We wear clothes basically to cover our body and to protect our body from sun exposure or cold weather. But do we really buy clothes mainly because of this reason? For most of us, buying clothes is about looking good or at least not being teased as a “manang” or “baduy”.
I visited Alabang Town Center this weekend and I was surprised at the long lines of teenagers buying Havaianas flip-flops. It was only 11:00 am and the line was extending to the aisle of the mall. I saw this one young girl around 13-14 carrying 3 pairs of the same style but with different colors. Wow!
It’s the same with shoes and clothes. Philippines is really an ironic country. People say that this is a poor country but if you visit any mall in the metro during the weekend, you’ll ask yourself if you’re really in a poor country.
Maybe the reason why the fashion boutiques and the department stores are all filled up during weekend especially when the weekend coincides with the pay-day is because Filipinos are heavy cloth buyers. In this country, you’ll find people dying of hunger everyday in the streets while inside the malls, people are buying fashionable clothes and 3 pairs of flip-flips!
Buying too much is always bad for the environment because when we buy more clothes, more shoes, more flip-flops that what we need, more of them will have to be manufactured. During the manufacturing of these items, of course, more energy has to be used. Also, when there are more clothes, shoes and flip-flops to be manufactured, more natural resources are needed to produce them. There will be more wastes when we got used with our clothes or when they’re not fashionable anymore or when we can’t wear them anymore.
How many flip-flops do we really need? How many different colors of skinny jeans do we really need to buy? Have you seen the pile of old shoes in your house? How are we going to dispose them?
Having green clothes may mean buying only the clothes that we really need with the aim of energy-conservation and the protection of the natural resources of the earth. Having green clothes may mean wearing hand-me-downs. It may mean buying from ukay-ukay stores. They can be fashionable but they are not from the factories. Besides, they are cheap!
Buying clothes and dressing up are regular activities in our lives but we can make it extra-special when we think about our natural resources, energy and wastes whenever we do them. Go green clothes!