Marina Spadafora on consumers' power
0 (0 Likes / 0 Dislikes)
I am here to tell you
the story of this shirt.
Apparently an ordinary,
innocent T-shirt.
It could also be
the story of any garment
we casually buy, almost any day.
But we have in our pockets
a very powerful tool, our money,
and I will show you
how our purchasing choices
can shape the world we wish for.
So let's talk about this T-shirt,
I picked up a red one
in honor of the TEDTalks.
The first question is:
what is it made of?
It's made of cotton.
We think of cotton as a natural,
soft and breathable material,
so it must already be
a good choice for us
and for the environment too.
But we have to ask ourselves:
where does this cotton come from?
Cotton is mostly grown
in the southern Emisphere,
more precisely in Southeast Asia,
South America and Africa.
What happens there?
The people who grow
and take care of the props
are very poorly protected:
we can see these two poor farmers
spraying each other with pesticide.
They are not equipped at all
to do this activity.
So not only do they spray
a lot of pesticide onto the plants
- imagine that 25% of all pesticides
used every year in agriculture
is used in cotton crops,
so a hell of a lot,
but also these pesticides
besides hurting the people
who spray them on the crops,
stay in cotton's fibers
and therefore in this T-shirt.
So this T-shirt, believe me or not,
is still full of pesticides.
Plus, as the previous speaker
eloquently showed,
these pesticides kill bees
and we know how devastating that is.
And I will tell you more,
no more than two weeks ago, I read
in an Italian newspaper
that there's an even bigger
problem related to the bees.
In India there is this transgenic cotton,
called BT, sold by Monsanto,
with a small detail:
it has to be impollinated by hand.
What happens then?
Little girls are sold
by very poor families:
in Uttar Pradesh, for example,
9-10 years old girls
are taken away from their family,
taken out of school
and kept in semi-slavery
to do this crazy job.
They have to get up
very early in the morning,
because the male flower
opens up before 5.30 am.
So this bee issue also
brings about slavery.
This beautiful red T-shirt
had to be dyed, then.
Look what happens to the dye:
in absence of adequate filters,
it seeps into the rivers
and this happens frequently,
in the places
where our T-shirts are produced,
there are no filters for wastewaters
and so they end up
in rivers and in the sea.
What does this mean?
All the fishes,
all the plants, all the animals
in the rivers and in the sea
get polluted and die;
and it's worse than that.
European and American laws
mandate that the clothing
sold in our stores
is only processed with azo free dyes.
Greenpeace, who's a bit suspicious,
has sent some
undercover volunteers to buy garments
from the usual suspects:
H&M , Zara, Benetton
- but also a bit higher up,
they went to the designers,
Dolce and Gabbana and so on.
They bought the clothes,
brought them to the lab
and they discovered
that none of these clothes
comply with the norm,
they were all dyed with heavy metals.
Greenpeace thus launched
the Detox Campaign
that says: not only do these
horrible dyes pollute water
and hurt the workers,
but they also hurt those who wear them
causing skin allergies,
and there are studies
that suggest that they
interfere with human DNA.
Who makes these T-shirts?
How much do workers earn?
When we are all happy because we scored
a $14 T-shirt, we think
we found a bargain:
the person who sewed this
T-shirt made only 12 cents.
12 cents can't buy much
of what one needs to survive.
Let's then talk about the living wage.
What does it mean?
To live a decent life,
people must be able to buy food,
pay the rent, have health care,
educate their children,
buy clothes,
have transport to go to work every day,
and maybe save some money too.
It is said that a living wage
is a right for every person.
But what happens in the world?
Well, it doesn't work exactly like this:
the living wage in Bangladesh
should be 259 € per month
to access all those basic needs.
The workers, though, only get 28.60 €.
There is a huge gap!
Bangladesh is the most outrageous case
but Cambodia and Sri Lanka
aren't doing much better,
India is also bad and China,
often considered terrible,
is actually a bit better.
So there isn't fair pay
for the labour,
people get hungry
and can't live a decent life.
What about safety, then?
You must have heard
about this tragedy
that took place in Bangladesh,
on April 24th 2013.
Since then, 24th of April
is Fashion Revolution Day,
when we're all asked
to wear our clothes inside-out
to show the label
and ask: "Who made our clothes?"
That day,
in Dhaka, there was
a badly constructed building
where the workers were locked in.
"Locked in" means that
there were iron bars on the windows
and the gate was locked with a chain
because the guard
sometimes would have a coffee
or something to eat
- and locked the workers in.
These facts were filmed
and confirmed by BBC
and in Italy by Milena Gabanelli.
This particular building
had cracks in the walls
and had already been
declared unsafe, it came down
killing 1121 lives of people
who were making our cheap clothes.
So we can say this T-shirt
is made 60% of cotton,
20% of sweat and 20% of blood.
People are understandably
getting angry,
and we don't need
any more social unrest.
People unite to say:
"That's enough.
We can't go on like this!".
And it is happening
all over the world.
Plus, there's child exploitation.
We know that in many countries
families are so poor that they need
their childrens' support to survive,
but if adults' rights aren't guaranteed,
how can children's ones possibly be?
