Hi everyone, welcome back to My Green Closet. So it's time for another monthly
green favorites video but I think since it's a new year I'm feeling like
changing up the format of these a bit so for this first video I'm gonna share
five fashion industry documentaries that I recommend watching. So the first one is
"River Blue" which is a documentary that focuses on water pollution, specifically
from the fashion industry. And this documentary I actually helped crowdfund
quite a while ago and I'm super excited it's finally out and available to the
public and it is really devastating to watch the impact that fashion and
clothing production is having on our water and fresh water around the world.
Water is our most valuable resource we need it to live, and this documentary
specifically looks at the leather industry and also denim and how much
toxic pollution comes from these industries and is dumped directly into
rivers and streams. It has huge health impacts for the people working the
factories, as well as the communities that live near the rivers and use the
water for irrigation. This also of course is a huge environmental issue because
there's toxins just being dumped right into water sources. It's affecting
wildlife it's affecting fish and aquatic life some of these rivers they say are
biologically dead because nothing can survive in them so this is a really
important fashion industry environmental documentary I highly recommend watching
it and I will link to all of these documentaries down below. The next
documentary I want to talk about is "Udita" or "Arise", which is a documentary about
women garment workers in Bangladesh. This is available for free to watch on
YouTube and this is about the ethics behind production, about unionizing, it
follows various women and their stories. One of the women they follow is a
garment worker but also works in a union and she works to help garment workers
and specifically female garment workers understand their rights and fight for
fair pay. They also tell the story of a woman who lost both of her daughters and
her son-in-law in the Rana Plaza factory collapse and she talks about
just what life is like now, she's raising her grandchildren
and how she still hasn't received compensation from these brands, and
basically how devastating and difficult this horrific situation has been. They
also show how the garment workers are protesting and fighting for a wage
increase of just about $50 a month, which if you think about how many clothes they
produce that would be pennies to an end consumer. This is a video that should
definitely have more views I think it tells really important stories and gives
you a look into what life is like for a garment worker in Bangladesh. The next
documentary is "Unravel", and this is a much lighter one than the other ones
I've talked about and it's only 15 minutes long and is available to watch
for free. So this documentary is about a textile recycling facility in India and
what happens to our old clothes, but the takeaway from this documentary is
actually really about how people working in this facility see clothing
consumption in Western countries. The women talk about how there must be a
shortage of water because people are only wearing their clothes a few times
and therefore water must be so expensive that it's cheaper to buy new clothes
wear them and throw them away than it is to pay to wash them. I think this
documentary offers a really interesting perspective and they follow one woman
who is so positive and joking and always smiling and seems so lovely and it's
just really interesting to see things from her point of view and to see this
kind of end-of-life process and what's happening to these textiles and these
textiles are actually getting recycled which is amazing because a lot of it
just gets thrown away but yeah I really recommend watching this I think it's a
really interesting little video. And the next video I want to talk about is also
a shorter one it's only about 12 minutes I think and it's called "From Sex Worker
to Seamstress" and this is a Vice News piece I think I have mentioned it before
on the channel but I think this is really important to see. It looks at how
women in Cambodia are being "rescued" from prostitution and forced to work in
garment factories they're basically given the choice of going to prison or
working in a factory. And the conditions in the factories are so horrible and
this piece highlights how there is this terrible cycle of
forced labor in the fashion industry, and connection to the sex industry. And the
final documentary is "The True Cost" which you've probably heard of maybe if you're
on this channel you've already seen it but if you haven't seen it I really
recommend watching this. I think this documentary gives a good overview of all
kinds of different issues in the fashion industry from ethical issues to
environmental issues and gives you a bit of a snapshot of how complex this is and
how many problems there are in the fashion supply chain. If you are going to
watch just one of these I would recommend the true cost because it does
give you a more comprehensive look at the fashion industry and this is the
documentary I usually recommend people start with because it gives you a kind
of a taste of it. Documentaries like river blue of course go much more into
an issue like water pollution and dyes and what's happening with that whereas
The True Cost kind of touches on a lot of these different things. I hope you
enjoyed this video and I'd love to hear in the comments if you've seen any of
these documentaries, or if there maybe was a documentary that really opened your
eyes and changed your opinion of the fashion industry or made you a lot more
aware of these issues. Thank you for watching and thank you so much those of
you supporting me on Patreon, and I'll see you in the next one.