H&M, the poster child for confusing fashion—is it sustainable and responsible or not?—is poised to boost the quality and ethics of Ethiopia’s textile industry.

Along with Swedfund, a development financial institution, H&M wants to improve the social and environmental standards in Ethiopia’s nascent textile industry after a visit to the region earlier this year highlighted the country’s needs and viable offerings. Beginning this fall, H&M will start purchasing textiles from companies Swedfund is investing in. Swedfund has invested in more than 230 companies with a focus on responsible fiscal and environmental values, the institution claims.

“Swedfund will provide local market expertise and will invest in Ethiopian suppliers,” reports the Guardian. “This cooperation will also involve both parties setting standards for sustainable production and monitoring indicators such as water use and wages.”

“We see the cooperation as an opportunity to get involved in Ethiopia’s growing textile industry at an early stage and to contribute to more jobs. We have for many years worked in existing manufacturing countries to improve working conditions and the environment,” Karl-Johan Persson, CEO at H&M told the Guardian.

H&M’s interest may lie more in the fact that partnering with Ethiopia’s textile industry will cost the retailer less than purchasing from China, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other textile-producing countries. According to Thomas Ballweg, a procurement and technical consultant at GermanFashion, “On the one hand are the lower costs – much lower than in China – with 80 million people living there. And, it’s near the sea – and quick to get to Europe via the Suez Canal,” Ballweg told DW.

“Through this unique partnership with H&M, our goal is to contribute to developing the textile industry in Ethiopia, thus creating jobs with good working conditions that lift people out of poverty, especially women” Anna Ryott, managing director at Swedfund told the Guardian.

But will the move bring responsible textile manufacturing to the African nation or open the door to more sweatshop conditions and environmental hazards?

Responsible textile manufacturing is a necessary component to an ethical fashion industry, but the best step forward may be in reduced clothing manufacturing efforts in the first place—and a more focused effort in recycling, upcylcing and the creation of longer-wear products that decrease the need for new textiles altogether.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Related on EcoSalon

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What is Really Behind Fast Fashion, ‘Mad Men’ Execs and the H&M Trend Craze?

Image: gunman47

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ColumnNike has proven that it can “just do it” when it comes to incorporating sustainability into its supply chain… or has it?

Not so long ago, the Nike brand was synonymous with sweatshops and child labor.

But over the past decade, it has successfully reinvented itself into a poster child for innovation and sustainability in the apparel industry. Under its Nike Better World campaign, it has launched game-changing initiatives like doubling its use of recycled polyester in apparel; starting the Reuse-A-Shoe program, which has turned 28 million old shoes into things like sport courts, tracks, and playgrounds; and creating the Nike Materials Index, which seeks to clarify the environmental impact of internal design decisions. And ostensibly, it has cleaned up its labor issues.

For many, it’s a rags-to-riches story – proof that it is possible for one of the largest shoe companies in the world to embrace social responsibility and still turn a hefty profit. If they can “just do it,” why can’t the rest?

The story, however, is slightly more complicated. This week’s return of Behind The Label looks at the good – nay, great – elements of Nike’s about-face, along with the not-so-good aspects.

The Good

Nike’s corporate social responsibility efforts have been lauded throughout the industry. However, the company makes clear that it’s less altruism that drives forward their sustainability efforts – it’s the need to prepare for a “fundamentally different operating environment,” one in which “competition for scarce natural resources affects the cost and availability of the inputs needed to make our products” and “rising energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions lead to increasing pressure on traditional models of product manufacturing and transportation.”

Its sustainability pillars are four-fold:

• Creating a portfolio of sustainable materials
• Prototyping and scaling sustainable sourcing and manufacturing models
• Igniting and driving market transformation
• Creating digital services revenue

Now, it’s easy for companies as large as Nike to talk the talk when it comes to sustainability goals. But Nike is also walking the walk, particularly when it comes to the technology of sustainability.

Its latest innovation is called Flyknit – a new shoe created through a mechanized knitting process that minimizes weight (for a better “barefoot” running experience AND lower shipping costs) as well as waste (66 percent less than the brand’s popular Air Pegasus+ 28).

