazon enjoyed record-breaking global revenues of $386bn in 2020 – but, stripped of opportunities for parading possessions in front of others, there was a widespread rethink in why we buy and wear things. Nonetheless, as much of the world begins to reopen, there are rallying cries to boost the economy by opening our wallets. Shopping has been cast as a positive act, retail therapy a civic duty. “All the narratives are building around a new Roaring 20s, a hedonistic binge, taking revenge on the virus with our consumption,” says MacKinnon. “But I think a lot of us are going to feel uncomfortable and disquieted, to the point of despair, as we remember what the fully revved-up consumer culture looks like.”
He wants us to act on that discomfort. But he’s not suggesting we live entirely off the land. In his hypothetical model he applies a 25% reduction in consumption – a figure “modest enough to be possible, dramatic enough to be earth-shattering” – and while he won’t specify a figure when discussing what our real-world efforts should be in the coming years, something in this ballpark might well be the goal. That doesn’t just mean fewer physical things; it’s also less electricity, travel and eating out. “Basically $1 spent is a consumption dollar; I’m not fussed whether it’s spent on a canoe or a powerboat,” he says. “If you want a rule of thumb for how much impact you’re having as a consumer, the best one is: how much money are you spending? If it’s increasing, you’re probably increasing your impact; if it’s lowering, you’re probably lowering your impact.” How might a lower-consuming society look? Everything is reoriented because people, brands and governments are no longer striving for economic growth. Individuals are more self-sufficient, growing food, mending things and embracing wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of imperfect aesthetics (think patched-up pockets or chipped ceramics). Brands produce fewer but better-quality goods, while governments ban planned obsolescence (the practice of producing items to only function for a set period of time), stick “durability” labels on items so shoppers can be assured of longevity, and introduce tax subsidies so it’s cheaper to repair something than to bin it and buy a new version.Why has such an approach never before been attempted on a broad, society-wide scale?......read on https://www.theguardian.com/
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Some of the world’s best-known brands — household names — are driving the demand for cheap, forest-destroying commodities like palm oil, pulp and paper, timber, beef, soy, and cocoa. While some of the world’s biggest banks are investing billions into agribusiness companies driving deforestation and human rights violations. Millions of hectares of rainforests are burned or bulldozed in Indonesia, the Amazon, and the Congo to make way for plantations, roads, and factories. While many of the biggest brands have made commitments pledging to stop destroying rainforests across their supply chains, these same companies have failed to meet their own timelines or deliver on their promises. That’s why we’re committed to holding these companies accountable.Corporations have a moral and ethical obligation to end deforestation once and for all and to uphold human rights. Profit and doing the right thing are not mutually exclusive. But rainforests are irreplaceable and short-term profits for cheap agriculture are a threat to us all.
Conflict Palm Oil is found in roughly half of all packaged products sold in U.S. grocery stores. As “Palm Oil” or as a hidden ingredient, it’s in everything from snack foods like chips and ice cream to candy and instant noodles. It’s even found in household items like soaps and lotions, toothpaste and shampoo. Palm oil has become the most widely used vegetable oil on Earth. The demand for Conflict Palm Oil comes at a high price: widespread destruction of critical rainforest habitat, land theft from Indigenous People, human rights abuses, forced labor, child labor, toxic exposure to pesticides, and worker exploitation.
Like many of the agribusiness commodities responsible for rainforest destruction, Conflict Palm Oil plantations are monoculture crops. That means that where these plantations now stand, there were once diverse rainforest habitats that animals like endangered rhinos, tigers, elephants, and orangutans called home. Not only do Conflict Palm Oil plantations destroy habitat, but they create inroads into the forest that increase the threat of poaching. Clearing rainforests also leads to destroying hundreds — even thousands — of years of carbon storage through the destruction of peatlands. So by destroying rainforest habitat and peatlands to make room for monoculture crops, these companies are causing a massive spike in greenhouse gasses, as centuries of stored carbon are released into the atmosphere. https://www.ran.org/issue/the-businesses-driving-deforestation/
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Corporations vs. Consumers: Who is really to blame for climate change?University of Mancester | Jul 7, 2022 | Elizabeth Oldfield Climate change is one of the biggest threats to our world in the 21st century, with passionate activists advocating for change. Many of these changes involve increased sustainability, and encouraging consumers to buy ‘greener’ products, but this ignores the main culprit of fossil fuel and climate change: corporations.
Since 1988, just 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to this, only 25 corporations and state-owned organisations were found to be responsible for over 50% of the global industrial emissions2 during the same time period. Due to these staggering numbers, you would think that the onus would be put on these corporations to change the way they operate. However, this has never been the case. Instead, the common solutions which aim to tackle climate change revolve around consumer choice, and changes individuals can make in their everyday lives. These include, buying green or sustainable products, using public transport or a bike, and becoming vegan or vegetarian, among many others. Whilst these changes are good to make, they do not consider those unable to make them. With green products costing almost 50% more than their ‘non-green’ alternatives3, buying them is simply out of the question for many working-class people. As well as this, many other individuals live in areas where public transport is unavailable, and travelling by bike is not possible. No one should feel pressured to make choices that are going to negatively impact their everyday lives. Assuming everyone is free to make these choices is a very privileged outlook, and one that is far too common among some environmental activists.
Corporations on the other hand can easily choose to make their products greener and more sustainable, by using alternative methods. However, the main issue here is many corporations could not care less about climate change, and instead prioritise profits. They are completely ignorant about the effects their acts have on our planet. One of the many examples of this is Exxon, a multinational gas and oil company, which was revealed to have been aware of climate change for decades. Rather than acting early on to tackle this threat, theyinstead led efforts to block measures that would cut emissions..
The fashion industry is another main culprit of climate change, with it being the second-biggest industrial polluter, responsible for 10% of global emissions. However, a lot of the time, it is the working-class consumers who lack the funds to buy from sustainable brands who are blamed, rather than the companies who are at fault.......read on https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/global-social-challenges/2022/07/07/corporations-vs-consumers-who-is-really-to-blame-for-climate-change/
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