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Informed and intelligent men know that every Dollar or Euro that you spend is a vote for the kind of world we live in. But do you know the real price of your T-shirt? Since the Millennium, clothing production has more than doubled and together, we have increased the number of garments that we buy each year by 60%. They call it fast fashion: a hydra of many heads, it is hard to decide which is the ugliest, here we are going to talk about just one aspect: we’ll call it the cotton head that devoured the Aral Sea.
The WWF and the National Geographic submit that it takes 2,700 liters of water to make a single cotton T-shirt. That is as much as most of us drink in 900 days. Cotton tees, cotton shirts, cotton sweaters, cotton pants… they all use a lot of water – and we just keep buying more and more of them. If it takes almost 3 years worth of a man’s drinking water to make just one tee, at what cost has this come to the world’s freshwater supply?
In 300BC, in what is now Uzbekistan, that hero of history books, Alexander the Great, crossed the mighty Oxus with his army. It took them 5 days; the river was more than a kilometre wide, a vast conduit for the glacial waters of the Pamirs, it was the lifeblood of the region. In 2013, when I crossed the Amu Darya (as the Oxus is now called), the river was just a slim shadow in the centre of its bed. Alexander and his entire army could have waded across it in a matter of hours. In fact, the river doesn’t even reach the Aral sea anymore. Why? Because since the 1960s, the flow of glacial water from the Pamirs, that once ran in the Oxus, has been diverted to cotton production, as has much of the flow of meltwater from the Tian Shan mountains to the North, which once fed the Syr Darya in Kazakhstan. As a result, the Aral Sea, its two main tributaries shrunken beyond recognition, has dwindled to a mere 10,000 Km2.
In 1960 it covered 68,000 km2 and the water volume was 10 times greater than it is today.
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In 1960 it covered 68,000 km2 and the water volume was 10 times greater than it is today. What this looks like from Space is illustrated by the NASA photograph attached. It shows the Aral sea in 1989, and 2014 respectively. And remember, in 1960 the sea was even larger than in 1989. We just keep on buying and the Aral area remains the fifth largest exporter of cotton in the world. At the same time, average garment quality seems to have gone down even faster than prices: we keep our clothes only half as long as we did 15 years ago; more than 50% of the fastest fashion is worn for less than a year; some suggest the cheapest garments are only worn seven or eight times.
Clearly, much of the cotton that the Aral Sea perished to produce is now discarded landfill in some rich nation. Well, that was a worthwhile trade. Faced with the facts, surely few men would see the loss of the world’s fourth-largest saline lake with the resultant desertification, salinisation of the soil, and climate change as a fair exchange for junk clothes. We believe that men should buy less, pay more and wear it more. Your clothes are not cheap if someone else is paying the price; indeed, they are not even truly cheap to you.
If you wear that €10 tee, seven times, it has cost you almost €1.50 per wear. If you buy a €60
tee and wear it 100 times (a full year, a couple of times per week, because it still looks great), it has cost you €0.60 per wear. That’s less than half the price. When realistically priced, more expensive clothes are a better deal for every man and they are a better deal for the environment. We started our company, Commun des Mortels because we wanted to provide fashion-forward men with the option of premium quality, ethically, sustainably, produced tops that were realistically priced. It might not surprise you that ‘fashion’ and ‘sustainability’ are not two words usually put together but we wanted to change that. You don’t have to shop with us, indeed, dare I say it, sometimes you shouldn’t shop at all. Next time you’re about to click the BUY button, spare a thought for the Aral Sea and ask yourself: ”Do I really need that tee?”. If the answer is yes, still don’t click until you are certain that you’re getting a quality product that will last and last, not some cheap top that will be landfill next time you clear out your closet.
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This post was originally published on CommundesMortels.com and is republished on Medium.
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