Its the Second Dirtiest Thing in the WorldAnd Youre Wearing It. Photo Credit Aleph StudioShutterstock. The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world. Manhattan audience earlier this year. Its a really nasty business. While youd never hear an oil tycoon malign his bonanza in such a way, the woman who stood at the podium, Eileen Fisher, is a clothing industry magnate. On a warm spring night at a Chelsea Piers ballroom on the Hudson River, Fisher was honored by Riverkeeper for her commitment to environmental causes. She was self deprecating and even apologetic when speaking about the ecological impact of clothing, including garments tagged with her own name. Fishers critique may have seemed hyperbolic, but she was spot on. When we think of pollution, we envision coal powerplants, strip mined mountaintops and raw sewage piped into our waterways. We dont often think of the shirts on our backs. But the overall impact the apparel industry has on our planet is quite grim. Fashion is a complicated business involving long and varied supply chains of production, raw material, textile manufacture, clothing construction, shipping, retail, use and ultimately disposal of the garment. While Fishers assessment that fashion is the second largest polluter is likely impossible to know, what is certain is that the fashion carbon footprint is tremendous. Determining that footprint is an overwhelming challenge due to the immense variety from one garment to the next. A general assessment must take into account not only obvious pollutants the pesticides used in cotton farming, the toxic dyes used in manufacturing and the great amount of waste discarded clothing creates but also the extravagant amount of natural resources used in extraction, farming, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and shipping. While cotton, especially organic cotton, might seem like a smart choice, it can still take more than 5,0. T shirt and a pair of jeans. Synthetic, man made fibers, while not as water intensive, often have issues with manufacturing pollution and sustainability. And across all textiles, the manufacturing and dyeing of fabrics is chemically intensive. Globalization means that your shirt likely traveled halfway around the world in a container ship fueled by the dirtiest of fossil fuels. A current trend in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand for quick and cheap clothes and it is a huge problem. Your clothes continue to impact the environment after purchase washing and final disposal when youre finished with your shirt may cause more harm to the planet than you realize. Fisher is right, the fashion industry is truly a mess. A Thirsty, Needy Plant. Cotton is the worlds most commonly used natural fiber and is in nearly 4. It has a clean, wholesome image long cultivated by the garment industry. But the truth is that it is a thirsty little plant that drinks up more of its fair share of water. A Part of Hearst Digital Media. Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means Good Housekeeping gets paid commissions on. How your clothes are poisoning our oceans and food supply. A list of all the characters in The Canterbury Tales. The The Canterbury Tales characters covered include The Narrator, The Knight, The Wife of Bath, The Pardoner. Buy and sell second hand items, and more, in your local area. List for free with Preloved classified ads, in over 500 categories Created by Winnie Holzman. With Bess Armstrong, Wilson Cruz, Claire Danes, Devon Gummersall. Corel Draw 8 Windows Xp. A 15yearold girl and her trials and tribulations of being a teenager. It is also one of the most chemically dependent crops in the world. While only 2. 4 of the worlds cropland is planted with cotton, it consumes 1. Some genetically modified varieties, which are resistant to some insects and tolerant of some herbicides, now make up more than 2. Cotton is indeed grown all over the world with China being the largest cotton grower followed by India, the United States, Pakistan and Brazil. Uzbekistan, the worlds sixth leading producer of cotton, is a prime example of how cotton can severely impact a regions environment. In the 1. 95. 0s, two rivers in Central Asia, the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya, were diverted from the Aral sea to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and nearby Turkmenistan. Roman clothing owed much to that of ancient Greece, but it had distinct forms of its own. In all the ancient world, first and foremost clothes needed to be simple. Today, water levels in the Aral are less than 1. As the Aral dried up, fisheries and the communities that relied on them failed. Over time, the sea became over salinated and laden with fertilizer and pesticides from the nearby fields. Dust from the dry, exposed lakebed, containing these chemicals and salt saturated the air, creating a public health crisis and settling onto farm fields, contaminating the soil. The Aral is rapidly becoming a dry sea, and the loss of the moderating influence that such a large body of water has on the weather has made the regions winters much colder and summers hotter and drier. While Uzbekistan is an extreme example of how cotton farming can wreak havoc on the environment, the impact of cotton agriculture is felt in other regions, including Pakistans Indus River, Australias Murray Darling Basin, and the Rio Grande in the U. S. and Mexico. Organic cotton is a much more sustainable alternative, but today it is only about one percent of all the cotton grown worldwide and quite expensive to grow compared to conventional cotton. It is not without its downsides, however. Organic cotton still needs large amounts of water, and the clothing made from it may still be dyed with chemicals and shipped globally, meaning that theres still a big carbon footprint with cotton garments carrying the organic tag. Clothes to Dye For Dyes are creating a chemical Fukushima in Indonesia. Second Life Clothes' title='Second Life Clothes' />The Citarum River is considered one of the most polluted rivers in the world due in great part to the hundreds of textile factories lining its shores. According to Greenpeace, with 6. Driver Canon Mg5350 Windows. Upper Citarum producing textiles, the adverse health effects to the 5 million people living in the river basin and wildlife are alarming. Little care was paid to Indonesias water infrastructure when its textile boom began proper framework for waste disposal was largely neglected. Clothing manufacturers dumped their chemicals into the river, making the Citarum nothing more than a open sewer containing with lead, mercury, arsenic and a host of other toxins. Greenpeace tested the discharge from one of these textile plants along the Citarum and found disturbing amounts of nonylphenol, an endocrine disruptor, which can be deadly to aquatic life. Greenpeace also found the water to be high in alkalinity equivalent to that of lye based drain openers and had apparently not even received the most basic of treatment. Greenpeace described the discharge as highly caustic, will burn human skin coming into direct contact with the stream and will have a severe impact most likely fatal on aquatic life in the immediate vicinity of the discharge area. The menace caused by nonylphenol doesnt end at the Citarum River. The chemical remains in our clothes after they are produced, and only comes out after a few washes. For this reason, the European Union member states have banned imports of clothing and textiles containing nonylphenol ethoxylates it banned nonylphenol for its own textile manufacturing more than a decade ago. While not banned in the U. S., the Environmental Protection Agency has identified eight safer alternatives to nonylphenol ethoxylates. Altogether, more than a half trillion gallons of fresh water are used in the dyeing of textiles each year. The dye wastewater is discharged, often untreated, into nearby rivers, where it reaches the sea, eventually spreading around the globe. China, according to Yale Environment 3. New technologies, such as waterless dye technologies have been developed, but have not yet been deployed at most manufacturing sites. Vanishing Acts Jodi Picoult, 2005 tells a story about the nature and power of memory about what happens when the past we have been running from catches up to us. The laundry system that changed my life. Wu Zetian 624 December 16, 705, alternatively named Wu Zhao, Wu Hou, and during the later Tang dynasty as Tian Hou, also referred to in English as Empress. The textile industry, which has been using copious amounts of water to dye garments for hundreds of years, may be reluctant to embrace this change. After all, this new technology is expensive to install and only works on certain fabrics.