martedì 4 ottobre 2011

I am what I wear: jeans





"Jeans your skin"  Meltin' Pot jeans brand.

Most of us have this one pair of jeans where we literally live in, a second skin which becomes a part of you. That's the way most of us approach their wardrobe. We either are attracted to clothes and see them as an extension of who we perceive ourselves to be within our world or we are repelled by the clothes we see, that we consider as: that 's not me. In other words one of the building blocks of our personality is clothing. We are what we wear since we wear that  which confirms who we think we are. 

The jeans that started of as a workers uniform became over the years a fashionable and expensive piece of our wardrobe that sometimes even made it into a collectors item. In the beginning jeans were promoted as pants that allowed you to get dirty and do the rough stuff, nowadays the words "dirty" and "rough" are connected to sexuality. Sex sells and advertising agencies use our hungry libido, to become that what we desire to be when wearing a certain brand of jeans.

Identifying yourself to your pair of jeans indicates that we, fashionable and non-fashionable people need something beyond ourselves to confirm who we are. It's not enough to be ourselves, we feel the need to pimp ourselves up and say to our environment: "hey look how though I am" or "see how cute and sexy I am". Our entire life we spend tons and tons of time to create this one perfect picture of ourselves, the picture we fear the most when it comes to not achieving this goal. We feel down and not entirely ourselves, according to our desired picture, and therefore we shop a bit and comfort ourselves with a new pair of jeans that can make up or assists recreating, restoring tis picture we have of ourselves. Along with achieving this picture we like to gather ourselves in groups that wear the same clothing styles as we do, to confirm the picture and to confirm us that everything is okay. We're okay, cool, hip and desirable when others share the same excitement for our clothing style. At last we've got an identity, we've got jeans.

This pair of jeans that gives us self-worth and a feeling of belonging, that when we put them on we feel as if we're home, is total self deception. Totally identifying ourselves with the picture we desire. The question is, do we understand what's behind these mind projections and desires we have if it comes to our jeans. Do we know what we're holding in our hands when we put on our jeans? Who made it? How was it made? What did I accept when I allowed myself to buy these pair of jeans? What does wearing jeans mean on a global scale?

The reality behind our beautiful and fashionable  jeans, consists of abuse. The abuse of living beings, the abuse of nature and the abuse of the system we live in. The abuse is shown in many different areas that work together to get your jeans in the stores: the cotton industry, the manufacturing industry and globalization.

Cotton industry

The cotton that makes up the fabric of your jeans is for a large part hand picked by children of Uzbekistan. Children who go to school and get recruited by the government to abandon school for picking cotton, this way these children enter forced child labour,  get hardly or not paid at all and it's almost impossible for their parents to get their children out of this industry during the harvest time. The sad thing is that the Uzbek government is leading this cotton picking campaign every autumn to meet up with their cotton quotas. Schools are shut down by state officials and even the teachers are forced into laboring in the cotton fields. Every child has to pick a daily amount of cotton. Those that fail to reach their target are reported, punished  and their grades in school will suffer from it. 

Uzbekistan is one example of child labor when it comes to cotton picking, it's also one of worlds largest cotton producing countries, but it's certainly not the only country that does so. Also india, Egypt, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Benin are guilty of cotton picking child labor.

By buying your pair of jeans you accept cotton to be hand picked and you allow forced child labour on children that should be in school instead, to learn their basics like reading, writing and maths. When you wear your nice and soft jeans, you do not feel the forced soft child hands struggling for survival. You do not want to think about such things while you're building your image of a cool and hip person that belongs to the right fashion group to feel accepted by life. The same life that you abuse by sustaining child labor.

Besides child labor the cotton industry is a large polluter on a global scale. The cotton producing countries can't afford to loose crops and are at the same time greedy enough to do anything to earn more money. In order to get the most produce from the fields they use a lot of pesticides. These pesticides are flooding into the water supplies and will pollute the water reserves on a global scale. We're living on one and the same globe and polluting water reserves in one country causes over time problems in other countries. Earth is a closed system where water is constantly re-cycled and all waters are connected to each other. Not only the waters gets poisoned, also the child laborers complain about physical symptoms they suffer from after long exposure to the pesticides. Therefore these pesticides are a threat for the health of all living beings with the planet included. It is common sense to see that we cannot keep on abusing without experiencing the consequences. Even when you wash your pair of jeans, the poisson of the pesticides are still in the fabric and will be washed out over time to pollute the water reserves in your town.

Buying a pair of jeans is accepting pollution and allowing it to become a global problem. Even when you do not care about these issues as pollution, because it simply doesn't hit home, your own health can also be at stake. For those that are hyper-allergic, the pesticides that are still remaining in your jeans, may irritate your skin and give it a rash. And not even the biggest egoist wants to pollute his own water supply, only ignorance and not facing the problems behind your jeans can sustain the abuse that's going on in the cotton industry.

