Some time ago I saw a nice pair of jeans in a shopping centre, which were not even expensive.
However, there was no label indicating its origin, where they were manufactured, basically I could not see the “made in”. It should be an obligation by law and curious as I am, I decided to start a small investigation, first by asking the shop owner, who had no idea.
Then I pretended to be a member of a consumer association, I listed a whole series of regulations that they have been violating so that they gave me the address of the warehouse where they bought them.
Once home, I called that warehouse, always pretending to be a member a consumer association. They started immediately to tell me the story of the jeans, without any problems, as some journalists have already made an investigation before. First of all, they were made with cotton from Benin. The cotton threads are then dyed in Spain, before being shipped to Taiwan to be woven into several separate pieces (pockets, legs, etc.).
The pieces are then sent to Tunisia to be sewn with Japanese polyester threads. The factory also added buttons, zips, rivets which were made in Japan with Australian metals.
So the jeans would leave Tunisia for a warehouse in France from where they will be sold all over Europe. In short, the jeans travelled about 65,000 kilometers: one and a half the tour of the world.
The production of these jeans is definitely “globalized”: to sell jeans at the lowest possible price, manufacturers look for the lowest cost of production at all levels. The manufacturer multiplies the steps to optimize the overall manufacturing cost. Dyeing is less expensive here, buttons are cheaper there, etc.
This causes several problems: the culture of cotton requires a lot of water for countries that do not have much water, the working conditions of the workers are very bad, transport consumes a lot of oil and releases greenhouse gases.
In the end the jeans are very expensive for the planet, even if they are sold at an attractive final price for the consumers.
There are so many other examples like this. Danish prawns are cleaned in Morocco and then sent back to Denmark to be marketed. Scottish langoustines leave for Thailand to be decorticated by hand in a large multinational company and return to Scotland where they are cooked and then resold.
What do you think about this practice? Wouldn’t it be better to bring production closer to places of sale, reduce energy and hydrocarbon consumption, finally do some good to our planet?
For more on environmental issues, please visit my blog crisbiecoach.blog.
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