Buy Nothing Day (2)

CLOTHING apparel and related items — toys, shirts, trousers, shoes, sandals, hats, eyeglasses, beauty products, jewelry, and all the worldly merchandise – take their rightful places in shelves and display racks as regularly as the four seasons come around.

The first whiff of change apparently comes from the world’s top source of consumer goods, Hong Kong, which recently announced a “Buy Nothing Day.”

It is an international day of protest against consumerism which originated in Canada and has been celebrated by cutting up credit cards and pushing around empty shopping carts.

Studies say Hongkongers dispose of 110,000 tons of textile garments each year – an amount that would fill 25,000 Hong Kong stadiums. That is equivalent to 1,400 T-shirts being thrown out every minute. Per capita, it works out to about 15.3 kg of clothing disposed of in a year.

That is the exact opposite of the Black Friday sales in the US, which comes a day after Thanksgiving. Hordes of buyers would rush into department stores to grab anything that they can afford to carry home because prices are so cheap.

Many of the stuffs they bought usually end up in the garage, waiting for the day when they would be of use.

Meanwhile, in many parts of the world, multitudes go hungry. Many have nothing to wear. The food the poor bring to their tables are either poisoned, contaminated, or both.

And as the world’s poor grow in number, so does the number of billionaires. There were 1,645 billionaires in 2014, with a combined wealth of $6.4 trillion.

There is an inverse proportion when it comes to wealth. The more it accumulates in the hands of a few, the less the majority of the poor will share those wealth.

So, is the time to join the bandwagon of Buy Nothing Day ripe?

Yes, it should have been yesterday. But it’s not too late.

Let us hope that this movement snowball worldwide and reach a point where the rich stop their mad rush for turning out consumer products at the cost of depleted natural resources.