The computer-controlled weaving technology is a “game-changer,” Nike president Charlie Denson told Bloomberg News last March. The technology eliminates the need to cut and assemble multiple parts of the shoe, which is the most labor-intensive part of the process and a large reason Nike has long outsourced cheaper labor in Asia. Denson says that the technology cuts costs so much “that eventually we could make these shoes anywhere in the world.” Including, potentially, on-site at your local Nike store.

The Bad

Indeed, Nike has come a long way from its position at the center of the sweatshop movement of the 1990s, when it was revealed that the company was using child labor in its overseas factories. The news sparked student movements on college campuses across the country, which lobbied their administrations to divest themselves from campus and sports apparel that were made under sweatshop-like conditions.

Since then, Nike has made an effort to work with advocacy groups and unions to address their concerns. But apparently, the company hasn’t worked hard enough. For instance, in 2011, garment workers at the Sukabami plant near Jakarta, Indonesia, claimed that they were mentally and physically abused at factories making Converse, a brand that is owned by Nike. The workers reported that supervisors “slapped them in the face, kicked them and called them dogs and pigs,” according to a report from the Associated Press. Workers at the factory made around 50 cents an hour – “enough for food and bunkhouse-type lodging, but little else.”

According to the AP, Nike is aware of such abuses in its factories, but it is unable – or unwilling – to stop them. An internal report released in 2011 showed that about two-thirds of the 168 factories contracted by Nike to make Converse products fail to meet Nike’s standards, with twelve in the most serious category, 97 in a category for no progress, and six that hadn’t been audited.

The Questionable

When Nike released the Flyknit shoe, it also launched the Nike Flyknit Collective – a large-scale marketing campaign centered around a platform for creative innovators who were embracing the fundamental principles of the shoe’s design. As part of the campaign, Nike hosted large scale art installations in six major cities, producing video and media content to share on the web.

Nike is famous for lavish advertising, endorsement deals, and marketing stints like this one. The Flyknit campaign easily cost millions. And recently, Nike made headlines for closing one of the most lucrative athletic sponsorships in history — $200 million over 10 years to 23-year-old golf star Rory McIlroy.

When faced with such sums, it’s difficult to explain why Nike can’t pay its factory workers more than 50 cents an hour, or why it claims that it can’t scrounge up the resources to more vigorously monitor its overseas factories.

The advances taken by Nike have been tremendous. And it’s possible that Nike’s latest advance, a shoe knit mechanically, is its greatest yet.

But have Nike’s shiny sustainability efforts distracted us from the fact that substandard conditions continue to perpetuate its overseas factories? The campus protests may have stopped in the 1990s, but it appears the problems continue to exist more than 20 years later. Nike has proven that it has the resources to overcome sustainability barriers previously thought insurmountable. Let’s hope its next efforts are directed toward creating a better world for its workers.

Images: Nike Better World, Nike Sustainability Strategy, Nike Flyknit Collective

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In the last of this 4 part series, undercover industry writer, Louise Lagosi address the history of fashion marketing, the strategies used to build the perfect consumer while covering up poor quality, and how those tactics have effected us as a society. We also look at how the fashion industry and marketing is changing with the times to keep up with an evolving society of people.

If you read the first three parts of this series, you might be in the mood to avoid the media, shut off your TV, stop shopping, and just give up on fashion. But, other than offering you peace of mind, what would that accomplish? As easy as it is to point fingers, the leaders of the fashion industry are not the only ones responsible for the state of fashion. Society as a whole bought what was being sold without stopping as individuals to question the motives behind the advertisement or wondering if our “consumer” habits were good for us, our neighbors, or the planet.

Unless you want to go back to wearing burlap bags, and go Medieval, we all need something to adorn our bodies. And let’s face it, beautiful clothes, beautiful anything for that matter, really does make life more joyful. That said, nothing can be beautiful if it has a dirty, rotten underbelly it’s hiding. So let’s just get to the core of this thing.

Taking Responsibility

Now that the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been imprinted on our brains, we all know that shopping with small mom and pops stores, as well as supporting local designers and supply chains is the best thing we can do for our immediate environment, but how can we be effective on a global level? Have you read any articles, or signed any petitions requesting that corporations clean up their acts? Written to your government representative asking for higher international labor standards lately? Not sure who your representatives are? Well, it’s pretty easy to find out. In this age of information sharing with a little due diligence and research it’s becoming increasingly easier to figure out who’s doing business right, and who’s doing business wrong. And it’s even easier to find a petition or even to start a petition asking companies and the government to do business responsibly.

It has become more and more common to share our opinions and knowledge of this kind freely among our friends and associates, on Facebook, Twitter, and various social media sources. As a favor for your sharing the information, they in turn go on and share it with their friends and pretty soon the news has gone viral. Some of your conversations on Facebook might look something like this:

“There’s a joke going around China today that you can tell what colors are going to be in fashion next season by looking at the rivers.“

“I think I’ll opt for a nice neutral, beige from now on, thanks.”

 “Time to Stop the Fashion Pirates again. Forever 21 has gotten caught stealing yet another design from independent designers.”

“I stopped shopping at Forever 21 after my last purchase from there smelled like magic markers and fell apart in the first wash. But I do buy clothes from the local designers in my own town.“

 “Why does Disney still carry polyester jammies for kids coated in fire-retardants? Didn’t they get the memo that it’s been repeatedly proven that both the synthetic fibers in clothing and formaldehyde based fire-retardants are carcinogenic, cancer causing, hormone disrupting, and/or can cause damage to our nervous systems?!

“I wouldn’t know, I avoid both synthetics and Disney like the plague.“

 “Did you hear that Victoria’s Secret were caught slashing and throwing away garments that were returned because donating them to charity was too much of a hassle to organize?”

“I wouldn’t wear Victoria Secret, even if it were free. Let’s just say that I don’t know a single 16 year old whose boobs naturally sit directly under her chin, so why, at any age, should mine?”

Whether or not these conversations in social media and on the street actually sway the decisions of those in power to create a change in the industry, for us to be aware enough about these issues that we feel a little whistle blowing is in order can make us better, more informed, people.

Word gets around fast in this Internet Age and in no time at all, Walmart has a publicity crisis for abusing their laborers, and the Gap is making public apologies for promoting red,white, & blue flag waving products that are made in China. H&M and Nike claim they too are doing their parts, all while receiving raised eyebrows from the sustainable community, for making lofty corporate responsibility initiatives mandated for 2020 that promise unprecedented standards with little or no suggestions on how they might go about doing so. Perhaps H&M & Nike could borrow from their multibillion dollar marketing budgets to fund reaching their 2020 goals.

Are initiatives enough? Hardly, but when you’re a company that’s big enough to consume one third of the planets organic cotton supply, even a small initiative, like H&M’s organic cotton initiative can keep large amounts of fertilizer and herbicide from going into our water, provided it’s an honest effort. “Good” is questionable when you take into account that their organic cotton is not all that organic after all.

Recent New York City H&M window

With their greenwashing marketing efforts these companies still do not get the green light for sustainable shopping. In the same way we shop for food, if we can’t find clear and certifiable labeling on the product, many of us are not buying it. Some consumers are even going so far as avoiding stores with bad track records altogether, regardless of their “eco” initiatives.

In 2009, The Hartman Group’s report, titled Sustainablity: the Rise in Consumer Responsibility stated that 88% of consumers engage in what they consider to be sustainable behavior. Are people hearing concerns about water contamination or global warming and choosing to cut back where they can to help? Are fast fashion fans growing annoyed that their clothes fall apart after a couple washes when the hand-me-downs from their mother’s wardrobe seem to last forever? Have people suddenly realized that they have enough stuff in their closets that they could probably go for years without shopping and still maintain appearances?

Author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, describes the pivotal moment in her consumer mindset, “When I piled up all of my clothes in the middle of my bedroom, I was astonished that there wasn’t much variety within the mound of poorly made clothing. It was mostly all one color, and I had bought more or less the same few items over and over again. I wasn’t using most of it, and most of it was cheep crap that I didn’t even like very much. Overall, I was unsatisfied with what was in there.”

She explains the transformation that occurred in that moment of realization, “It made me more mindful. I shop my own closet now. I have stopped buying repeat garments. I don’t crave having a million tops. That doesn’t really interest me anymore. I want one or two good garments for each category to make complete outfits within my wardrobe. I want to save my money to buy really nice items to fill in the holes.”

