Week 2: Be Green

Sidney Siu
ASA 141
Blog #2

As we end our first week of the Be Green Challenge, I don’t think I feel any different than last week besides the fact that I am conscious that I didn’t buy anything outside of necessities. I barely have to be careful of not buying something extra for myself because I don’t usually look for or randomly buy things when I don’t need it. Lucky for me, I don’t have any events coming up where I would have wanted to buy something new to wear. I believe that as the weeks go on, I will need to be more mindful of buying things. For example, I will probably need to go to Target soon and will really need to concentrate on only getting what I need.

In Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s Crossing the Assembly Line, she mentions how many Asian American fashion designers get their start by learning from their parents who work in the fashion industry. This makes me think of all the Asian (American) immigrants who work so hard in garment factories, only to get paid pennies. So by buying unnecessary products, such as fast fashion clothing, we are contributing to the demand for theses products that workers aren’t getting a decent pay for. It also contributes to the cycle of global warming as it emits a lot of CO2 from endless transportation, keeping the factories running, and pollution of wasted/old products. Not only do we need to stop/halt new greenhouse gas emission, but according to National Geographic, “scientists have also emphasized that we need to extract existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” This just goes to show how bad the human carbon footprint is and how little time we have to fix the problem.