As if child labor and pollution isn't enough, the cotton industry is using up so much water that the water supplies gets unevenly distributed. In Uzbekistan the cotton industry uses the water from the Aral Sea, this vital water resource for the Uzbeks is reduced with 15% of it's former volume. With the reducing water supplies a lot of fish species from the Aral Sea dyed, the wetlands dried out and it created a lot of environmental refugees.

Water is essential to us, to all life and to the planet, withdrawing water from one part to another is man made environmental abuse and will have major consequences for every one. It's not only within the producing part of cotton that a lot of water is wasted, also within the manufacturing of the jeans and all the years that you wear and wash your jeans. It's a never ending cycle of water wasting that we could approach in a different way while considering all interests at the same time.

Within the produce of organic cotton the use of water is reduced, the pests are controlled in a natural way and the land isn't under attack of intensive agriculture. There are many roads to walk when we consider greed for more profit as a factor that can be excluded. Without greed we do not need to over produce, we do not need to use aggressive pesticides that damage the soil and the health of the laborers and we do not need to use valuable water for only one purpose so that living beings do not have enough water to live on. When we simply act in the best interest of all in every way we do not need child hands to pick the cotton to meet up our greed quotum.

The manufacturing industry 

After  the harvesting of the cotton for your jeans, it will then be transported from the fields to the plant where workers are sorting, ginning and milling the cotton before weaving and cutting the actual fabric into jeans. This whole process is producing a lot of fine dust that affects the lungs of the workers, which can eventually develop into black lungs. It's not a type of work one should be in for many years, but the reality is that in for instance China and Mexico entire families work within this industry. Their working career starts as children, still underaged and due to the poverty they live in, these people are doomed to work this kind of jobs till they get sick and no longer can perform.  There are not many other job options that have less health risks within the poor regions they live in. This means that your pair of jeans provides poor families with a salary and at the same time it promotes disease within these workers that isn't necessary when security/health issues are taken into consideration.

Organic grown cotton might seem the solution and when we have a look at the growing of the cotton it is definitely a great alternative to traditional growing. However within the process of ginning, milling, weaving, cutting and sewing the organic cotton is not different from the traditional, it still produces fine dust. 

After the jeans is sewed they have to be bleached and dyed, the most common dye used for jeans is sulfur dye to create this deep intense color and many different shades. A lot of water is also used in the dye process and the contaminated waste water within developing countries is discharged directly into the rivers, due to lack of money for proper treatment on the waste water. However in India they found ways to not waste the dye and the colored waste water by re-using or re-cycling this water to add more dye to or to make lighter shade colors. In South China the rivers turned black and started smelling after many years of being a dump site for the jeans industry. In Xintang, China,  the people gathered and successfully demanded from the authorities that the rivers had to be clean again. Now the rivers are green again, but there is still toxic waste in the rivers that can't be removed. This shows that intoxicating the planet has high costs and is irreversible, which makes you wonder if the process of buying jeans is irreversible. What would be the least to get over, not having a pair of jeans produced through abuse or no longer having clean water in our rivers? As much as we want to believe that these practices take place in developing countries also developed countries have sulfur dye pollutions within their borders, contaminating their rivers that connect them with the rest of the world. The only difference is the scale on which it takes place.

Not only the cut and the color of your jeans make up their stylish image, you want this cool worn look that makes your jeans a bit more expensive and therefore more desirable. This used look is brought to us by the fashion industry as the hottest and most desirable type of jeans. Special shaded areas on the jeans will make your butt and legs look better than reality is showing you. To get a jeans into this worn state the most common  process used is manual sandblasting. Turkey was one of the biggest jeans sandblasting countries in the world, which was forbidden in 2009 by Turkish law. In Turkey the sandblasting workers suffered from black lungs due to the fine sand in the air and resulted in early deaths. So a great step forward when this manual sandblasting process was prohibited, however the demand for this process was still alive and this industry moved from Turkey to developing countries like China, Bangladesh and Egypt. On a global scale nothing really changed, except for the big jeans brands who didn't want to be seen as uncool and didn't want to be connected to this type of abuse. This abuse that is only a small part of the total abuse that involves the manufacturing of your jeans.

Manufacturing your jeans is a long story of abuse. Where child labor was involved within the picking of the cotton, child labor is again used within the manufacturing process. Children work  side by side with adults in sweat shops where they are treated inhumane and they are payed, even for their countries standards, a low income. 

How long will we sustain an industry so full of abuse only for our own gain? Is your image more valuable than the life's of people you do not know, when they breathe the same air as you do? How long will you accept the abuse of others to allow your to be fashionable. Providing yourself with an identity has a high cost if you count all the deaths that are connected to it. Providing yourself an identity in itself is making you pay. Believing the identity that you buy through advertisement is only a boost for your ego and is emphasizing your fears such as lack of self-worth and lack of self-direction. Following your inner voice, the ego, is making yourself into a dressed up plastic mannequin that can't move itself through self-will and is a living dead. So you accept yourself by definition to be a living dead and by doing so you allow others to become real death. Quite sick if you consider all aspects of you and your perfect pair of jeans.


Globalization 

Our world, globe, exist within polarization, globalization has therefore brought many opportunities to many people. However within polarity there is always the opposite movement. Globalization has showed us how we could function as one, we suddenly were connected to each other and experienced the world as a whole. At the same time globalization has shown us that we are not ready yet to take the full responsibility of being a world that is one and a complete whole. Our thinking mentality or strategy still evolves around our own direct experiences. We might know about an earthquake in Japan, but we are thanking God that we live far away from that and it is not concerning ourselves. Taking this principle back to the jeans industry, we see that we know about the abuse that is going on within the manufacturing process of jeans, but we see it as a story that is playing out far from home and therefore without consequences for ourselves. Globalization implies connecting ourselves with the entire outside world and this can only be possible when there really exist a connection between all of us. Polluting one river is in time effecting us, accepting child labor and risking the health of workers is indirectly going to effect us.

It is globalization that provides us with low prices and large discounts, it's globalization that's seducing us to buy into fast-fashion. Fast-fashion can be compared with fast-food and we all know what down side that brought into our life's. Due to low fashion prices we get more greedy and buy 3 pair of jeans instead of 1 pair. Therefore the value of the single pair of jeans goes down from a money point of view and also from a point of how we perceive this piece of garment. People find it easier to throw away a less expensive pair of jeans when they no longer like it or when it's not fashionable anymore. This creates more demand for more cheap clothes and therefore more slave work in the sweatshops and total jeans industry. Hip, hip, hurray for globalization that we accepted and allowed to fully grow into a mature system. A system that due to the fact that were not ready for it, is bringing more abuse than opportunities.

Of course we can donate our no longer desirable clothes to charity and make people in developing countries "happy" thanks to globalization. It is great to give your jeans a second life, but do we ever consider if our clothes are real wear-ables for the people in developing countries? Is a worker in Mexico, who sits squat on the ground all day to perform her job, served with your old pair of skinny jeans? It may even cause her health risks as vaginal infection or tingling leg syndrome. 

Wearing your pair of jeans and making it in a pair of shorts to let it revival till it dies of anility is probably the best way to not make a heavy footprint on society. Although this only works out if the fabric can be re-cycled without using heavy chemical processes.


Equal Money System 

It's obvious that the whole process of producing jeans from sewing the cotton till selling the jeans is a long road of abuse and based in the greed of all the players involved. Within this play no player is acting in the best interest of all, it's only a matter of fulfilling desires based in greed or based in fear of survival. A pair of jeans in it's current state can not be produced within an Equal Money System. How would we have to adjust this whole process within common sense and no longer having to worry about money, but only the best interest of all.

-Mass crops of cotton are no longer necessary since no one needs 8 pair of jeans if he/she can manage with 3 or 4 and wear them till they're really finished.

-Using extensive amounts of water and withdrawing it from the water consumption is not necessary when the industry is smaller and organic methods are investigated.

-Time investment within the use of pesticides and organic pest control methods.

-Specialness and exclusiveness around hand picked cotton is an idea, common sense is to pick the cotton in a way that there is no cotton damaged or wasted and no machinery is used that consumes lots of crude oil products.

-The transport of the cotton to the plants does not require to go from one end to the other end of the world to go through the different steps of manufacturing, only because of money issues as making more profit.

- Processing cotton into fabric is producing a lot of dust, when money and profit are no players anymore, the plants can be made into safe working places.

-Investigating time into finding the type of dye to color the jeans that isn't toxic and isn't producing a lot of waste, it could be made into re-cyclable waste.

-Make a jeans into a wear-able item and not into a fashionable ego booster.

-Every body within the process of manufacturing jeans will earn the same amount per hour and the price of a pair of jeans needs to be stable and not subject to supply and demand or to other market operations. Clothing is for everybody a basic need and therefore it needs to be accessible.

Within an Equal Money System you wear a pair of jeans that is in the best interest of all. Buying an EMS jeans is accepting full responsibility for all living beings and allowing abus to not exist.




Source:

Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry
http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.115-a449


Sandblasting jeans worker exposed to big risks
http://www.sask.fi/english/magazine/sandblasting-jeans-worker-expose/

Cotton in Uzbekistan
http://www.ejfoundation.org/page142.html

Cotton Campaign
http://www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/cotton-campaign
Denim Pollution - SolutionsTo Sulfur Dyeing Wastes
http://www.denimsandjeans.com/denim/manufacturing-process/denim-pollution-solutions-to-sulphur-dyeing-wastes/
Rivers turn green as world's jeans capital fights pollution
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/greenchina/2011-03/08/content_12136883.htm




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