Signs of Change in Mainstream Fashion Media

CFDA Leader, Diane Von Furstenburg, and American Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Anna Wintour, recently released that they support encouraging a cleaner Fashion Industry through an initiative presented by the NRDC called Clean By Design. We’re still waiting to see how they do clean up, but they have taken the first step, which is openly acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is nothing short of a miracle.

Fashion Labels Evolving With the Times

Eileen Fisher

This privately owned company has always taken a holistic approach to designing clothing. The brand carefully chooses fibers for their sustainable, community based, growing methods, natural content, longevity, and feel. They work with collectives and factories around the world that pay fair-trade wages. They design clothes that are timeless and that do not relate to any trends, allowing the clothes to survive as long as their high quality materials do. And through their recent initiatives like Ampersand, they have been educating their customers on why choosing their products supports a sustainable environment here on earth for everyone involved.

Patagonia 

Patagonia also keeps their marketing to a minimum, but when they do promote something, the message is unusual for a clothing company. They promote clean water initiatives, such as Our Common Waters, in their recent Common Threads Initiative, they tell people to stop buying more than they need. They also provide transparency in their supply chain like in The Footprint Chronicles, with this interactive map on their site showing exactly where their factories are located with stats, reports, and a brief on Patagonia’s history with each one. This brand ultimately puts their dollars in recycled materials innovations, such as polar fleece made of recycled bottles, and maintaining factory standards, so they can provide more responsible products to their customers.

Timberland

Timberland is a brand that is committed to the outdoors. Which is why they have made  developed TIMBERLAND RESPONSIBILITY, their plan for significantly reducing their companies emissions through the research, evaluation, and investment in company structures that will allow them to run cleaner and produce products that have a smaller impact on the earth. The company reports are transparent and available to the public on their home site, grading their efforts and describing all the methods used to achieve their challenging goals to reduce their company wide climate impact.

Levi’s 

Levi’s has been doing business with the goal of striving towards sustainability and excellence for over 100 years now. They give cash credits to customers who return their old Levi’s in for their denim recycling programs and they have been working on increasingly finding ways to reducing their water use in their denim production processes. Are they singing about their exceptional practices in their ad campaigns to help better educate their customers? Let’s just say this is one of the places where they still have room to improve.

Pendleton

This nearly 150 year old American company produces much of it’s premium products, from fibers grown, spun, dyed, and woven in America. They keep marketing to a minimum and keep their funding aimed at doing business responsibly and offering the best quality products possible to the customers they serve. Their product’s are so beautifully made, by  that they end up heirlooms in most of the fortunate homes that they grace.

Change is indeed happening all around, but most of all it starts with each one of us. We have to make up our own minds. What type of consumers are we?

Image: oxfam, Fashionista, Last Night’s Garbage,Amy DuFault

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Does PUMA’s sustainability efforts cancel out its shaky sweatshop record?

In 2010, global athletics brand PUMA wowed the sustainable design world when it unveiled the Clever Little Bag, its eco-effective reinvention of the classic shoebox. The product of a nearly two-year collaboration with Yves Béhar’s fuseproject, the Clever Little Bag consists of 65 percent less paper, reduces PUMA’s carbon emissions by 10,000 tons per year and requires significantly less water, energy and diesel in the manufacturing process. Plus, it’s reusable.

The project falls under the company’s “PUMAVision” for a world that is “safer, more peaceful and more creative than the world we know today.” But while PUMA is making strides in the world of sustainable design and packaging, the same can’t be said for its commitment to ethical manufacturing. For decades, PUMA has repeatedly come under fire for human rights violations in its developing world factories. The contradiction begs the question: can commitment to ethics and the environment necessarily be separated?

The Good

The 4Keys is the tool we have developed to help us stay true to PUMAVision, and we use it by constantly asking ourselves if we are being Fair, Honest, Positive, and Creative in everything we do. We believe that by staying true to our values, inspiring the passion and talent of our people, working in sustainable, innovative ways, and doing our best to be Fair, Honest, Positive, and Creative, we will keep on making the products our customers love, and at the same time bring that vision of a better world a little closer every day.

PUMA works to implement this PUMAVision through three programs: puma.safe (addressing social and environmental issues), puma.peace (working for world peace) and puma.creative (promoting creativity).

