The Shocking Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Fabric and Leather Industries

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: October 11, 2017

Inexpensive clothing has become a serious pollution problem in more ways than one. Each year, an estimated 80 billion garments are sold worldwide, and each year, Americans alone throw away 15 million tons of clothing1 — most of it having been worn just a few times. This is a trend that completely disregards the toxic toll each garment takes on environmental and human health throughout the manufacturing and distribution processes involved in its creation.

Organic cotton, which is more sustainable, accounts for a mere 1 percent of the cotton grown across the globe. Sustainable plant dyes account for an even smaller portion of the global garment industry. Great benefits could come from expanding the organic cotton and natural textile dye industries. Natural materials such as leather also have significant downsides. Leather processing has become incredibly chemical intense, poisoning areas where locals are already struggling with widespread poverty and pollution.

The Toxic Side of Leather Tannery

The short video above by Daniel Lanteigne shows the impact the leather processing industry has had in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country that has no regulations on toxic waste management. More than 20,000 people work and live in the Hazaribagh tannery district, where toxic chemicals from 200 tanneries flow freely through the open sewers lining the city streets. The Buriganga River has turned black from the toxins, and mounds of discarded leather scraps line its banks.

Yet people still use the river for clothes washing and bathing on a regular basis. As one would expect, skin ulcers, respiratory problems and chest pains are common health complaints in the area. As noted in the video, “market profitability is causing both the government and the tanners to turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences and health hazards.”

Bangladesh also does not regulate workers’ conditions. Few if any are given any kind of protective gear and are in direct contact with the chemicals on a daily basis. Most tanneries do not even have ventilation or indoor lighting. Child labor is also commonplace and unregulated.

Garment Industry Poses Serious Threat to Waterways

A recent article by Heather Pringle and Amorina Kingdon in Hakai Magazine2 highlights how the fashion industry is impacting waterways around the globe. Commenting on the leather industry, Pringle and Kingdon write:

“To transform perishable animal skin into durable leather, factory workers soaked animal hides in a series of toxic baths containing nearly 40 different acids and several heavy metals including chromium, a known carcinogen. The hides absorbed just 20 percent of these chemical brews: the rest was waste.

In all, Dhaka’s tanneries discharged nearly 22,000 cubic liters of toxic effluent daily into the Buriganga River, which ultimately flows into the Bay of Bengal …  

Faced with an environmental disaster along the floodplain of the Buriganga River, the Bangladeshi government forced Dhaka’s leather factories to move to a new industrial park in 2017, and it has promised to install an effluent treatment plant there. But the opening of the plant was delayed, and in February, residents raised fears that the transplanted tanneries were contaminating a second river, the Dhaleshwari.”

Toxic runoff from cotton growers also poses a serious threat to water quality. In Pakistan, the fourth-largest cotton producer in the world, the cotton industry has polluted much of the groundwater, rendering it unsafe to drink. Cotton also gobbles up 20 trillion liters (5.28 trillion gallons) of the Indus River’s precious water each year.

As a result of widespread water mismanagement, the Indus River now faces the same fate as the Aral Sea, situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been nearly drained for irrigation, obliterating the once-thriving fishing economy in the area. Aral Sea fishermen of old used to catch 40 tons of fish per year. Today, the area is littered with fishing vessels lying on dry land, and what used to be a thriving seaport is now nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the water’s edge.

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Climate Change Is Making It Harder to Grow Rice

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Malaysian farmers are watching changing weather patterns threaten their staple crops, and switching to other crops might be the only answer.

Author: Sawsan Morrar | Published: October 11, 2017

When Abdulhamid bin Saad, 68, reminisced over the 50 years he’s worked the rice paddies, he had no problem remembering what farming was like before using the new technologies available today. But Saad could not explain why the weather feels warmer these days, or why rainfall seems to occur less frequently. “I’m just a farmer,” he told me.

Saad might not fully grasp why the changes are occurring, but the new generation of farmers in Malaysia are already experiencing what rising temperatures does to their paddy fields. Shafrizal bin Abdulhamid, Saad’s son, said that while this year’s rain came surprisingly early, the stresses over climate change are mounting, threatening their crop and their livelihoods.

These shifts in weather patterns are spurring what once had seemed unimaginable: A reconsideration of rice as the central food in Malaysia’s diet. While domestic consumption is about 2.8 million tons this year, the average local rice yield was 30 to 50 percent lower than its potential, according to Malaysian research. Local researchers are now looking towards more climate-adaptive foods, imagining a way to move forward with climate change in mind.

