ELC speech

Working 6 days per week, for 12 hours per day. You probably wouldn’t even consider this, but for
250 million children this is the truth. These children are your age or even younger. They work in the
fashion industry. Most people think that child labour is something from the past, but it is still very
present. The adults working in the fashion industry don’t make it good either. With only 1 free day
every month and an unliveable salary of around 200 to 500 euros per month. More than 1 billion
people are underpaid in the fashion industry. That’s more than 1/6 of the world’s population. But
there is another side to the fashion industry as well. The environmental side. The fashion industry is
the second biggest consumer of water in the world. Only agriculture uses more water. There are
whole mountains of refused clothing, just because we decided we don’t like it anymore. This is killing
the earth.

You probably know the company Shein. Shein is the perfect example of fast fashion. New trends are
on Shein within days and the prices are low. You might not realize, or care, how this is possible. You
just select some items and click on order. But behind this order, there is a world filled with toxic. For
example the prices. You can get a whole new outfit for less than 20 euros. Most people think that
those prices are connected to the quality, but that isn’t true. The low prices are connected to the bad
working conditions. Because if the employees would get a fair and liveable salary, Shein wouldn’t be
able to have such low prices. No matter how bad the quality. Employees for Shein have to work 18
hours per day and don’t have weekends. They get 4 cents for every clothing piece they make. When
you multiply that with the 500 pieces of clothing they make each day, this is around 1,10 euros per
hour. If you have a job yourself, you probably make more money than those adults. About the
children isn’t even spoken, but in some cases, they get no more than 50 to 70 cents per week. And as
if that wasn’t enough, the employees get punished too. When they make a mistake, they will receive
no more than 1/3 of their payment.

And then there is the environmental side of the fashion industry. The fashion industry causes 10% of
the carbon dioxide released into the air every year. This carbon dioxide comes from the big
industries, but also from the transportation of fabrics and clothing. However, there is an even bigger
problem. Waste. Only looking at the US, there is already 11,3 million tons of textile waste each year.
All those pieces of clothing end up on mountains of refused clothing. This refused clothing contains
lots of plastic. Each year there is 300 million tons of plastic produced worldwide. And 1/5 of all this
plastic goes straight to the fashion industry. Clothes made by Shein consist of 95.2% new plastic. The
company stores more than 548 thousand products. Most of those products end up on those
mountains of refused clothing, without even being sold or worn once.

When trying to find solutions, most people think big. Ideas such as ‘we should take down companies
like Shein,’ and,’ equal rights are the minimum’. All these things have to happen, but you can’t get
there at once. You need to take small steps to achieve big things. In the fashion industry, the most
important thing to remember is: The companies will keep producing in these horrible ways, because
we keep buying products from their toxic place.