The development of the Clever Little Bag fell under the puma.safe program. When PUMA approached fuseproject to collaborate, their needs were simple, said fuseproject’s Bart Haney at a recent presentation for the Pratt Institute’s Sustainability Crash Course. PUMA wanted to completely redesign their shoebox, polybag and hangtag to be more sustainable, while also cutting costs.

The project began with a comprehensive lifecycle analysis, the findings of which were released to the public in a 50-page PDF document. In short, it was found that the Clever Little Bag would result in savings on the production side because of reduced carbon emissions; savings during transport because of the innovative shape and reduced weight; and influence on customer behavior, since the shoe bag would encourage reuse and eliminate the need for an additional polymer shopping bag.

Next, it was on to the design phase. After going through more than 2,000 designs and testing out more than 40 prototypes, the Clever Little Bag design was chosen. Made from non-woven polyethylene with a corrugated “bone” structure to separate shoes and provide stability, the design requires little assembly and considers transport, storage and retail display efficiency.

The PUMA hangtag also got a makeover, shrinking to save paper and incorporating icons from the PUMA Eco-Table to save space. As for the polybag, the solution was almost laughably simple, Haney said. By folding the shirt in half just one more time, designers were able to halve the amount of plastic needed.

The Bad

The positive press surrounding the Clever Little Bag launch couldn’t overshadow the human rights violations reported at PUMA factories in recent years. Though PUMA is a member of the Fair Labor Association and claims that it conducts regular independent audits, it is regularly called out by anti-sweatshop organizations for conditions at its 350 outsourced production facilities. For instance:

• In January 2011, PUMA’s El Salvadoran producer Ocean Sky came under fire when sweatshop conditions and 60 hour-plus shifts were exposed by the American National Labor Committee.
• In April 2011, 101 Cambodian garment workers fainted at the Huey Chuen factory in Phnom Penh due to long working hours and poor health and safety. And just a few months ago, a woman was shot during a labor protest in Phnom Penh calling for better working conditions and higher pay.
• In March of this year, an independent study by the War On Want exposed working conditions in Bangladeshi factories producing Olympic apparel for PUMA, Nike, and Adidas. The report found that most workers make well under a living wage and have to illegally work over the 60-hour maximum in order to make enough to survive.

One report can be dismissed as an isolated incident. But frequent reports from factories around the world point to larger issues of neglect.

The Questionable

With its emphasis on sustainable innovation, PUMA is capable of creating industry-wide environmental change. The Clever Little Bag is proof that reimagining things like a shoebox can not only improve eco-efficiency but also cut down on costs – a fact that is already pushing PUMA’s peers to analyze their own packaging.

But if PUMA is serious about having a positive social impact, it must also take meaningful steps to improve working conditions along its supply chain. According to the PUMAVision statement, the company is constantly questioning its pursuit of fairness. Insisting on living wages and decent labor conditions in its overseas factories seems like a logical next step.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: H&M’s Conscious Collection

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

Behind the Label: Levi Strauss’ E-Valuate Program

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Behind the Label: West Elm Green

Behind the Label: TOMS’ One for One Campaign

Behind the Label: Design Within Reach

Behind the Label: Burt’s Bees

Behind the Label: Aveda Natural Beauty Products

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Change, whether good or bad, supported or maligned, always begins the same way: with one person, one idea, and one moment of courage. Many people find change suspect because the outcome is unknown; there are too many unforeseeable consequences. They naysay new ideas about old ways of thinking, not realizing how remiss we’d be without the positive progress in equality, health, and the environment that change makes possible. They forget that just years ago, secondhand smoke in offices, restaurants, and other crowded areas was just an accepted aspect of life. But thanks to one city – San Luis Obispo, California – the majority of indoor public spaces in America are now smoke-free, and we’re much healthier for it.

Cities effect change through bans, setting precedents that are sometimes revolutionary and almost always controversial. Over the past few years, a number of U.S. cities have gone the way of San Luis Obispo: initiating bans that are aren’t always popular with everyone but have the power to change things for the better.

