Planet Money makes a tee shirt. Watch the video to see how the shirt goes from a cotton field in Mississippi and around the world as it is made.

Enjoy

Michael

Georgia Yarn Company

http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title

Comments

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 04:41

sally orgren

So the team of reporters started by buying two bales of cotton from a farmer in TX, only to learn they could not get it processed. The cotton processor/spinner they contacted in the southeast did not want to "pollute" his equipment with an unknown/untested fiber.

So they realized they had to start this process at the other end, with the finished shirt, and work backward through the process. They used Kickstarter to raise the funds to launch this project.

Their journey to produce a finished shirt for their Kickstarter shareholders will be the story.

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 05:37

sarahnopp (not verified)

There is a book by Pietra Rivoli which did a similar thing. It is called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade.

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 08:51

ReedGuy

There is lots of snobbery and snootiness just as it was in the old days.

Apparently, the first cultivation and weaving of cotton began in India. Also was found in Peruvian tombs. Then the Spanish found it in Texas and Louisiana. I find that kinda funny though, I think the natives found it to and never wrote a book on it. Funny how the man with a pen is the 'discoverer of things'. ;D

A book could have been written in the 19thC on following the beaver pelt.

You also see it in the lumber trade, apparently a sugar maple is not the same everywhere. It is, but some people don't agree, not based on science.

There's a number of volumes in the internet archives entitled 'Cyclopedia of Textile Work'. The first volume is on cotton, and I have not downloaded the other 8 volumes to see what's in those.

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 14:48

sally orgren

Sorry! I probably should have phrased that more elegantly.

Basically, the fellow willing to spin the cotton they purchased would have had to clean his machines before and after, since it was an unknown source to him and not from his region, which would have been tremendously expensive for the reporting team working on the project.

That is when they realized they needed to look at the project from the end to the beginning, or they would be incurring unwelcome problems/costs along the way.

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 15:27

ReedGuy

I'm thinking more of contamination. It's like a potato grower, the different varieties of potatoes he processes and sells have to be kept separate. ;) And nothing wrong with the potato, but markets are very fussy and even more so when it's competition. I can remember potatoes, hand selected from a conveyor by size and placed in boxes and carefully weighed to 50 lbs. These boxes were labeled say, 70 count. If the inspector found 72, that was just as bad as 69. Had to be 70. So the fix for that bit of nonesense was to mark approximate count with the number. The weight was 50 whether there was 65 or 73 in the box. You were buying on weight. Just an example to prove there are snobs and sticklers to cheat you at every turn. ;)

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 16:20

endorph

this morning where they were in Indonesia and talking to the company that spins the yarn - very interesting

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 22:14

kerstinfroberg

From time to time there have been discussions here (in Europe, I think, but at least in Sweden) about the definition of "made in". From what I understand, the rule still is that you can put the "made in Your Country" if something that made the item "more valuable" was done in your country (as the last operation). I remember a case of "made in Sweden" which meant the whole shirt was made in several countries, but the buttons were sewn in here - and, of course, the label "made in Sweden". After all, a shirt withOUT buttons is a lot less "valuable" than a shirt WITH buttons...

Apparently ONLY the sewing-in of the label wasn't enough, even if it was the label that made the thing "valuable" (think Dior, for instance).

So are the t-shirts in question marketed/labelled as "made in US"? If not, then what do the labels say?

As for pollution/contamination: there are (not many, but still - ) a few spinnig mills I hve heard of that offer "you will get your own wool back, spun into yarn". If they can actually do that - how much (wool) would get lost in the cleaning between batches? (I have no idea, but I imagine it would be quite a lot...)

Tue, 12/03/2013 - 23:24

ReedGuy

Another thing appearing on items is 'Made from Unknown Materials'.

The term 'value added' is taking the raw material and processing it to the next step. An example where that was once used here in selling wood. Mills here, that run as a commercial enterprise, have a license to harvest timber off public land. This harvested timber could not be sold as raw logs outside of the province. They had to be sawed,or be chipped or what have you before export. When we lost mills due to the economy (very few went bankrupt, they just pulled out) there was a clut of sawlogs. When you cut wood, you need a market for lots of different products to be profitable. So the restriction on value added went out the window to keep the volumes flowing, as the harvest levels on public timber land never dropped, some cases it went up.

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 02:21

sally orgren

is how can we buy a t-shirt in America for less than three dollars when it HAS traveled the globe to be manufactured, regardless if the cotton or final label is domestic or not? 

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 03:55

ReedGuy

Volume and government subsidies, taxing someone else. How can I buy strawberries fresh from California or Florida for $2.50-$5 a lb, when local summer berries are $5.00 a box. If a sell a load of pulpwood locally, the trucking takes half the profit. Lumber is cheaper 1000 miles from here than it is locally, from the same mill. (rolling eyes) Natural gas is cheap, any place but here, because local distribution rates are several times higher than those in large urban centres. Same gas, same well.

China is subsizing builing contractors to build cities that the locals, whom many are peasant farmers, can not afford to live in. Ghost cities and false economies.

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 05:01

sarahnopp (not verified)

Yeah, the hidden costs are just amazing. There was a discussion with a farmer about why it costs so much for us to buy a chicken she raises in her backyard, compared to the ones at the store. The answer: subsidies. Who knew.

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 15:34

sally orgren

we all complain about the high cost of things but then want the cheapest price for a product. I wonder, what IS the true cost of the t-shirt? 

FYI, I believe the Kickstarter campaign was offering the shirts at $25 a piece, and if I heard correctly, they raised over $500,000 (U.S.) for the project, with a stated goal of $50,000.

 

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 16:41

ReedGuy

I know the last time I got a Canadian made work shirt 'Big Bills' it was around $35. A Dickies from Bangladesh $8. An Asian medium will not fit like a Canadian medium, the Asian is too small in the elbows, shoulders, and arm length.