Why green up fashion?

• Consumers spend around 1 trillion dollars yearly on clothing products.
• About a billion people worldwide work in the textile and clothing industry.
• A quarter of worldwide used chemicals and more than 10% of all pesticides are used for cotton production. That is about 40.000 tons of pesticides per year.
• A normal T-shirt uses about eight times its weight in chemicals.
• The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that every year at least three Million people get a pesticide poisoning, causing 20.000 deaths. Other organizations count with up to 25 Millions of poisonings and 40.000 deaths.
• Often non-specific pesticides are used, polluting the drinking water, killing birds and fish and destroying the ecosystem.
• The German companies Bayer and BASF are in the top six of world leading pesticide producers.
• The amount of water used to irrigate cotton is greater than that of all the households worldwide.
• 20% of the cotton worldwide is genetically modified and 0,1% organic.
• One out of six children in the world today is involved in child labour, doing work that is damaging to his or her mental, physical and emotional development.
• Textiles and clothing represent about 7 per cent of total world exports and are among the most dynamic product sectors worldwide. Developing countries now account for half of world textile exports and almost three-quarters of world clothing exports.
• Of an average 100 EUR jeans approximately 25% goes to branding and marketing and 1% to the workers.
• Every German buys between 12 and 15 Kilos of clothing yearly. That’s about 12.375.000.000 Kilos of clothing per year just for Germany.