Blood, Sweat and Luxuries

Six young British consumers swap their luxury lives for the simple mud huts and shanty towns of Africa and Asia to work alongside the people who mine, manufacture, process and recycle luxury goods.

Six young British consumers swap their luxury lives for the simple mud huts and shanty towns of Africa and Asia to work alongside the people who mine, manufacture, process and recycle luxury goods.

The volunteers leave behind Ethiopia's capital and head for the famous coffee plantations of Yirgacheffe. Here, they take up residence in the remote mountain village of Biolya, where they are challenged to live as coffee workers. However, this time the group will have no help from a local family, and surviving on meagre wages begins to causes tensions within the unit.

The volunteers head for Ghana, where they battle frayed tempers and exhaustion to join thousands of workers mining for gold by hand. They also take part in one of their most stressful ordeals yet when at Electrical Dump site, where young children are put to work scavenging through abandoned computers from the West in search of valuable copper pieces.

The volunteers leave Africa for the Philippines as they enter the final leg of their journey. Here, they discover the ultra-competitive world of electronics, where they join highly disciplined factory workers to assemble components. They are also given a taste of an alternative to industry life when they visit a city dump, which is both home and workplace to the people who rely on it for a living.