The Final Resting Place of Our Clothes
What happens to your clothes once they are discarded?
Across the world, over 100 billion clothes are manufactured annually .
Over 92 million of them end up being discarded in the landfills.
Only 1% of discarded garments are recycled into new garments or fabric.
Fashion and textile industry contributes to 7% of the landfill dump globally every year. (Source:The Roundup.org)
Of the garments waste producers, US and China contribute the highest: almost 30% of the global waste. This is then dumped primarily, into the Global South, which imports the highest percentage of used garments in value every year.
Unravel
In her documentary “ Unravel”, Meghna Gupta throws light on the shoddy industry of India through the lives in women working in one of the factories of world’s “cast-off capital”, Panipat, India.
Day after day, these women, sorting and tearing apart clothes from the west, wonder about the lives of women in the US and Europe. They wonder how they live, how they look and what drives them to buy and wear these garments, from a one-piece swimsuit to a white wedding dress. Having been nowhere outside of their little town, their world is defined by these rejected garments they receive from across the Atlantic.
Raw, energetic and full of hope, Unravel beautifully showcases the painful cross section of fashion, feminism and the wide existing gap between the global north and the global south. What does one half of the world living in scarcity feel about the other half living in indulgence?
When people in the West throw their clothes away, their cast-offs often go on a journey east, across the oceans, to India’s industrial interior. From the Kutch District of western India to the northern city of Panipat, garment recyclers turn into yarn the huge bales of clothes that come from people and places distinctly strange. With little exposure to Western culture other than the Discovery Channel, the garment recyclers rely on their imagination and the rumours that travel with the cast-offs to create an an intriguing perspective on the West.
Director: Meghna Gupta
Producer: Meghna Gupta, Gigi Berardi
Source: Aeon Video: