Are your clothes environmentally friendly? Do you even know. I didn’t. Manufacturing clothes is a complex industry that involves chemicals, non-ethical labour (child labour), shipping, and very high carbon emissions (5% over the overall carbon emission every year).
Clothes define us. Make us feel pretty or handsome, help us feel confident. I’m the first to admit that it’s hard to feel good in a job interview when you are wearing and old suit. But
Still, I know that my love of clothes is not the best for the planet. So I made one of my environmental objectives to buy more second hand clothes. In this PBS YouTube show Hot Mess they present other ways to help reduce our environmental foot print with different ways of choosing and buying clothes.
Pre discussion
- Do you like to shop for clothes?
- Do you ever buy second hand clothes?
- What do you do with the clothes you don’t wear anymore?
Some concepts to explore before the video:
- clothing as a status symbol
- impact on the planet
- textiles, garments
- releasing carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas emission
- climate-friendly
- fossil fuel
- sustainable
- ethical labour
- environmentally friendly shipping
Teachers note: The presenter speaks fast. But you can reduce the speed to 0.75 and still get a natural flow. You can also add the close captions. If the rate and vocabulary is a bit frustrating for your students, encourage them to use their meta-knowledge to achieve comprehension (images, body language, guessing from context). The faster they get over what they don’t understand, the better they will feel when faced with native speakers in real life.
The Video: PBS Hot Mess How To Make Clothes Less Terrible for the Planet
Discussion Questions
- Stop the video 2 or 3 times and do a Mind Map of all the key concepts.
- Why are clothes so important to us?
- What are some of the impacts of polyester, rayonne, leather, and cotton?
- What are some of the environmentally friendly things we can do to reduce the impact of buying clothes?
- After watching this video, what could you change in your buying habits that could improve the impact of the clothing industries’ impact on the environment?