And it’s poised to become worse. The world is expected to warm by an additional three degrees Celsius by 2050. While a warmer climate may affect rain and irrigation, other changes are not as apparent. As temperature rises and carbon dioxide levels are elevated, the nutritional content in crops begins to decrease due to the changes. This means less food, and less profit for farmers.

Saad’s paddy fields are conveniently located next to the largest irrigation channel in Malaysia, Wan Mat Saman, allowing him access to fresh water. Many farmers in the area, though, are not so fortunate. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), approximately 35 percent of Malaysian rice is solely grown with rainwater, leaving farmers even more vulnerable to changing weather patterns.

“It’s difficult to prepare for harvest when you cannot rely on rainwater, and you don’t know its schedule,” Abdulhamid said.

Abdulhamid’s family eats rice three times a day. When I visited in March, they gathered at lunch to enjoy a meal of chicken legs, yams, and white rice under a sheltered patio that overlooks acres of their paddy field. Beyond their field are other paddy fields as far as the eye can see. The patchwork of crops stretches to Alor Setar, the capital of Kedah, only minutes away by motorcycle, a common form of transportation in the state.

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Green in the Desert: Local Farmer Captures Carbon to Grow Food, Feed Community

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Author: Chilton Tippin | Published: October 7, 2017

Shahid Mustafa is the first to admit his farm might not look as orderly as those you see while driving down the highway.

At Taylor Hood Farms, you won’t find manicured rows or flood-irrigated fields. Nor will you notice bed after bed of a single crop like alfalfa, commodity cotton or chile peppers.

To hear Mustafa say it, there’s a little bit of chaos in nature. Some of that chaos reflects in the appearance of his farm, where red amaranth grows tall and sweet carrots fill beds near lemon cucumbers and artichokes. But embracing nature’s way, according to Mustafa, could offer key solutions to some of the region’s most urgent environmental and health difficulties—even if some chaos is part of the package.

“The regenerative way is to work with nature, instead of against it,” he said. “Our philosophy is that the best food comes from the best soil, so most of our focus and attention is on enriching or enhancing the soil that we have.”

In the Paso del Norte region, Mustafa is pioneering an innovative approach to farming called regenerative agriculture. The practice could help restore topsoils degraded by conventional farming techniques, to say nothing of its implications for ensuring residents have consistent access to healthy foods.

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Cornell University Study Shows Glyphosate Damages Soil-Friendly Bacteria

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Published: October 7, 2017

As farmers battle in their above-ground war on weeds using glyphosate-based herbicides, they may inadvertently create underground casualties – unintentionally attacking the beneficial bacteria that help crops guard against enemy fungus.

“Beneficial Pseudomonas in the soil can help crops thrive. They can produce plant-stimulating hormones to promote plant growth and antifungals to defeat problematic fungi – such as Pythium and Fusarium – found in agricultural soil, but previous studies reported that the abundance of beneficial bacteria decreased when the herbicide glyphosate seeps underground,” said Ludmilla Aristilde, assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering. “Our study seeks to understand why this happens.”

Soil bacteria require their proteins – composed of amino acids – and their metabolism to support cellular growth and the production of important metabolites to sustain their underground fight. But glyphosate applied to crops can drain into the soil and disrupt the molecular factories in the bacterial cells in some species, interfering with their metabolic and amino acid machinery.

The new findings show that glyphosate does not target the amino acid production and metabolic gadgetry equally among the Pseudomonas species. For example, when Pseudomonas protegens, a bacteria used as a biocontrol agent for cereal crops, and Pseudomonas fluorescens, used as a fungus biocontrol for fruit trees, were exposed to varying glyphosate concentrations, the researchers noted no ill effects. However, in two species of Pseudomonas putida, used in soil fungus control for corn and other crops, the bacteria had notably stunted growth, said Aristilde, who is a faculty fellow at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

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Soil Holds Potential to Slow Global Warming, Stanford Researchers Find

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Author: Rob Jordan | Published: October 5, 2017

If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource.

The work, published in two overlapping papers Oct. 5 in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics and Global Change Biology, emphasizes the need for more research into how soil – if managed well – could mitigate a rapidly changing climate.

“Dirt is not exciting to most people,” said Earth system science professor Rob Jackson, lead author of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article and co-author of the Global Change Biology paper. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big co-benefits. Fostering soil health protects food security and builds resilience to droughts, floods and urbanization.”

Humble, yet mighty

Organic matter in soil, such as decomposing plant and animal residues, stores more carbon than do plants and the atmosphere combined. Unfortunately, the carbon in soil has been widely lost or degraded through land use changes and unsustainable forest and agricultural practices, fires, nitrogen deposition and other human activities. The greatest near-term threat comes from thawing permafrost in Earth’s northern reaches, which could release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Despite these risks, there is also great promise, according to Jackson and Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the Global Change Biology paper.

