How do you tell which clothes companies are ethical? Primark for example.

[BercowsFlamingoFlownSouth]

My dds love primark. I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than step foot in there. They are telling me that despite clothes being cheap as chips they are ethically made. I'm not convinced. How would I find out?

Wonderful thing, the internet. There's a thing called Google. Put in "Is Primark ethical?" and it comes up with all sorts of sites allowing you to have a quick read and decide for yourself.

How could they possibly be ethically made? Are they saying that every seamstress making a £1.99 t-shirt is on a living wage (for her region), working legal hours for her age, in clean, well-ventilated surroundings with adequate healthcare?

Nope, of course they're not, but then neither are most high street brands.

goodonyou.eco/how-ethical-is-primark/

Ethicalconsumer.org has a large database that rates the ethics of companies.

Also, by ‘ethical’ I assume you/they mean fair working conditions for manufacturers (as @crosspelican says - and as she says, I think that’s unlikely though don’t know for certain).

What I do know for 100% certain is that the promotion of fast fashion, made from plastics and designed not to last, is distinctly unethical from a climate perspective.

I’m not on my high horse here, I do plenty of shopping that’s as bad, but you asked!

Also, a friend of mine who works for the Clean Clothes Campaign and knows the industry inside and out says that Primary aren't any worse than other highstreet brands. Others just mark up more.

The high street's not ethical, full stop. Many "good" brands are made in the same factories as cheap brands, for the same crap wages.

There's a YouTube channel, Justine Leconte, who is a fashion designer. She goes into ethical and fast fashion on some of her videos. It might be interesting for your girls?

Thank you for the helpful replies. We get into lots of discussions about various things and I find posters very helpful in getting them to think deeper about things.

I'll have a look at those sites thank you.

ShatnersWig did someone piss in your cornflakes this morning?

I doubt they are any worse than other high street shops. Primark always gets the blame for fast fashion but they also sell perfectly serviceable basics like t-shirts, pyjamas and hoodies which last really well. I have vests from Primark which washed well and kept their shape and vests from M&S which went baggy and out of shape after a very short time.

To be ethical the people who make the material or grow the cotton must be paid a fair wage and given safe working conditions, then the people who sew the clothes must be paid a fair wage and given safe working conditions, including paying contractors to install fire escapes, and fire escape protocols. That's a long chain of people to be paid a fair wage per 4.99 top.

They should look at these links:

theconversation.com/five-years-after-deadly-factory-fire-bangladeshs-garment-workers-are-still-vulnerable-88027

www.fairtrade.org.uk/Buying-Fairtrade/Clothes

Depends on how old they are or how much they can handle, but do your girls know about the Rana Plaza disaster? It's well covered by the BBC, including what happened (or rather, what hasn't happened) to help survivors or the families of those who died....look yourself first before you show them what fast fashion contributed to....

Download the Good on You app, it is so helpful on different ethical measures

You can tell though can’t you that if you are being asked to pay so little for something that has been grown, harvested, dyed, stitched, shipped and packaged that somewhere along the supply chain someone isn’t getting a good deal. Probably the workers and also the ecological cost of these clothes. All the clothes you need are already made (secondhand all the way!) or can be created ethically close to home or from companies with a clear and transparent supply chain. You’re having to ask this question and primark don’t make it easy to access the info - that says a lot.

This is something from a few years ago about buying ready-distressed jeans:

Jeans with a distressed, already-worn look have been popular since the 1990s, but one way the effect is achieved is by blasting them with sand - and this can give factory workers an incurable lung disease. So should we stop buying them?

"I have difficulty breathing... When I return from work I feel so tired. My eyes are in pain from all the dust," says an 18-year-old worker at a garment factory in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is home to more than 4,000 clothes-making factories and many of the world's leading jeans companies use factories based there.

The worker, who agreed to speak anonymously to the BBC World Service, says he works 11 hours a day in the choking atmosphere, to earn a salary of $70 a month.

"I know the effects this is having on my health, but I continue to do it because I need to feed myself and my family," he says.

"I am a poor man, so I do this to survive."

Manual sandblasting of jeans requires just a hose, an air compressor and sand - workers literally blast the jeans with sand, to give them a worn look and to soften the denim.

Silicosis is caused when small particles of silica dust from the sand embed themselves within the lungs.

It causes shortness of breath, coughing, weakness and weight loss. It's incurable - and in its acute form, fatal.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15017790

This is Primark’s entry

I buy at Primark not for fast fashion ,but because I'm on a budget and it's what I can afford .

There were screenshots, they have gone awol...

Primark is not ethical (it is not hard to work that out based on their prices)

M&S, and the 3 main UK supermarkets - Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys - all have very strict ethical procedures when it comes to manufacturing but cause many suppliers to go into administration trying to drive down margins to make bigger profits

I've worked for an ethical fashion company and it involves factory audits. It's very hard because often a factory may sub contract the work to somewhere not ethical to make more money. That is a supply chain issue and very hard to trace sometimes. I think Primark has suffered this issue.

I've been to factories in India making high end and mid high street in the same place. Good factories supply lunch and sanitary items for women. They have safety and ventilation, but I would still say it's very basic in comparison to UK. Having said that the mark up on good especially fashion is massive. Having seen how things are done even in good factories it's very manual as labour is so cheap and machines very expensive. So lots of hand dying still. I don't worry about it.

To be fair, the reports on the Rana Plaza collapse states that factories in the building (5 clothing factories in all) were making for Primark AS WELL as Prada, Versace and Gucci. Its not just cheap clothes that contribute.

Personally, I think the only ethical way to shop is to buy very few good quality items, take care of them and use them for years (clothes or otherwise).

It doesn't necessarily make the items more ethical but it means there are less of them. Others would argue this means less work for people who need it (even if it is in sweat shops).

Most high street clothing is not ethical and as a general rule if it’s cheap, you can guarantee it’s not ethical. A lot of people cannot afford truly ethical clothing unless they buy it second hand.

I'll just remark here that using the search criteria on ebay to restrict results to Used is a lifesaver when you know exactly what you want and you don't want to fund a sweatshop to do it.