STRIP!
Our Clothes Are Killing Us,
Professor, Student Believe
By JENNIFER HILL • Hometown Oneonta & The Freeman’s Journal
ONEONTA – You might think the mannequin dressed in colorful plastic flowers on the main floor of SUNY Oneonta’s Hunt Student Union is there to advertise cute clothes.
Two posters flanking the mannequin indicate the opposite. The one on the left says, “The Ugly Truths About 80 Billion Garments Produced Annually.” On the right, “What Can We Do?”
SUNY Oneonta Human Ecology professor Bharath Ramkumar and junior Devin Meaney created the exhibit to tell the bad news about the fashion industry – that it is one of the worst polluters of the environment; and the good news – if we change our habits of using and disposing of textiles, we can reduce its harsh impact.
A second exhibit, in SUNY’s Milne Library, is a mannequin wearing a T-shirt that tells passersby how harmful producing one cotton T-shirt is.
“Cotton is highly water-intensive in making clothes,” Meaney said. “It takes 713 gallons of fresh water, our drinking water, to produce one T-shirt. And you can’t use altered or dyed water.”
“Only .4 percent of fresh water is available for drinking and bathing,” she added. “It is a scarce resource.”
Ramkumar and Meaney created the exhibits because they believe once people know fashion industry’s harmful effects on the environment and people’s health, and what to do about it, they’ll change.
“It’s not that people don’t care, they just don’t know,” Ramkumar said, and Meaney concurred.
Ramkumar didn’t know the full extent of the harm production, consumption and disposal of textiles had on the earth and on people’s health until he began teaching a Quality Analysis of Apparel class at SUNY two years ago as a newly hired faculty member.
“In the class, we focus on the process of making a textile product,” he said. “And that’s when I learned about the negative effects the process, from start to finish, has on the environment and humans.”
“I was just appalled,” he said.
