A T-shirt’s Life
by Kristine Kim, July 2020
I start as a cotton seed, grown and harvested by a farmer in Maharashtra, India. His financially precarious lifestyle means he has to borrow money to pay for me and to rent the small plot of farmland on which I am grown. If his harvest yield is poor, due to unforeseen climate shocks or a lack of professional training, the farmer will fall further into a desperate cycle of debt. The heavy use of pesticides accumulates in the farmer’s lungs and causes other health complications, from skin disorders to neurological damage. These pesticides trickle into the soil and water sources, poisoning the farmer and his community from the inside out.
I travel by boat, emitting into the atmosphere the greenhouse gas equivalent of 5.7 million miles driven by a car, to Shanghai, China where I am transformed from plant into yarn. The factory workers operating the machinery are covered in a dust of cotton flurries and the air they breathe is thick with moisture. Although the dust and steamy air can induce respiratory disease, it is the intense industrial noise of the machines that aggravates the workers most. Once spun into yarn, I am woven into fabric and chemically treated with various dyes and softeners. I overhear concerned whispers from the workers linking exposure to some of these chemicals to occupational cancer, including nasal and lung cancer.
I board another ship, but this time headed to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I will be sewn into a finished garment by a young woman in a sub-contracted factory. I am brought here to be sewn specifically for the low cost of labor (roughly 1/5th of the price in China), the weak environmental and labor regulation, and the seemingly infinite network of sub-contracting factories willing to push out high volume at unnatural speeds. The young garment worker supports her family living in the rural outskirts of Dhaka and must keep her job at all costs. Although the pay is poor and the visible cracks in the factory walls unnerve her, she works long and hard hours to meet the factory’s production quotas. She has no direct line of communication to the brand for which she works and will lose her job if she decides to unionize.
From Dhaka, I am exported to the United States by air, emitting 5,590 metric tons of CO2e as I make my way to a distribution center in Columbus, Ohio. I am scanned, catalogued, and eventually sent to a retail store in Los Angeles, California, generating more emissions as I travel. I am sold for $9 to a young woman the same age as my garment worker in Dhaka. In her home, I enter perhaps the most energy intensive phase of my life, consuming significant amounts of water and electricity as I am machine washed and dried. I was not designed and constructed for longevity, so I am discarded at a donation center after only a handful of wears.
For my final voyage, I am shipped to Dakar, Senegal, in a plastic-wrapped mound filled with other used garments. The massive quantity of imported second-hand clothing overwhelms the Senegalese market, suppressing the local clothing industry in favor of the cheap, discarded clothing from the West. If I am not sold in the used clothing market, I eventually join other discarded garments along the shoreline, polluting the environment and emitting toxins from the chemicals that were once used to treat me. As I slowly decompose over the next 200 years, I reflect on each pair of hands that I passed through and I wonder: did my life bring value to any of them?