3.

For a few days ago I read an article about India, an expert talked about the clothing industry and he said that when red was a trendy colour it coloured the rivers in India red. I think that this says something about how we treat the countries that are supplying us with fabrics and clothes. Today you can find a trend in how we should behave and what we can do to prevent change of climate. The stores encourage us to by ecological/organic clothes and ecological food. I wonder if this is a trend, or if it really has its origins in a more consciously concern about the environment?

First of all I think that most people want to contribute to a better environment but doesn’t know how they can contribute to a better world and work toward a zero-emission. People can also easily be mislead and this happens all the time, for a couple of months ago we all were chocked by how down were picked from living geese. Another thing was when stores like Indiska and H&M had children working in their factories in different developing countries. This makes it hard for a consumer to trust stores when it comes to buying clothes which are both made without toxics and not made by children. I think that we are easily misled by the clothing industry because we fall for trends and right know ecological-thinking is a trend.

The other side of this is that the stores might have another agenda which is to earn money. They want to sell clothes and sometimes I don’t think that they care about where or how the clothes are made. As long as you can buy them for a low cost and then sell them for a higher price, the most important thing is that they make a good profit. The question is if money or the environment is the most important thing, because without the resources from nature it can be hard for different industries to even be able to manufacture clothes in the future. As a consumer it is hard do decide if you are to trust stores like H&M and Indiska when they have betrayed your trust before, they set the trends and sell clothes to make profit not to set a good example.

Finally, clothing and climate change are two factors that people don’t think about because we don’t have the factories that produce the clothes we wear in our countries. Maybe some of the big manufacturers of clothes should work more towards making ecological/organic clothes for other reasons than for trends. Because the situation right now is that I as a consumer can’t trust the clothing companies when they say that their clothes are made in a fair-trade and in an ecological way. But as consumers we also have a responsible but I’m sorry to say that we just can’t stop buying these clothes either because then we might en up sending developing countries into more poverty. This is a complex subject without any easy answers but one thing is for sure and that is that we all have a responsible to save the earth and use its resources in a more careful way. Zero-emission must be a goal for the industries of today at least as a vision for them to work towards.