Lucy Mangan: how many slaves work for you?

Need an antidote to Christmas excess? Calculating your slavery footprint should sober you up pretty quickly
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A woman picks cotton in Uzbekistan
Chances are there'll be something in your wardrobe that carries the touch of a modern-day slave - such as those work the cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Photograph: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters

Hello everybody, and a happy new year to you all! I hope you ate, drank, were merry and didn't swap too many bodily fluids too inappropriately with anyone at your office/friends'/neighbours' parties.

Are you feeling a bit bloated? As though all your senses have been fully sated and then some? Do you feel in need of a purge – certainly intestinally, and perhaps even mentally as you look back on a series of days of excess and abandon. You do? I have the perfect thing. Do you want to try calculating your slave footprint? It's like your carbon footprint, but much, much worse. is a US website that allows you to calculate the likely total of people – men, women and children – working in terrible conditions in poorer and developing countries to manufacture all the stuff – food, clothing, electronics and so on – you have. You put in your details (your age, gender, how many children, bedrooms, bathrooms, gadgets you own) and out comes an appalling number. In my case, it was 65.

I keep hoping that in fact it's lower, because the site doesn't allow for the number of secondhand items you might have, because it doesn't always tell you whether it's asking for your day, week or month's consumption, because there is no way to tell it that my "stereo and 10+ CDs" are 20 years old, or that I have so many tops and shoes because I never throw anything away rather than because I buy billions a week... because, because, because...

In the end, of course, I must face the fact that whatever potential adjustments I could make, there is no way that number is going down to zero or anywhere near it. Every nappy I buy adds to my complicity. Every t-shirt, whether secondhand or not, that ends up in my wardrobe will probably carry the touch of a modern-day slave - maybe one of the 1.4 million in the Uzbek cotton fields cited on the clothing page, maybe elsewhere - but almost certainly somewhere.

The glitter in every sparkly eyeshadow loses lustre when you're told it's probably from mica mined by Indian children in some hideous real-life version of Indiana Jones's Temple of Doom.

Of course, the precise number isn't the point. Or at least, it's not the main point. The real value of the site is that it gives you a way of reframing the world and your actions in it. I am much more likely to stay my purchasing eye or turn leftover food in the fridge into a further, if only faintly appetising, meal if I think of the true costs embedded in it – the litres of water used, the carbon generated in its manufacture - rather than the small waste of money it represents at the point of (non-)consumption. How much more so when there is a way to reckon the human cost as well.

Some, naturally, will argue that it is less a human cost than the price of progress – that our so-called slaves are not being oppressed but given opportunities, that richer countries are investing rather than exploiting poorer nations. Maybe they are right, but I can't hear the doubtless convincing details they have to share over the sound of my own blundering, thundering steps across the globe, leaving huge and bloody footprints in their wake.

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