Day 3: T-Shirt Economics
For today’s blog, I watched a video which described how a t-shirt, a common, simple product, can have such an economic impact, as it travels throughout the world in order to get manufactured. I’ll briefly explain the lifecycle of a t-shirt before it enters peoples homes, which also has significant environmental impacts as well.
The Life of A T-Shirt
The production of typical t-shirts, which are sold and bought 2 billion times a year, begins farms of cotton seeds, which are usually in America, China and India. Once the cotton seeds grow into plants, self-driving machines carefully harvest the cotton balls, another machine mechanically separates the fluffy balls from the seeds and the cotton is compressed so it can be packaged and transported. Once they leave the farms, they are transported to spinning facilities, usually found in China or India, where high tech machinery blends, cards, combs, pulls, stretches, and finally twists the cotton into slivers which are sent to the mill where they are knitted into sheets, made soft and white through bleach and chemicals. After all of this, the dyed sheets of cotton are shipped to factories, usually found in Bangladesh, China, India or Turkey, where the sheets are stitched into t-shirts, which machines cannot do. Often the workers in these factories face poor conditions and very low wages. Finally, the T-shirts are transported through ships, trains and trucks to be sold in high-income countries and end there journey.
Positive and Negative Impacts of T-shirt Production
Although there are some positive impacts of T-shirt production, for instance, that people can recycle and donate their clothes, or even re-use old clothes at cleaning cloths. However, the huge increase in fashion consumption in the last 20 years, has led to a drastic increase in the negative impacts of T-shirt production. The cotton plants require vast amounts of water and pesticides, which can harm the farmers and damage surrounding wildlife. As the cotton travels around the world, for each step of production, it consequently leaves a huge carbon footprint, due to the pollution caused by the ships and trains. Lastly, the human labour factories, where the t-shirts are stitched, are filled with workers who get paid incredibly low wages and work in terrible conditions, just for the clothes to get shipped off to high-income countries. Therefore, I think that t-shirt production establishes economic inequality between the countries where shirts are stitched, like Bangladesh, and where they are transported to, higher-income countries, to be sold.
The Journey of Another Common Product- Chocolate: From Beans to Bar
We always find chocolate bars just lying around in our shelves, but we never really think about how they got there, how a single chocolate bar involves numerous stages of production, from growing on cocoa beans, to finally being packaged and shipped off to supermarkets and corner shops. Therefore, I have chosen to research the life of a chocolate bar.
Cacao Trees- Cocoa requires tropical climate and shady conditions, which means that cocoa farms look slightly like rainforests and are situated in tropical countries, commonly in West Africa. Farmworkers who harvest cocoa are, on average, extremely poor, with some living on only $1.25 per day. Almost all of the world’s cocoa is grown in developing countries, the top four producers being, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Indonesia, while the top consumers of chocolate are all high-income countries.
Fermentation and Drying- In the process of fermentation, the pods are placed into large containers, where they ferment for five to seven days. The chocolate taste is developed as the beans turn which helps them ferment evenly. The last stage before they are transported round the world is Drying, in which they are laid out in one layer, out in the sun, which prevents mould when they are shipped off.
Transporting the Cocoa beans- The supply chain for a product that is consumed thousands of miles from where it’s grown is very complicated. They are usually sold to international trading companies which ship them to port cities, as they become part of the financial world.
Roasting- Roasting is the next step in the process and is carried out by the chocolate maker rather than the farmer, most commonly in Europe or North America. The chocolate companies simply roast the beans as evenly and accurately as possible. To rid the roasted cocoa beans of their papery shells, a process called Winnowing is used, in which they crack the beans open and blow away the light shells with fans.
Grinding and Conching- The pure cocoa nibs are then ground with stone rollers until they become what’s known as cocoa mass. Conching is used to refine the cocoa mass and it is in this process that sugar and other flavourings are added to the chocolate.
Moulding and Wrapping- After all of this is done, the melted chocolate is simply poured into plastic bar-shaped moulds where it is cooled and then wrapped. Big chocolate companies have machines that help wrap but smaller chocolate companies often wrap their bars completely by hand.
The only thing left is for the consumers to buy them in their local shops!
