How fast fashion fuels climate change, plastic pollution, and violence, P11
- Shidonna Raven
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Helle Abelvik-Lawson
September 22, 2023
Source: Green Peace
Shidonna Raven Fashion - Home & Heirloom Collection. All Rights Reserved. Copyright. Trademark.
Photo Source: Unsplash
Dangerous, low-paid work for ‘disposable’ clothes
The constant push for cheaper manufacturing traps skilled garment workers in extremely unsafe working conditions. Deadly fires frequently rip through clothing factories around the world. March 2020 alone saw 66 fires in factories across the industry – that’s two per day.
It’s been 10 years since the worst fashion factory disaster, and little has changed. The 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh killed 1,134 people and injured 2,500 (mostly young women).
These women knew their working conditions were dangerous.
The Rana Plaza building was declared unsafe in the days leading up to the collapse. Fashion companies forced the suppliers to fulfil their orders anyway.
Imagine working at your machine, in quiet terror, as the building cracked around you, sewing the hem of a garment that might never even be worn.
That was a decade ago, and if anything the problem of waste in fashion has gone into overdrive – the exploitation of lives; of human labour and skill; all the way to the garment waste ending up on Ghanaian beaches.
And sometimes, companies don’t pay the workers at all.
Just as the world went into COVID-19 lockdowns, the fashion industry owed $16 billion to garment workers for orders completed before the pandemic shut their stores. Some still haven’t been paid.
How has it come to this? Do we now just accept that clothing has to be made from oil and misery – so it can remain dirt cheap, and far too plentiful? Is it our fault as customers who need clothing to function in society?
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