Bolivians actually started
a children's workers union
to protect the rights
of children workers.
And on top of that all,
we buy so many
of these cheap products,
and after a short while
we get tired
and we chuck them creating
mountains of textile waste.
that's cluttering
the world's landfills.
But I am not here
to bring you bad news,
or news you probably
already heard of anyway.
I am here to tell you
that there is an alternative,
and you hold in your pocket
the key to this alternative:
fair trade, a sustainable and
fair way of doing business.
I was very lucky: about 10 years ago,
after a life spent
doing "regular" fashion
with runway shows and all,
I found myself
around a table discussing
the length of a skirt for 2 hours.
And I said to myself:
"I can't do this anymore!
I need to do something
that fits with my beliefs,
something that'll help
make this world
a better place,
improve working conditions
and the environment, and so
I found fair trade.
What is fair trade?
It is an international organization,
WFTO, that has a series of rules.
Here are some of the rules:
Transparency and accountability.
Fair payment -remember what we said
about the living wage.
No child labour.
Respect for the Environment.
All rules that we take for granted
but aren't actually granted at all,
as we saw, in those countries
where people are treated horribly,
on a daily basis.
So fair trade
certifies working cooperatives
that apply these conditions,
and make sure, for example,
that wastewaters are filtered
before reentering the environment.
Here I am in Ecuador
with some of the artisans
I work with, at almost 4000 meters
in a place called Salinas, a very
successful example
of Fair Trade Economy.
It is a small village
where a Priest from Venice
arrived 40 years ago and never left.
He has created a sustainable economy
where for example
these women knit for me,
or better, for me as creative director
of the fashion brand "Auteurs du Monde",
Authors of the world
-namely our artisans-
produced by Altromercato.
We work with all these realities
where a fair price is paid,
workers have medical insurance,
they get medical assistance
and work in healthy environments.
Here are some other pieces
from the collection,
the cardigan is made of cotton
in a cooperative
in Kathmandu in Nepal, KTS,
Kumbeshwar Technical School.
I love them because they're
an example of social entrepeneurship.
What does it mean?
They are entrepreneurs,
but they invest part of their profits
back into the community
sponsoring a school
for street children from 3 to 11,
who wouldn't otherwise be able
to go to school
but can now get an education
through this initiative of KTS.
I think this can be the formula
to save this crazy world
that is going awry:
do business, pay a fair price,
take care of your workers
and reinvest some of the profits
into the community
making it a better place for everyone.
And you can choose organic cotton.
Organic cotton is free of pesticides,
grown with alternative methods:
I went to visit
a wonderful place
called Sekem in Egypt
where they apply
biodynamic agriculture.
To fight pests, for example,
they use yellow paper cones
with a sticky,
fragrant resin inside.
Insects are attracted
and once they get in
they remain there.
So the soil stays fertile,
you can rotate crops,
there's no desertification
and the cotton is organic,
biodynamic actually,
with none of the horrible features
we talked about before.
And then you can dye cotton
and other fibers with plants.
The threads of the tapestries
we admire in museums
and in the beautiful
villas on Lake Como,
were dyed hundreds of years ago
yet they're still
vibrant and beautiful,
so there still is a way to do it.
This is an Ethiopian
gentleman I work with
in a cooperative called Sabahar,
where they dye everything with plants.
If you don't have plant dyes,
there are azo free colors,
chemical colors with no heavy metals,
colors that don't
pollute the waterways,
don't hurt the workers
and the people who wear the clothes.
These are more designs
I did for Spring Summer 2014.
I'm committed to make beautiful,
interesting, attractive fashion,
but also one
that's fair and sustainable.
These two garments come from India.
This gave me
the chance and the privilege
to build a reputation in this field,
so I have become
a reference point for all
the fair and sustainable productions
in Italy and in the world.
Famous brands like Moschino
asked me to improve their
CSR (corporate social
responsibility) profile.
Together we produced beautiful
crochet garments in Kenya,
with these nuns,
called the Crochet Sisters.
Then Pinko came to me
to design a line of bags,
and I suggested to make them in Ethiopia.
I took inspiration
from Omo River's body painters,
they gave me the ideas
of these graphics for the prints
and the bags were all produced
in a small factory in Addis Ababa.
At the end 45.000 bags were produced,
with a wonderful impact
on the whole area.
Here in Como, I know, there are
many important businessmen,
some of whom I met last night,
so if not for wanting to save the world,
they should consider this growing
section of the population, the Millennials.
Millennials are the kids born
between 1980 and 2000,
they'll be 46% of the working force
in America 10 years from now.
What do Millennials want?
Millennials want quality of life,
and they prefer companies
with a high Corporate Social
Responsibility Profile,
so life versus work.
They want quality of life,
reward the companies that behave,
they are always online
and they know who does what.
So, and this is the main
message of my talk,
every time we spend our money
we cast a vote for the world we want,
so we hold the solution in our pocket
and we must be aware of it
every time we spend money.
Plus, as my sweatshirt -
designed for Oxfam,
then sold at Coin stores - says,
"It always seems impossible,
until it's done"
a quote by Nelson Mandela:
in Italian, "Sembra sempre impossibile,
finché non è fatto"
Thank you!
(Applause)