Fair Trade Fashion v Sustainability
The only natural resource we have in plentiful supply are people's hands.
A journalist recently asked me how sustainable Fair Trade fashion really is. "Shouldn't we be buying clothing made locally?"
Of course some of us make our own clothes. I even have a few friends who handweave the fabrics too - although they wear jeans and organic cotton t-shirts whilst they do this. Others recycle their clothes or buy from second hand and charity shops, or in Japan - from 'flea markets' (which is not a disparaging term in Japan).
Still, for those of us who can't make our own clothes or do want to buy something new now and again, Fair Trade fashion is as green as it gets. And here's why:
First much of Fair Trade fashion is made with organic cotton reducing the burden of millions of tons of chemical fertiliser and pesticide on the land, sea, and air, and of course the pollution caused by manufacturing them in the first place.
The fabrics and other raw materials used to make Fair Trade clothes are not synthetic. Most synthetic fabrics are petroleum based, and even if they are not, it still takes lots of energy to produce them - usually generated from fossil fuels.
And handlooms release no CO2.
Yesterday I met up with two fellow social entrepreneurs, Iftekhar and Maqsood (founders of Water Concern in Bangladesh) to talk about a Fair Trade fashion project.
"The handloom is free of carbon emissions as they are completely hand powered. That is not the only reason we started working with ten handweaving Fair Trade groups, of course. The groups provide work for over three hundred people and an income that is often double what they would earn doing other work locally."
A weaver can handweave 8-10 metres per day. A power loom here can weave 25-30 metres per day providing work for only one person for every three machines. The energy consumption of one power loom is the equivalent to twenty vacuum cleaners sucking all day. That's 20 x 3 power looms = 60 vacuum cleaners' worth of energy to provide one job - a lot of carbon emissions and global warming for one job!
"My view on economic policy is Gandhian, but new models of sustainability need to be developed. Fair Trade fashion offers an alternative."
"Ah... but what about production capacity?" says the journalist.
With ten million handweavers living on starvation wages in Bangladesh and India, there is ample production capacity. We just need the will to work in the villages and arrange the distribution channels so the villagers can sell what they produce.
I'm working to help People Tree's handweaving partners to be the first to trade carbon emissions through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Handweavers deserve to benefit from low environmental impact of their production methods, so they can scale up their activities and help others break out of poverty.
Photo: Shafiqul Alam/Oboyob