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Vuelve a crecer el hambre en el mundo, impulsada por los conflictos y el cambio climático, según un nuevo informe de la ONU

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 Publicado: 15 de septiembre 2017

Tras haber disminuido de forma constante durante más de una década, vuelve a aumentar el hambre en el mundo, que afectó a 815 millones de personas en 2016 –el 11 por ciento de la población mundial–, según la nueva edición del informe anual de la ONU sobre seguridad alimentaria y nutrición publicada hoy. Al mismo tiempo, múltiples formas de malnutrición amenazan la salud de millones de personas.

Este incremento –de 38 millones de personas más respecto al año anterior– se debe en gran medida a la proliferación de conflictos violentos y de perturbaciones relacionadas con el clima, según explica El estado de la seguridad alimentaria y la nutrición en el mundo 2017.

Unos 155 millones de niños menores de cinco años padecen retraso en el crecimiento (estatura demasiado baja para su edad), según el informe, mientras que 52 millones sufren de emaciación, lo que significa que su peso es demasiado bajo para su estatura. Se estima además que 41 millones de niños tienen sobrepeso. La anemia en las mujeres y la obesidad adulta son también motivo de preocupación. Estas tendencias son consecuencia no solo de los conflictos y el cambio climático, sino también de profundos cambios en los hábitos alimentarios y de las crisis económicas.

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El síndrome del desarraigado climático

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  Por Eduardo Febbro | Publicado: 10 de septiembre 2017

Entre enero y junio, los refugiados por las condiciones climáticas extremas y aquellos que deben abandonar sus tierras debido a los conflictos comparten porcentajes casi idénticos:4,6 millones de personas oriundas de 29 países escaparon de los conflictos, y 4,5 millones pertenecientes a 76 países desertaron sus regiones por los estragos climáticos. Comparado al balance de 2016, el IDMC constata que durante el primer semestre de 2017 hubo menos desplazados climáticos (24 millones en 2017) y más víctimas de las guerras. Sin embargo, el panorama es poco alentador en lo que atañe al clima. Los huracanes en el continente americano y el monzón en África y Asia incrementarán el número de exiliados climáticos. Combinados, ambas situaciones extremas muestran un mundo cada vez más inestable y a millones de individuos obligados e elegir entre partir hacia el éxodo o morir en un conflicto o en algún desbarajuste del clima. Toda la parte de África sahariana es la más azotada por los conflictos armados (46% del total), seguida desde luego por Medio Oriente. En apenas seis meses, 997.000 personas tuvieron que desplazarse en la República Democrática del Congo (más que todo 2016) mientras que 992.000 lo hicieron en Irak y 692.000 en Siria. En lo que atañe a América Latina, según el informe, en México, la violencia desplazó a 311 mil seres humanos. Con respecto al clima, Asia es la zona más golpeada tanto por los desprendimientos de terreno como las inundaciones que azotaron, por ejemplo, las provincias del sur de China en junio (858 mil desplazados) o el ciclón tropical Mora que en mayo y junio barrió Bangladesh, Myanmar y la India (851 mil desplazados). A estos factores de conflictos y clima se le suma el de la pobreza, que incrementa los estragos. A veces, guerras y clima se combinan para estrangular a las poblaciones. Ese es el caso de Somalia donde la sequía histórica condujo al país al abismo del hambre y a 800 mil personas a desplazarse hacia los centros urbanos. La ayuda humanitaria internacional apenas pudo articularse a raíz de las devastaciones que causa la guerrilla islamista del grupo Al-Shabab. En total, a finales de 2016 había en el mundo 40 millones de personas que vivían fuera de sus tierras de origen por culpa de los conflictos armados. 

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Thailand: ‘We Need to Save Our Seeds, Climate, Seasons to Protect Our Communities!’

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Author: Lee Ayu Chuepa | Published: October 5, 2017

This is what we try to do daily at the Akha Ama coffee factory. My name is Ayu and I am a young coffee farmer and a social entrepreneur. I belong to the Akha indigenous community living in the Maejantai, in the Northern Thailand. I grew up in a small village where people used to provide everything for themselves, from building houses and tools to foods by doing subsistence agriculture.

I was lucky because my parents worked hard to give me the chance to study. Later on, whilst working for an NGO, which supports village kids by teaching them how to build social enterprises, I understood that was my mission too!

