The Garment Industry: “buy, wear, dispose, and repeat”

The garment industry is, to a large extent, based on the hope that people will throw things out — and replace them — long before they actually wear out. So we buy, wear, dispose, and repeat, and the result is a heck of a lot of waste. Of course, lots of people (especially in very poor places like Bangladesh) have jobs as a result. The buy-wear-dispose cycle is reminiscent, in that sense, of the Keynesian idea of stimulating the economy by paying men to dig holes and then paying them to fill them up again. Nothing is created, but people get paid, they spend the money, and so on. Except, in this case, the “hole digging” isn’t efficient, in that it produces plenty of negative externalities. >>>

LINK: The True Cost of Fashion: Andrew Morgan on His New Documentary (by Nell Minow in HuffPo)

Andrew Morgan’s new film, “True Cost,” shows us the devastating environmental impact of the cute, cheap, dresses and shirts we buy and then get rid of to buy some more. While the price we pay for clothing has sharply decreased, the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically. One reason is the difference in how many articles of clothing the average American owns and how long we keep them. There has been a 500 percent increase in clothing consumption in the past two decades…..

What do you think?

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