Our Shirts Are Garbage | Merch & Fast Fashion
Our Shirts Are Garbage | Merch & Fast Fashion
Hello friend!
We’ve gone back down deep into the world of fast fashion and resurfaced with not only a 25-minute video about the seemingly endless issues with the fashion industry, but also:
Climate Town Merch.
That’s right, we’ve finally gone and made Climate Town shirts and you can buy them here. Wait, that's an article about sweatshops in America, the shirts are here. Wait:
This is the link to buy our t-shirts.
Nice. But maybe you already have enough t-shirts. And maybe you even have enough newsletters. What’s the point of this anymore? Well, lucky for you, we are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button this high in the scroll:
For the rest of you, wheeeeeeeeee:
Tchotchkes!
If you already watched the episode, some of this will be a repeat for you. But what the hell, this email’s free and we’ll make it fast. But then again, if you really want to skip ahead, you can scroll down until we’re not talking about the shirts anymore. Old school.
For the past couple years, we’ve wanted to make Climate Town shirts. But we also made a whole video about the massive problems with fast fashion, so we first needed to find a shirt that didn’t do the following shit:
Use factories that pay workers less than living wage and also have conditions like those that led to more than 1,100 worker deaths in a single factory collapse.
Have a supremely globalized supply chain where different parts of production are spread out over thousands of miles, all over the world.
Overproduce so much that somewhere between 10% and 40% of clothing is never sold or worn at all. And wow, that’s a huge gap between 10% and 40%, but that’s kind of how it goes for fashion industry research at the moment (more on that later).
And when it comes to labor practices, according to a report from Follow the Money, even companies like Patagonia are using some of the same factories (and pay and working conditions) as fast fashion brands:
And this was honestly pretty shocking to us. Even Patagonia, a company that prides itself on sustainability and seems to do a lot of things well, still doesn’t require the factories they work with to pay a living wage. And their defense sounds remarkably similar to a lot of fast fashion companies:
But after not making shirts for a while, we finally came across a company called Ethix Merch, which runs the merch programs for the Sunrise Movement and Third Act and a lot of unions. And when we asked about shirts that might check a lot of our boxes, they pointed us to TS Designs in North Carolina.
The good folks at TS Designs make a shirt they call Cotton of the Carolinas, which is entirely grown and made in North and South Carolina. And each step of production is trackable and verifiable, so if you want to call the cotton ginner, you actually can. They even made this nice graphic to show you all the steps of making a shirt:
But somehow we’re supposed to assume you can pay people a decent wage to do each of these specialized, highly skilled steps, and still sell shirts for less than $10. Wild!
Then we got some art from a fantastic artist named Margalit Cutler, printed up a run of 423 of each design, and put them up on our webstore, which is run by Ethix Merch.
And that’s how we finally made some Climate Town t-shirts we actually feel good about.
The Trash Clothes of the Desert
If you’ve watched either of our videos on fast fashion, you probably now know that even if you donate your clothes with really good intentions, and they’re actually really nice clothes, and you want them to go to a really well-decorated home:
But even that quote doesn’t tell the full story. Because the reality is that a lot of those “recycled” clothes get sent to another country, where they sort through bales of discarded textiles only to find that a lot of it is basically trash.
And in the case of Chile, the largest importer of used clothes in South America, a lot of those trash clothes end up in:
The Beautiful Atacama Desert.
Now the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth.
*Crowd calls out* HOW DRY IS IT?
The Atacama Desert is SO dry NASA goes there just to pretend it’s Mars.
*Crowd goes wild*
But starting in 2001, a woman named Manuela Medina (or at least that’s what she told Grist, who did more of their always great reporting here) found a different use for the positively bone dry desert: it turns out the Atacama Desert is so dry that she could get cheap bales of ropa americana, unload them into piles on the ground for people to buy, and then never have to move the piles until they sold, since it never rained.
*Crowd goes wild again*
And within the last few years, this clothing trash pile had grown so large that it could even be seen from space. According to an interview with the environmental manager of Alto Hospicio (a nearby city):
And, of course, there are a lot of people outside of Chile dealing with the same absolute landslide of unusable used clothing. There’s even a specific term for it in Ghana: Obroni Wawu. And if you want to know what that translates to, it’s honestly pretty depressing. But if you really want to know, you can click this link.
But as for the Atacama Desert pile? Well in 2022, it was lit on fire. They really can’t catch a f*cking break down there. And that fire was particularly nasty, because these days the majority of our clothes are made from that famed fossil fuel derivative we’ve all been told to love: plastic.
*Crowd goes wild, but one octave up*
Chart Town: the Rise of Polyester
Just when you thought you weren’t dressed like a water bottle, turns out the majority of our clothes are made from plastic. According to a report from the Changing Markets Foundation called Synthetics Anonymous: Fashion Brands’ addiction to fossil fuels:
So while cotton was the top fabric up until 2000, since then polyester has blasted into the lead, and “is present in more than half (56%) of textiles we use today.” And just so we’re all clear:
“Polyester is generally produced from PET, which is derived from crude oil and natural gas.”
But here’s the thing about PET: that’s also how you spell pet. And pets are way more popular than polyethylene terephthalate. So if you go to google PET, you’re not going to get the information you need. And you’re probably going to get distracted. But don’t worry:
Here is the Wikipedia page for PET.
Read it and see what you think about your clothes being made of that.
And at the very least, thank you for your service as part of a global human experiment to figure out what all these microplastics in our bloodstream are going to do to our bodies.
