Most items of clothing have complicated international journeys | Hacker News Reader

Most items of clothing have complicated international journeys

bbc.co.uk

62 pointsporterde14 comments

NPR's Planet Money podcast created a T-shirt and attempted to follow it every step of it's economic journey. An interesting look into the gears and cogs of global manufacturing of an everyday object.

Planet Money buys a barrel of crude oil and follows its journey through the various actors and entities in between pumping it out of the ground and selling it as a final product.

Another relevant podcast: in this episode of Adam Ruins Everything, Adam talks to Laura McAndrews, Professor of Textiles, Merchandising and Interiors at UGA and former PM at Gap and Urban Outfitters about "fast fashion" and what it takes to get your $6 t-shirts made

http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...

I remember reading The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (1) for an undergrad class about globalization - a light, quick read but one that stuck with me through college and post-graduation. Highly recommended.

The narrative follows the lifecycle of a t-shirt, from the farming of cotton in the southern US, to China where the shirts are created, back to the US for sale, and ultimately to Africa after donation.

1) https://www.amazon.com/Travels-T-Shirt-Global-Economy-Econom...

For those looking for an even shorter read, Leonard Read's I, Pencil gets the basic point across pretty quickly. There's even a video adaptation available for those who don't want to read at all.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE

Indeed. As well as the globalisation aspect, I found the political vs economic point interesting. As the BBC article ends:

"Rather than a story of how people were competing - how do I make a faster T-shirt, a better T-shirt, a cheaper T-shirt - what I found is that the story of the T-shirt and why its life turned out the way it did was really about how people were using political power," she says. The current backlash against global trade is a direct result of this kind of political interference, she believes.

The song "Are My Hands Clean?" from the 1980s, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, covers this exact subject. It traces the path of the materials used to make a cheap blouse you can buy at Sears from fields to the store. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vv60O2mk10

For a moment, I was really wondering how clothing can complicate international travel (border guards taking offense at your clothing?!). Then I realized the ambiguous grammar...

Start a small market site for local (for some value of "local") clothing production that maintains provenance and estimates footprint for all the articles.

I actually have a friend who started that very business. He established a strong relationship with one textile facility and one garment-making factory in Southeast Asia, and then resold those garments out of a boutique online shop in the US, all the while making transparent the footprint of his garments from textile factory to online shop.

It was a lovely idea, but he just couldn't make enough to sustain the business.

All that shipping around must completely offset the gains of the sustainable alternative to cotton.. though i guess it would do the same journey even with cotton.

Cotton itself is a very unsustainable crop. It takes 20,000 Kg of water to produce 1 Kg of cotton, and it's mainly produced in countries that do not have sanitation provided to a majority of their populations.

Cotton farming has had a devastating effect on drainage basins across the world.

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...

>It takes 20,000 Kg of water to produce 1 Kg of cotton

Closer to 10,000kg for 1kg of cotton if these Guardian statistics [0] are correct. While still quite wasteful - it is half as wasteful as you claimed (but still more wasteful than nearly everything)

[0] Data https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-mu...

I've never really understood where this water "goes". A kilogram of cotton can contain no more than 1 kg of water, so the rest of the water must somehow be involved in growing and processing the cotton.

However, suppose I use 10,000 L of water to irrigate my cotton plot. A lot of this water is lost to evaporation and transpiration. A little bit is bound up in the non-harvest-able parts of the plant too. However, none of this water seems like it's really "lost"--it eventually comes back as rain or snow, right? If we're not spending tons of energy moving the water around, this doesn't seem too awful. The worst possible outcome seems like it would involve the water evaporating and then returning as rain over the sea, which would make it more expensive to reuse as fresh water.

On the flip side, I can imagine that some water is also contaminated by the processing in a way that makes it expensive or impossible to reuse. That seems much worse.

Possibly not. Transporting yarn from Egypt to China can be quite efficient if packed in full containers, and the ships are going half-empty in that direction anyway. Besides, it's not like the cotton would all be grown in China.

It could be worth weaving in Morocco rather than China, but I guess the sewing is only in Morocco to cut the lead time between sewing and selling in Europe.

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