Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which buried over 1,100 workers, arrested the attention of American consumers. But the environmental crisis in Asia, driven by outsourced apparel manufacturing and impacting hundreds of millions of people, has gone largely unnoticed. Newsweek’s Adam Matthews aims to correct the oversight with his investigative report, the Environmental Crisis in Your Closet.
Over the past two decades American clothing brands have steadily moved production out of the US and into Asia. The American Apparel and Footwear Association estimates its members outsource the manufacturing of 97% of their clothing, more than 75% of it to Asia.
The Newsweek story surveys the damage done by off-shore manufacturers who skirt or flout regulations aimed at protecting the environment … and uses Datamyne bill of lading data to link bad actors to leading apparel brands in the US.
Read the full story here (and click the links to shipment records for a sample of the bills of lading that underlie Datamyne data).