INTRODUCTION
The average American family earns nearly $75,000 a year . . . Esther Bloom, “See How Your Spending Compares with That of the Average American—and the U.S. Government,” CNBC.com, September 27, 2017.
International trade in artisan-made products, what the United Nations calls “art and crafts,” generates about $32 billion each year. United Nations, Creative Economy Report, 2010.
Retail is a massive force in the U.S. economy—a $2.6 trillion industry, two-thirds of our total gross domestic product (GDP). National Retail Federation/PricewaterhouseCoopers, “The Economic Impact of the U.S. Retail Industry,” September 2014.
CHAPTER ONE: WEAR YOUR VALUES
The International Labour Organization estimates that human trafficking is a $150 billion industry . . . U.S. Department of State, “Trafficking in Persons Report,” June 2017.
Sexual exploitation has devastating consequences . . . M. Abas, et al., “Risk Factors for Mental Disorders in Women Survivors of Human Trafficking: a Historical Cohort Study,” BMC Psychiatry 13 (August 2013): 204–14.
Greek coins often had the first one or two letters . . . Raquel Laneri, “Is Monogramming Classy or Tacky?” Forbes (November 30, 2010).
One popular way to assert status was by monogramming linens . . . W. B. Carpenter, “Monograms,” Appletons’ Journal 5, no. 108 (April 22, 1871): 464–466.
(I read a hilarious op-ed by the investor Lawrence Lenihan . . . Lawrence Lenihan, “Op-Ed: How Small Will Beat Big and Save the Fashion Industry,” Business of Fashion, June 19, 2017.
Recent Pew research on millennials found that members of this generation . . . “Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends,” Pew Research Center, March 7, 2014.
In 2015, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies published CSR reports . . . “Flash Report: 81% of S&P 500 Companies Published Sustainability Reports in 2015,” Governance and Accountability Institute, March 15, 2016.
As the state’s resource guide on the act puts it, “An estimated 21 million people—11.4 million women and girls . . . Kamala D. Harris, California Department of Justice, “The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act: A Resource Guide,” 2015.
. . . as a recent survey of Western consumers . . . “Does It Pay to Be Good?” Sloan Management Review, winter 2009.
In Europe, the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act of 2015 is designed to tackle slavery . . . “Modern Slavery Act 2015,” http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted.
CHAPTER TWO: THIS BRACELET BUILDS COMMUNITY
The average American spends almost $1,000 a year on holiday presents . . . Amanda Haury, “Average Cost of an American Christmas,” Investopedia.com, December 20, 2017.
As Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer has noted, refusing a present prevents someone else from experiencing the joy of giving. Tara Parker-Pope, “The Gift That Gives Right Back? The Giving Itself,” The New York Times, December 11, 2007.
The gift market is an estimated $130 billion plus each year . . . Tom Popomaronis, “This $22 Billion Industry Is Dying. Meet the Startup Reviving It,” Inc., November 14, 2016.
This desire to sell something different has spurred the growth of private label clothing . . . Matthew Boyle, “The Retail Apocalypse Is Fueled by No-Name Clothes,” Bloomberg.com, December 12, 2017.
By the 1700s, the Europeans were calling Haiti the “Jewel of the Antilles” . . . Bob Corbett, “Why Is Haiti So Poor?” Faculty.Webster.Edu, 1986.
Today, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. Jon Lee Anderson, “Haiti Has a President,” The New Yorker, February 17, 2016.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported to have responded . . . Jon Lee Anderson, “Letter from Haiti,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2016.
As New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson put it in a 2016 article . . . Ibid.
Though the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund has closed down . . . Telephone interview, Nathalie Tancrede, January 18, 2017.
Christopher Columbus was apparently impressed by the woodwork and weaving of the Arawak . . . Eleanor Ingalls Christensen, The Art of Haiti (A.S. Barnes, 1975).
More than a quarter of Americans spend eighty dollars or more on a birthday present for their significant other. “How Much Do You Spend on Birthday Gifts?” Proflowers.com, July 13, 2015.
CHAPTER THREE: YOUR LATTE CAN IMPROVE LIVES
But globally, we consume something like six hundred billion cups of coffee a year . . . Guy Pearse, The Greenwash Effect: Corporate Deception, Celebrity Environmentalists, and What Big Business Isn’t Telling You About Their Products and Brands (Skyhorse Publishing, 2014).
More than 25 million smallholder farmers grow coffee . . . http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/articles/rainforest-alliance-certified-coffee; Lora Jones, “Coffee: Who Grows, Drinks and Pays the Most?” BBC News, April 13, 2018.
In one study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day . . . Michel Lucas, et al., “Coffee, Caffeine, and Risk of Depression Among Women,” Archives of Internal Medicine (September 26, 2011): 1571–78, doi: 10.1001/archinternmed .2011.393.
In the United States, we spend $40 billion . . . https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/facts/.
As Bambi Semroc of Conservation International explains, resentment can build . . . Telephone interview with Bambi Semroc, September 13, 2017.
This fungus, which has been attacking the leaves of coffee trees since the late nineteenth century . . . Jesse Bladyka, “Coffee Leaf Rust: A New Reality for Specialty Coffee,” Specialty Coffee Association News, April 11, 2015.
CHAPTER 4: WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL WHEN YOU CAN REPURPOSE IT?
Even back then, in ancient Rome, Julius Caesar had to confront removal and recycling of . . . Martin Medina, “Scavenging in Historical Perspective,” The World’s Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Production (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007), 18–21.
