The Negative Effects Of Ethnic Subcultures

The primary purpose of this essay uses persuasive writing to get her point across. Informing the reader about the eco dangers of buying outsourced clothing material. Most people often want the cheaper alternative without going to the flea market or charity clothing banks. But all the clothes get worn down, shrink, fade or just deteriorate in the end because the fabric is unsustainable. Resulting in the t-shirts and jeans to be tossed away and put into a landfill. Where they have been found to transmite “more than three million tons of carbon dioxide emissions”. (Siegle, 7)

The True Cost is a documentary that was filmed with the hope of educating consumers regarding the global impact that ‘fast fashion’ has on our society. Director Andrew Morgan provides the link between our clothes and the people who make them; careful to bridge the gap between the factory workers and how our high demand for fashion can affect their life. In fact, we seldom consider consumptionism (to consume, use or spend with little regard) and globalized production (when goods are made in another country for low wages) while shopping, but we should. Projects such as this documentary, shed light on the untold stories behind what appears to be a glamorous and trillion dollar business. Unfortunately, those who are impacted the most are the workers

Fast Fashion is a worldwide epidemic that encourages and feeds capitalism, consumerism, and the end of our planet Earth. This is a detrimental 2-4 week cycle of designing clothes, manufacturing it, producing mass quantities of it, and spreading it throughout the world in stores like H&M, Forever 21, Zara, ASOS, and many other brands. These brands usually all get mass quantities of clothes from closely related sweatshops from countries where labor is cheap, and where safety laws and ethical human rights are not enforced: china, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Production of clothes usually costs a small fraction of what they are selling it for, since all the materials are from regions all over the world the worth of a shirt is much less than what you are buying it for. The reason this vicious cycle is detrimental to our planet earth is because of the unending mass production. It manufactures unbelievable amounts of one item, because it will be gone in the next 2-4 weeks from the racks, and since they do not have enough time to remake the one item, they produce mass quantities of it and what is not sold is waste that is piling up all around our world in landfills.

Figure 1 demonstrates the 10 stages of production for Gap Inc. Jeans, from the raw material all the way through to the consumer as an end product. The first stage is the supply chain for the production of jeans is to source cotton. Gap has a sustainability and environmental issue when sourcing cotton. Gap Inc. scored a 0.5 out of a scale of 0 to 19.5 on cotton ranking, conducted by Rank a Brand. Which assessed “their cotton policy, sourcing and traceability based on publicly available information”. Besides the sustainability concern, gap has an environmental issue. Sourcing unstainable cotton uses a tremendous amount of water, as “It takes more than 5,000 gallons of water to make enough cotton for just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans”. It is also unclear to the consumer in which countries the cotton is sourced. As some countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan tend to be much more risk prone for child labor, during the cotton picking season.

How fast fashion is affecting the environment is a very serious topic since this type of consumerism in the United States is heavy on supply and demand, and because of that shoppers want it all and want it now which is basically fast fashions motto. The way to make these pieces of clothing heavily rely on cheap materials that can be made quickly, so that is polyester and cotton being made in big factories that emit out toxins into our earth. Cotton being one of the most used fabrics takes a lot to be made into a single garment. Uzbekistan which is the 6th biggest producer of cotton had faced many conflicts during production since cotton uses so much water to be made it has dried up the 4th largest lake the Aral Sea because of how much we need to produce cotton fashion. (Prospectjournalucsd) Buying these cheap garments that become unwearable after 5 times (Forbes) of wearing it usually gets thrown out after and producing more waste that gets put into our waterways since theses garments shed easy and through washing them can “find their way into oceans and on the shores everywhere.” (Sweeny) So with the help of shoppers, being able to cut down on the purchase of fast fashion can help aid in keeping the ecosystem in order.

80 billion clothing items are produced every year. About two million tons of clothes is thrown away every year. The clothes often cannot be resold due to lack of quality. Only about 10% of clothes are resold. ¾ of the clothing’s manifested from fast fashion labels will end up in a land fill after a year after it is put out for consumers to buy.

TenTree has created a product with the positioning to give customers clothing options that are environmentally and socially responsible. They promise to plant ten trees for every item purchased and only use factories that are approved by WRAP. (TenTree, n.d.) They also have a large selection of t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, tanks, hats, and toques, in a variety of different colours and sizes. (TenTree, n.d.) Satisfying the customer wants for a wide variety of socially and environmentally responsible clothing has created functional-instrumental value for their customers.

