There aren’t many shopping days left until Christmas, but according to the Guardian, by next Saturday every person in Britain will have spent about £366 each buying gifts. It’s up £32 on last year, in line with a trend in recent years that is much to the delight of retailers as the money keeps rolling in. It’s a fair bet that under millions of Christmas trees will be clothing – 74% of us say it’s on the present-shopping list – such as jumpers, trousers, shirts, underwear, scarves.
For frazzled parents, shops such as Primark offer a bonanza of spectacularly cheap clothing. You can do a bulk-buy of presents for a brood of children in one trip and still have change from a £50 note. Those seams might unravel before too long, but it looks glam enough to last the Christmas holidays. The details – the stitching and embroidery – come at ridiculously low prices.
Now fast forward to next Christmas or the one after. By then the chances are that a huge proportion of these Christmas presents will already have been thrown out. The worst possible scenario is that some of this mountain of clothing will be rotting in landfill sites. The British throw about a million tonnes of clothing straight into the dustbin every year, and only 10% of our discarded clothing is reused here. Some will go into car-seat filling, but it is more likely to be shipped by the tonne to developing countries, many in Africa, as part of a huge global trade in second-hand clothes.
The roads through the barrios – shanty towns – of Maputo, Mozambique, are lined with stalls selling second-hand clothes. In one area carts are lined up alongside each other full of trainers. A bit further along there are racks of jeans, and beyond, more racks of shirts and T-shirts. It goes on for mile after mile like some sort of drive-through open-air shopping mall. Curtains, pillowcases, duvet covers, towels – you name it, every kind of textile and footwear is on sale here.
Put aside the qualms about Africa dressing itself in western castoffs and what’s the problem, some ask. On the positive side, a lot of people in Asia get jobs making the clothes; westerners get a few months or a year of the novelty of a new style and then pass it on; a Mozambican gets a still-decent piece of clothing at a cost she can afford. The big problem is the west, greedily consuming two-thirds of the annual $1 trillion of clothing produced globally. Perhaps the global trade is rigged to provide us with Christmas miracles?
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