Making a living as a coffee farmer is not easy. So I went back to my village and started a social business, a coffee factory dealing with the whole value chain, from the seed to the coffee bean, to avoid middlemen and maximise income for the farmers. We apply integrated agriculture and agroforestry to grow coffee and other foods such as cherries, peaches and persimmons. Thus, aside from the coffee we sell, we also have food to eat. These production systems allow us to gain twice: we earn an income to support our livelihoods whilst growing our food and preserving a resilient land which ensures long-term food security and the continuity of our income-generating activities. Moreover, in a healthy forest we can find plenty of useful plants which thrive without any human intervention, from mushrooms to bamboos and the plants used in traditional medicine: if you treat the forest well, the forest will treat you!

This is what I believe in, and what made me join the Slow Food movement, whose mission is to promote this kind of sustainable agriculture and to support and protect the work of small producers.

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Climate Change: Could Sustainable Agriculture Be the Silver Bullet We Are Looking For?

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Agriculture has become one of the greatest threats to the future of our planet, writes Magdy Martínez-Solimán from UNDP.

Author: Magdy Martinez-Soliman | Published: October 5, 2017

As world leaders convened at the UN’s annual General Assembly last week, amidst the backdrop of New York’s Climate Week, the message was clear: we must act now and we must act together to tackle climate change.

It’s inspiring rhetoric but what exactly does this mean in practice?

When we, the global community, are confronted with mounting and seemingly overwhelming challenges in the face of climate change, it’s often difficult to know what to tackle first.

Where should we focus our efforts? Protecting the forests, the lungs of our Earth? What about the increasing scarcity of fresh water, waning food security, air pollution, reducing poverty, disaster preparedness in the face of more ferocious storms? The list goes on.

However, there is a more holistic way to tackle these issues and it starts with agriculture.

Many of these challenges can be considered symptoms of a broader, and frankly unsustainable, global agriculture economy which, until recently, we have been reluctant to collectively confront.

Agriculture in the 21st century is fundamental; it’s essential to our very existence. Today, the commercial production of agricultural commodities is a dominant economic force in many national and developing rural economies. Worldwide, the livelihoods of 2.5 billion people depend on agriculture.

Yet, ironically, agriculture has also become one of the greatest threats to the future of our planet. Considered to be the biggest driver of tropical deforestation today, the consequences of unsustainable agriculture include losses to habitats and biodiversity, rising carbon dioxide levels as well as the degradation of essential ecosystem services such as clean water and fresh air which we depend on for our very survival.

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Soil and Land Initiatives Seek to Spur Action Across SDGs

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Author: Wangu Mwangi | Published: September 28, 2017

Recent research and initiatives undertaken by UN agencies, governments and NGOs highlight the links between soil health and the achievement of development goals and priorities related to climate change, agriculture, gender, biodiversity and poverty. Among them, the Land Portal Foundation, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) launched a weekly blog series promoting land monitoring and information sharing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Under the auspices of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), regional and country-level activities are underway to boost soil monitoring capacities and data sharing for sustainable soil management.

In the first featured post under the new blog series titled, ‘Land and the Sustainable Development Goals,’ Jeffrey Sachs, SDSN Director, describes land use as “the most important bridge between the SDGs,” noting that land is at the heart of poverty eradication, food security, gender equality, water management, decent work, sustainable cities, ending climate change, and protecting biodiversity. Calling for new approaches to land-use planning, he highlights the launch of a study known as FABLE (Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land Use, and Energy), which aims to enhance interactions among agronomists, foresters, conservationists, hydrologists, and climate scientists, as well as with the communities whose lives they impact. [Land and the SDGs Blog]

This theme is taken up in a Working Paper published by the FAO’s Land and Water Division, which explores current and emerging needs in land resource planning (LRP) for food security, sustainable livelihoods, integrated landscape management, and restoration. The paper argues that the juxtaposed challenges of population growth, demands on limited resources by diverse actors, land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change require the rational use of resources to sustain and enhance productivity and maintain resilient ecosystems. Noting the need for an updated set of integrated landscape management tools and approaches, the paper presents the results of a survey of LRP tools and approaches that led to the establishment of the FAO’s Land Resources Planning Toolbox to help decision-makers and land users put sustainable land management into practice. [Publication: Land Resource Planning for Sustainable Land Management]

During the 4th Regular Meeting of the South American Soil Partnership, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in August 2017, seven countries launched a project to measure the organic carbon contained in their soils as part of a regional climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy. One of the main objectives of the project, which is being undertaken in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, is to release national soil organic carbon maps and work on a harmonized regional soil map by the end of 2017. By supporting countries to build their national soil information systems, the project aims to contribute to improved local decision making and to advise farmers and land users on how to restore degraded soil, tackle environmental challenges, increase yields and raise agricultural productivity. The project also seeks to strengthen the Latin American Soils Information System (SISLAC), as a decision making and policy development tool for the agricultural and rural development sector. [FAO-GSP Press Release on National Soil Information Systems in Latin America]

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