We had a lecture on sustainable fashion today and it really opnened my eyes to how integral it is for brands to adopt more sustainable approaches to making their produce. Fashion is a very wasteful industry, fantastic, creative, fast moving and brilliant, but wasteful and very harmful to the environment nonetheless. I'm going to cover the topic properly in another blog post because I think it's a very important issue which needs to be addressed. When researching Sustainable fashion, I stumbled across an issue which I've found myself looking at many times, and that is the issue with many brands using palm oil in their produce.
If you're unaware of the issue facing the industry and palm oil then you can read more on 'Say no to palm oil'. The website states:
'Palm oil is a type of edible vegetable oil that is derived from the palm fruit, grown on the African oil palm tree. Oil palms are originally from Western Africa, but can flourish wherever heat and rainfall are abundant. Today, palm oil is grown throughout Africa, Asia, North America, and South America, with 85% of all palm oil globally produced and exported from Indonesia and Malaysia; but most of the time not using sustainable measures.
The industry is linked to major issues such as deforestation, habitat degradation, climate change, animal cruelty and indigenous rights abuses in the countries where it is produced, as the land and forests must be cleared for the development of the oil palm plantations. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. This large-scale deforestation is pushing many species to extinction, and findings show that if nothing changes species like the orangutan could become extinct in the wild within the next 5-10 years, and Sumatran tigers less than 3 years.
In total, 50 million tons of palm oil is produced annually, supplying over 30% of the world’s vegetable oil production. This single vegetable oil is found in approximately 40-50% of household products in countries such as United States, Canada, Australia and England. Palm oil can be present in a wide variety of products, including: baked goods, confectionery, shampoo, cosmetics, cleaning agents, washing detergents and toothpaste.'
In a previous post, I spoke about how skincare brand Dove created really powerful adverts which sent across a really good message on how women should view themselves. Dove use palm oil in most of their products, meaning they aren't very sustainable or very environmentally friendly at all. This is a real shame as they do such a good job promoting great self image, I just wish they could promote being kind to the environment as well. I found a video promoting the ban of Palm Oil which mimicked Doves Onslaught video so fabulously. This is a true example of great advertising and getting your point across.
Here is Dove's original video.
DOVE "Onslaught" from David Hayman on Vimeo.
Then here is Greenpeace's viral spoof of the advert.
No comments:
Post a Comment