Companies today are increasingly setting zero waste goals . . . Mary Mazzoni, “3p Weekend: 10 Companies Going Zero Waste to Landfill,” TriplePundit, January 6, 2017.
Methane gas traps heat in the atmosphere even more than carbon dioxide does. Gayathri Vaidyanathan, “How Bad of a Greenhouse Gas Is Methane?” Scientific American, December 22, 2015.
We create at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day . . . Kadir van Lohuizen Noor, The Washington Post, November 21, 2017.
Globally, we’ve produced about 83 million metric tons of plastic, and less than 10 percent gets recycled. Roland Geyer et al., “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made,” Science Advances 3, no. 7 (July 5, 2017).
It can take one thousand years for a plastic bag to degrade. “Tips to Use Less Plastic,” Green Education Foundation, 2017.
“They’d come to the orphanage to visit their children,” she says. Telephone interview with Shelly Jean, August 23, 2017.
As Callie Himsl, an American who works at Papillon, puts it . . . Telephone interview with Callie Himsl, July 4, 2017.
Atlanta’s football team, the Falcons, recently did an amazing partnership with Novelis . . . Gracie Bonds Staples, “How Many Aluminum Cans Does It Take to Build a Home?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 20, 2017.
American businesses toss about one million toner cartridges every single day . . . Scott Bowen, “Taking Them Back: How Recycling Toner Containers Helps the Planet,” Forbes, August 10, 2017.
CHAPTER FIVE: NOT ALL FACTORIES ARE EQUAL, OR EVIL
Between the years 2000 and 2014, the number of garments . . . Nathalie Remy, Eveline Speelman, and Steven Swartz, “Style That’s Sustainable: A New Fast-Fashion Formula,” McKinsey.com, October 2016.
The most infamous accident in a U.S. sweatshop occurred at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City . . . Hadassa Kosak, “Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia, jwa .org; “Complete Transcript of Triangle Fire,” November 20, 1911, available through Cornell University ILR School, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Digital Archives; “Don’t Mourn—Organize: Lessons from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,” New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, March 25, 2011.
. . . American factories began ramping up production . . . “Mass Production,” Encyclopedia.com.; A. J. Baime, “How Detroit Won World War II,” History.com.
As Oren Shaffer, then chief financial officer at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, told the New York Times in 1989 . . . Louis Uchitelle, “Spread of U.S. Plants Abroad Is Slowing Exports,” The New York Times, March 26, 1989.
But U.S. companies also began doing something else that troubled . . . Constantinos C. Markides and Norman Berg, “Manufacturing Offshore Is Bad for Business,” Harvard Business Review, September 1988.
Buyers can put serious pressure on factory owners and managers . . . Sidney Leng, “Can Chinese Manufacturers Ever Be Clean, Green and Profitable? Garment Factories Search for the Answer,” South China Morning Post, September 12, 2017.
According to a United Nations 2017 World Water Development Report, more than 80 percent of the world’s wastewater . . . “Wastewater: The Untapped Resource,” United Nations World Water Development Report, 2017.
In the United States, some companies have moved away from environmentally harmful production practices . . . Yue Maggie Zhou, “When Some US Firms Move Production Overseas, They Also Offshore Their Pollution,” The Conversation, May 18, 2017.
As sustainable fashion pioneer Eileen Fisher has put it . . . Nancy Szokan, “The Fashion Industry Tries to Take Responsibility for Its Pollution,” The Washington Post, June 30, 2016.
This was the worst garment factory disaster in known history. Dominic Rushe, “Retail Group Approves Bangladesh Factories as Safety Concerns Persist, Report Finds,” The Guardian, November 21, 2016.
After the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, many fashion industry leaders . . . Ibid.
CHAPTER SIX: JUST DESSERTS FOR EVERYONE
The average cacao farmer in Ghana makes eighty-four cents a day, while farmers in Côte d’Ivoire earn about fifty cents a day. Etelle Higonnet, Marisa Bellantonio, Glenn Hurowitz, “Chocolate’s Dark Secret: How the Cocoa Industry Destroys National Parks,” Mighty Earth, 2017.
Chocolate is part of the livelihood of some estimated fifty million people worldwide, more than five million of whom are smallholder cocoa farmers. World Cocoa Foundation, “About Cocoa.”
Many leading small-scale chocolate makers watched videos about making chocolate at home on the website Chocolate Alchemy . . . Kim Severson, “The Kitchen-Counter Chocolatiers,” New York Times, February 10, 2015.
Dark chocolate lovers so often look down on milk chocolate . . . Julia Moskin, “Dark May Be King, But Milk Chocolate Makes a Move,” The New York Times, February 13, 2008.
“They can sell that cacao to whomever they choose. The goal is that they’re trained to follow sustainable practices and appropriate labor . . .” Telephone interview with Jeff Beckman, January 4, 2018.
“We started talking about the problems we’re facing, and openly sharing information as much as possible about the farmer . . .” Telephone interview with Jeff King, January 4, 2018.
As Barry Parkin, Mars’s chief sustainability officer, recently said, “There are obviously commitments . . .” Erin Brodwin, “Chocolate Is on Track to Go Extinct in 40 Years,” Business Insider, December 31, 2017.
In 2017, the nonprofit environmental advocacy and action group Mighty Earth launched an extensive investigation into cacao farming in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and released a report revealing the negative environmental impact. Wendy Paris, “A Mighty Grant: With Modest Support, This Environmental Group Achieved Big Changes,” Inside Philanthropy, March 23, 2018.