Fashion is everything to society and the media. The fashion industry has transformed into a necessity in the life of people. Everyone wants to look good, feel fabulous and feel as if we belong with everyone else. The envy and desire to wear certain things and look a certain way all come, from wearing the latest fashion handbags, accessories, dresses, shoes, and the list goes on. But, when is considering fashion into an individual’s life going too far to the extreme? Many do not consider the whereabouts of fashion materials and how the environment is affected by the mere existence of certain garments. Some may believe these objects grow on trees. But that is clearly not the case. Even though it would be nice. The fashion industry as a

In this article, Barenblat outlines some of the key reasons as to why fast fashion is detrimental for women and the environment. The author supports her claim by suggesting fast fashion is expensive for the planet, encourages young women in poverty to work in sweatshops, and leads to million tons of landfill each year. This information in the article is useful because it provides relevant statistics on the damages caused by the clothing industry.

The True Cost, by Andrew Morgan, was a truly eye opening documentary on what price workers who make our clothes have to pay in regards to their health, finances, and sacrifices they have to make. Most of us purchase clothes and do not think twice about where they came from, who made them, and impact it is having on our society. Stores such as H&M and Forever 21 sales clothes for very cheap prices; however, the more the prices are reduced, the more the environmental costs are raised. Our society revolves are materialism and most believe our clothing portrays who a person is, to a certain extent. If this is the case, our clothes may be saying more about ourselves than we think, if we are wearing clothes that workers in other countries are paying a price for.

The article in my view focused on race, culture and sub-culture. The claim made by Azealia Banks was that Iggy Azalea was ripping off other black artists; to her, having anyone other than black people represent the hip hop culture was offensive and shouldn’t be done. Perhaps, to her that could be seen as terrorism since there is no one uniform definition of terrorism. Certainly, I don’t see that as terrorism. It is difficult to see this as a form of terrorism but since there is no strict definition there may be several views on what terrorism is.

In the book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, a journalist and the author, writes about the lack of ability of disposal we currently possess for the massive amounts of textile waste. She wrote, “The rate of disposal is not keeping up with the availability of places to put everything that we're getting rid of and that's the problem." Millions of tons of textile waste are generated globally per year. There are many efforts to cut down the amount of waste by recycling, shredding, and exporting to developing nations. According to the United Nations, The US is the leading exporter of second-hand clothes. Very poor nations like India benefit greatly from imported second-hand clothing. These methods to cut back on textile waste are proven to work, but they don’t solve the problem, they just lessen it. Part of the problem with fast fashion and textile waste is that many of the clothes being mass produced are made out of cheap petroleum-based fibers. H&M received a lot of backlash for this, spurring them to release a more eco-friendly line of clothing, using organic cotton.

One essential point of this documentary is to explore the life of the low-wage workers in the garment factories in the developing countries. The film also explains the effects of consumerism within the clothing industry and how that relates to the pollution around the world. The story line begins with an incident where a garment factory building in Bangladesh collapsed and over a thousand workers were killed. Not only does this do a great job to set the scene for the rest of the story line, but it also sets the mood for the documentary. Next, they go on to explain an important key point in the story and that is consumerism.

Fashion today may seem as it’s not using much water, consequently it’s one of the most water wasted issues in the world, conversely it comes very close to water pollution. 2,700 litres of water produce just one t-shirt that we may wear once and just abandon a couple weeks in the time to come. You may not know, but many noxious chemicals are used to create the fabric that is discarded into our clothes but once it’s reached the fabric’s limit, people dump the chemicals into rivers which lead to water pollution without a care. On a sadder note, citizens in poor countries waste their lives making our clothes for at least 50 cents per hour just to feed

Generations ahead of us only had a tiny wardrobe, where clothes were not washed every day. In our generation, fast fashion is in. It’s ok to have multiple shirts or shoes of the same color. It’s actually ok to throw away unwanted apparel. Apparel companies are beginning to focus on sustainable fashion, also known as eco fashion. Apparel, fashion, and textiles is the most polluting industry in the world. Every stage, that a garment goes through, uses up and threatens our resources.