1. Santa Clara, California: No Happy Meal Toys

In April 2010, Santa Clara County’s Board of Supervisors decided to prohibit fast-food restaurants from adding toys or other promotional items to kids’ meals. The ban applies only to eateries in certain areas of the county, and only to kids’ meals that have significantly high levels of calories, sodium, fat, and sugar. Fast-food establishments have ninety days to give up the toys or develop more nutritionally sound menu choices for kids. Those supporting the ban feel that offering toys with fast-food meals rewards kids for eating McDonald’s, Burger King, and so on. It lessens the incentive for the fast food industry to target children, which could help curb the increasingly growing rates of childhood obesity in this country.

2. San Francisco, California: No City Money for Bottled Water, No Plastic Bags

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared in 2007 that no more of the city’s money would go toward bottled water (as in buying it for government offices or city functions). Other cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Salt Lake City, followed suit and cut local-government spending on bottled water. Some went further, like Chicago, which tacked on a five-cent tax to every bottle of water sold, and Concord, Massachusetts, which banned the sale of any bottled water from within its borders starting in January 2011. The anti-bottled water legislation in these two cities is much more extreme, and therefore much more disputed. Banning or reducing bottled water at the government level first seems like a more popular, and therefore possibly more effective, first step.

San Francisco put forth another groundbreaking law in 2007, banning plastic bags from all major supermarkets and pharmacies in the area. The government gave businesses (exempting small ones) a year to switch to paper or compostable bags. NPR estimated that this legislation would reduce plastic-bag usage by five million bags each month. The move inspired similar action in Los Angeles, Paris, and London. In Washington, D.C., residents now pay five cents for paper or plastic bags from stores, restaurants, and pharmacies.

3. North Olmsted, Ohio: No Sweatshop Goods

North Olmstead is a suburb in Cleveland that also happens to be the first area in the country to forbid products made in sweatshops. Mayor Ed Boyle came up with the idea in 2007, creating an ordinance that banned city vendors from buying, renting, or selling anything produced in a work environment with sweatshop-like conditions. Another Cleveland-area city, Bedford Heights, adopted the same ban, and other cities have looked into doing something similar.

4. Los Angeles, California: No New Fast-Food Restaurants

Los Angeles’s City Council made this highly controversial ban in 2008, deciding that South Los Angeles had more than enough fast-food establishments (about four hundred at the time), and put a yearlong moratorium on any new ones opening in the thirty-two-square-mile area. The council wanted to use that year to entice healthier restaurants and grocery stores into the neighborhood; the ban specified eateries that have drive-through windows and/or use heat lamps in lieu of freshly prepared meals. The council also enacted the ban to reduce the higher-than-average obesity rates in South L.A., though opponents argue that’s a form of food policing. But residents can still access hundreds of fast-food joints in the area. The problem is that there are very few grocery stores in comparison; the ban is supposed to close the gap a little and give people in the neighborhood more dining options.

5. New York, New York: No Trans Fat in Restaurants

Even more contested than the L.A. fast-food ban was Manhattan’s infamous trans-fat ban in 2006. The Board of Health voted to eliminate the unhealthy ingredient from all city restaurants by July 2008, giving chefs two years to replace it in their recipes. Even though trans fat is linked to heart disease and increases bad-cholesterol levels, many restaurant owners and citizens feared the ban would make food taste worse. Despite their doubts, a 2009 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that the ban-which reduced the amount of trans fat in NYC restaurants from 50 percent to 2 percent-didn’t hurt restaurant business. Plus, the amount of both trans fat and saturated fat was reduced in french fries by 50 percent, suggesting that restaurants offer more-healthful fare postban.

I always feel a little suspicious when something’s completely eliminated from public use because it can be a slippery slope. Even though I’m vehemently against smoking, I do feel that legislation limiting the right to smoke in cars and homes infringes upon people’s rights. That’s why I understand the outcry against fast-food and trans-fat bans, and even plastics and happy meal toys, to an extent-when does external enforcement of citizens’ personal lives and choices stop? Could these decisions, though meant for the greater good, be used to justify others that go too far? But limiting oneself to that mindset also limits anything good that can come from the restrictions, like healthier people and environments. These specific bans have the potential to do just that, which is why I hope they’re successful and influential, and that they’re not taken too far beyond their intentions.

Article by Vicki Santillano for DivineCaroline. First published May 2010.

Related DivineCaroline posts:

• New Plans to Get America Moving
• You Are What you Eat: Inside America’s Refrigerators
• Six Good Deeds That Take Less Than Five Minutes

Image: kla4067

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