Last Friday was the so called 'Black Friday', the day after Thanksgiving that Americans, and slowly also Norwegians, have come to embrace as a shopping day without any sensible limits. The day encourages you to buy items, just because they are so cheap you can not afford not to. This goes especially for clothes.
However, there are major reasons to be concerned about the current situation of how our clothes are being produced and the lifecycle of the cheap clothes we buy. I was glad to see that organisations like Greenpeace wrote this excellent piece on the day (in Norwegian) https://www.nrk.no/ytring/buy-nothing-day-1.13243458 because November 25th was also Buy Nothing Day. The equivalent of Black Friday that is so sorely needed. They also published this factsheet (in English) http://www.greenpeace.org/norway/Global/norway/Miljøgifter/Dokumenter/2016/Fact-Sheet-Timeout-for-fast-fashion.pdf which I highly recommend you check out.
The current way our clothes are being produced are severely bad for the environment. Composting a fabric that is made out of several different types of textiles, which is also coloured can take up to 1000 years to break down. In this process it is also likely that toxic waste will either leak from the compost area into potential drinking water or if burned, turn into the climate warming gass methane.
Worst of all is still the conditions that the clothes are being produced under. The Norwegian environmental organisation Framtiden i våre hender (The future in our hands) teamed up with the newspapers Aftenposten and sent Norwegian youths to the factories where the clothes we buy are being produced. They made the short series Sweatshop http://sweatshop.no to show a Scandinavian speaking audience how horrible the conditions are for the workers in these literal sweatshops, and how little they earn. I strongly recommend seeing the series. Both seasons are 5 episodes lasting 10 minutes each. When you think more consciously about the cheap clothes we buy; from it is made to when we dispose of it, you start seeing that this is not a sustainable solution.
The best alternatives are to:
-Buy less
-Buy used
-Buy only what you need
-Buy higher quality when you first buy