REMINDER: DO NOT GOOGLE “PET” IF YOU WANT INFO ON THE THERMOPLASTIC POLYMER. YOU WILL GET DISTRACTED AND WILL NOT COME BACK.
PDF Town: Mythic Proportions
Every once in a while we read a PDF that completely blows us away. That’s why we created our signature offering, A Top List of Interesting PDFs.
And it was as we were researching cotton for this episode that we came across our current #5 Top Interesting PDF from the Transformers Foundation (and authors Marzia Lanfranchi and Elizabeth Cline):
Cotton: A Case Study in Misinformation.
While there’s a lot of misinformation in all the climate topics we cover, fashion’s one of the trickiest:
The fashion industry contributes between 2% and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There are between 80 and 150 billion articles of clothing made a year. A McKinsey study says 60% of clothes end up in a landfill or incinerator within one year. Or maybe it’s a few years. Who knows?
But what if a potentially inaccurate claim is then repeated so often, over and over again in trusted media for years, until no one seems to even remember where the original statistic came from, just that it’s eye-catching and everyone uses it? Then that claim has:
Mythic Proportions.
“When a claim is used for so long and by so many that it gains a false sense of legitimacy”
Want an example? Okay. Take this quote from the UN from 2019:
“The fashion industry is widely believed to be the second most polluting industry in the world.”
Now if you want to write a quick article about the climate issues with fashion, that’s a great fact to toss in near the top.
But the problem? No one seems to have any idea where that stat came from. The New York Times even took it upon themselves to figure it out, and still couldn’t find the source. Luckily, it looks like the word got out on that one, so the second most polluting industry line has mostly faded away.
But then we hit the end of that 2018 NY Times article, to find a list of stats they thought we could really rely on. Including that same McKinsey figure from about 150 words ago: that “nearly three-fifths of all clothing ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced.”
And this is not to say the fashion industry doesn’t actually have problems.
It super does. It’s just hard to nail down the numbers because it’s an incredibly globalized industry that lacks the well funded oversight organizations that the energy industry has (IEA, EIA, or really any combination of those three letters).
And while we did our best to root out these kinds of mythic proportion facts in our episode, we’re sure a few still slipped by. So please, join us next year, as we look back at this episode to see what better research we wish had been available when we made this piece.
Lightning Round (dear lord we’re almost done)
I love/hate Elvis. No video about merchandise could be complete without at least a little section about the big dog king himself, Elvis Presley. And it isn’t just talent that gives Elvis his staying power, it’s the Elvis brand surfing on a tidal wave of Elvis merchandise.
The quantum leap in merch was due to Elvis’ manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. This is kind of the bedrock of the recent Elvis movie (which was how America’s Dad, Tom Hanks, contracted Covid in 2020, by the way), but basically Parker was a bit of a wheelin’ and/or dealin’ type and quickly recognized an incredible opportunity in the young King of Rock and Roll.
Parker used his background in carnival barking and marketing to build a brand around Presley with products that could be sold to teenagers and their parents. Parker was able to leverage the success of Elvis’ music and the box office numbers of the movie Love Me Tender, to make millions from over 50 Elvis products, including bracelets and shoes and lipstick. Apparently the Wall Street Journal calculated Elvis grossed $22 million dollars on merchandise alone by 1957, but we couldn’t track down the actual article, so we’re saying apparently.
Part of the frenzy to monetize Presley came from Parker’s 25%+ stake in Elvis profits, mixed with his anxiety that Elvis’ popularity had a 2-year shelf life. A much quoted and apparently true Parker story is that he even sold I Hate Elvis buttons, determined to maximize his revenue, even off the haters.
Parker’s formula for marketing Elvis may have been shameless, but the colossal revenue it generated was not lost on advertisers, and Tom Cotton can reasonably be considered one of the godfathers of cheap bullshit with somebody’s face on it.
Official Rollie (no prize). For this Official Rollie (no prize) you need a little back story:
The Atacama desert may be home to a massive pile of clothes, but it was also the backdrop to one of the greatest global news cycles of all time. And unlike balloon boy, this one has a happy ending.
Get ready to be transported back to the year 2010. You ready? Okay. Chilean Mine Collapse. Yeah, let that marinate. Where were you? What do you remember? Well one night in 2016, Rollie got a little too high and watched TWO documentaries about the Chilean mine collapse back-to-back. He was so moved by the drama, logistics, and complete lack of casualties, that he wrote an immersive comedy show about it called “Dark Down Deep Down Dark.”
It was very weird, but the fact that the show took place in a cave-like basement gave it a lot of momentum. At one point in the production, there was even an opportunity for the audience members to write one last letter to someone close to them. At the end of the show, the letters were mailed. It was a great gimmick to advertise the show, but also a lot of people got nice letters in the mail. WHOLESOME!
So this time around, you can be declared an Official Rollie (no prize) by:
Watching the show’s trailer.
Writing and mailing a letter to one of your friends.
Then responding to this email saying you did that (no cheating).
As always, pretty easy. It’s really easy to be Rollie.
And as for last installment of Official Rollie (no prize), we asked readers to submit suggestions for Al Pacino movies Rollie should watch that aren’t Heat or The Devil’s Advocate.
And of the many great choices suggested, Rollie watched Serpico (he yelled “Serpico!” around the office for a week straight) – which means the following readers have been declared Official Rollie (no prize):
Nitesh Kartha
G.S.
How about that, friend?
Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.
Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.
Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper
Art by: Kelsey Bravender
Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center
Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen