At the beginning of a product’s life, zero waste boils down to company practices.
Some companies make sure their employees work in safe conditions and receive fair pay for their labor. But some companies don’t. Those companies – that exploit labor in developing countries – are likely more interested in profit than your welfare or the planet’s. Zero waste starts with buying products that are well-made, durable, and safe, and you’re more likely to find those products from companies that care for their employees.
Practical steps:
1. Pay attention to news stories about company practices.
2. Learn how to tell if a product is well-made: investigate tags for product information, look at seams, test the material. One standard test: if you can see your hand through the fabric of a shirt, it’s not good quality.
3. Look into nonprofit organizations that support sustainable, humane economic development in countries that host outsourced factories. Looking for the Fair Trade label can be a good place to start.
Resources
Read: Staying up to date on news related to labor conditions in outsourced factories can be bleak, but it’s an essential part of being an informed consumer. Reputable news sources that regularly cover labor stories include (and are by no means limited to):
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Post
BBC
The Economist
The Atlantic
FORBES Magazine
The Center for Investigative Reporting
Use search terms like “factory,” “labor conditions,” and “manufacturing” or “overseas manufacturing” to find stories about outsourced production. You can also frequently find print copies of these resources, like The Economist magazine, at your local library.
For example, this is coverage of a 2013 garment factory collapse in Dhaka from The Washington Post: Bangladesh building-collapse death toll tops 600 (written by Farid Hossain). You can see at the bottom of the article that the reporting came from the Associated Press, another reputable news distributor.
This is a more recent interactive article from the Center for Investigative Reporting: A map of injuries at Amazon fulfillment centers (Reveal staff, 2019). You can see that this nonprofit news organization’s staff transparently lay out the information-gathering process they used to construct this map, a sign that their reporting is trustworthy.
Familiarizing yourself with the websites of companies you buy from is also a good idea. These are some examples of “Corporate Responsibility Statements” from companies with good track records in sustainability. You can often find these by searching “corporate responsibility” + the name of a company in the search engine of your choice. It’s up to you to judge how much truth these statements contain; comparing what they say with investigative news articles can help you.
Patagonia: Corporate Responsibility Statement
Dell: Corporate Responsibility Statement
Don’t be disgruntled if finding the information you want is difficult. This thought-provoking project by Jenny Odell might assuage some of your frustration: Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge.
Looking for more information in library books? 331.8809 will take you to the right shelves.
Watch: “The True Cost” uncovers the perils for workers in fast fashion’s business model and provides us with a vision of a better system.
Search: Ethical Consumer rates over 40,000 brands and products based on 300 topics, like workers’ rights, supply chain management, and pollutions and toxins. Nonsubscribers can view guides to ethical buying within specific industries and see some companies’ individual ratings.
Listen: Planet Money, from National Public Radio, undertook a massive project in 2013: from start to finish, they documented the production of a cotton t-shirt. Listen for interviews with women in Bangladeshi factories, cotton farmers in the United States, and more.
Try: Like Jenny Odell (see above), choose one thing you own and try to trace its origin. How to start? Try searching for the brand in a search engine, or in the Ethical Consumer database above.
HOW-TO ZERO WASTE 