Human Footprint - Our Clothing Footprint
We have clothes for every occasion -- from formal dinner parties to Saturday hiking trips, each event in our lives has corresponding attire. Party dresses, shoes, handbags, suits, jackets, blouses and jeans; conservative, formal, casual or trendy -- we've got them all. But imagine all of the clothes you will wear in your lifetime hung on one 30-foot-high wall. Human Footprint does just that.
What does our lifetime closet hold?
- On average, Americans buy 48 new pieces of clothing a year.
- On average, each garment lasts three years.
- Our need for the latest fashion has produced a $345 billion clothing business in the United States.
- This means that every man, woman and child in the country spends an average of $1,000 a year on new clothes, and likely throws away 68 pounds of clothing each year.
- At any given time, a man will have seven pairs of jeans -- and an average of more than 25 T-shirts.
- Over a lifetime a man spends $52,972 on his wardrobe.
- American women own an average of 19 pairs of shoes at any one time.
Washing our clothes:
- The average American generates 500 pounds of laundry every year, adding up to a colossal 35 billion loads across the country.
- That's 1,100 loads every second.
- All that laundry adds up to 560 billion gallons of wash water -- equal to what flows over Niagara Falls in just over 11 days.
What does the footprint look like for one simple white T-shirt?
- It takes 528 gallons of water to make one shirt.
- One-third of a pound of chemicals is also used to produce one T-shirt.
- And whether you take it on vacation or not, that T-shirt has already logged some serious air miles just during production. From the United States, where the cotton is often grown, to China, where the T-shirt is often manufactured, and then back to your local store, for instance, is 14,625 miles -- before you even put it on for the first time!
What is the footprint of an average pair of sneakers?
- Sneakers are a compilation of different natural and synthetic compounds and will have travelled farther than we will walk in them before we ever take them home.
- The leather comes from Texas -- but it may be tanned in South Korea and then stitched together in Indonesia.
- Before they're even out of the box, they're likely to have travelled 20,000 miles.
***
All calculations for the film use the following assumptions: An average lifetime is 77.75 years or 28,379 days. The U.S. population is rounded to 301,000,000.
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17 Comments
I don't understand your premise. Are you saying that man-made carbon dioxide effects Global Climate Changes? What if you are wrong? What if climate change is the result of something else? Like periodic solar fluctuations? How can you prove it? I obviously don't understand much about this, but, isn't carbon dioxide in our air measured in parts per million? Isn't that a real small number? What are the other "greenhouse gases"? I heard that methane is way worse than CO2. Is that true?
Also I kind of got the impression that you are trying to say that the U.S. uses way more energy than any other country, and that's a bad thing. I thought that we also produce most of the food, durable goods, and raw materials for worldwide consumption. We have one of the highest standard of living indexes in the world. Do you want the U.S. to revert to a non-industrial farming economy? That seems unreasonable.
Where am I going wrong?
I found your program on the human footprint very informative and quite fascinating One comment, however, has to do with your comments on COLTAN.
While 80% of Coltan may come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that is because the DRC is really the only place that calls the ore Coltan. Most of the world's Tantalum comes from Australia and the DRC according to 2005 USGS data produced only about 1.2% of the world-wide tantalum production and less than 0.03% of Columbium.
While what has happened with Coltan production in the DRC is quite tragic, the tantalum capacitors in our cell phones and almost all other electronic equipment as well have very little dependence on Coltan production in the DRC.
Apparently the international producers of tantalum and columbium are quite aware of the political problems produced by the mining of Coltan in the DRC and appear to have acted responsibly in trying to insure that even the small amount of ore that comes form the DRC is in fact mined in a safe and environmentally friendly manner.
Here's an idea or two for reducing your human clothing footprint:
1) Live naked. You'll just have to suffer the occasional trip to the police station and spend a bit more time at the local courthouse than you might care for. You'll also have to hire a lawyer (who probably buys enough clothes for the both of you anyway) and for what? In the end, for all your effort to improve the environment, you've gotten nowhere with your clothing footprint and you've only INCREASED your paper footprint... from all court summons and public indecency tickets.
2) Get a second (or a third) job and buy all of your clothes from Patagonia and wear them until they're so full of holes that you're darn close to doing the idea above anyway. Why? Well, Patagonia is one of the few companies that can and will recycle some of their old clothes and turn right around and make new clothes. The idea is to make fiber from fiber and not from virgin resources. More and more companies are finding ways to do this but just like Patagonia, you really REALLY have to like their clothing or it's a moot idea.
3) Do what I do. 'Blend' your purchasing. Buy new (if you must) and buy used every chance you get. Goodwill, Salvation Army, they all do good things with the money that you give them anyway and WHAM! You're instantly smack dab in the middle of 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'.
So it's too late, you (heh) missed my post and you've gone and bought new and now you're heading to the trash. Wait! Donate, donate, DONATE!! Just because you've frayed your t-shirt a bit more than you like or you've 'outgrown' your jeans doesn't mean that they belong in the trash. I like frayed and look... Your jeans that got too tight for you now fit me perfectly. :)
Sorry to ruin the fun here, but number three is where it's at. I love Goodwill. I get alot of designer clothing with the price tags still on. It is the thrill of the hunt and I doubt if my family of three will have a wardrobe consisting of $50,000 in our lifetime. We always look nice and get compliments. The money I save goes to our family vacation and the clothing I do not use anymore goes to goodwill. Great place for purses and shoes also. The area stores will donate unpurchased or returned clothing which is a win win for everyone involved.
Give us solutions don't tell us how fucked we are we know that!
I was very disappointed with the show. Those loaves of bread for example (and many other things) are not shown in wide angle. I understand that it was computer generated pile but it would be much more helpful to have some larger object nearby with a wide camera angle to see how big the pile really is. It means nothing to just fill the screen with something. I kept expecting to see the big picture but it was not there. Disappointing...
If a man spends $52,972 in a lifetime on his wardrobe, How much does a woman spend? How come the show and webpage has no info about how much women spend on clothing in their lifetime?
I watched bits and pieces of the show and found it very interesting and disturbing at the same time. It is nearly impossible for one to live life fully "green" but there are actions and choices one can make to balance it out. I was wondering what you did with all the eggs that were being poured into a barrel? to represent our comsumption in a life time? I missed that part
I might be crazy but if humanity got over than unnatural shame or what ever you want to call it about their bodys we wouldn't spend so much on clothing and use up resources. THE BODY ISN"T BAD IF WE SAW THE NATURAL BODY EVERYDAY IT WOULDN"T BE SUCH A BIG DEAL.
you guys are big moms
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