Is Our Clothing Toxic? It’s More Complicated Than We Think

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Author: Jill Richardson | Published: July 13, 2017

Google “toxic fabrics” and a host of sites will come up, some from as far back as 1993. Generally they list a number of synthetic fabrics (acrylic, nylon, polyester) along with rayon (which is made from chemically processed wood pulp) and make the case that all are bad because they are made from scary chemicals. Obviously, natural fibers such as cotton, hemp, wool, and linen are the way to go. Those are made from plants and sheep, not coal and petroleum derivatives.

The truth is more complicated than this. Your clothing is never made solely out of just cotton or polyester. Every single fabric has some form of processing. It may be preshunk cotton, or superwash merino. It may be bleached. It’s almost always dyed. And nowadays clothing comes in all kinds of high-tech variations: UV protective, bug repellant, wrinkle-free, stain resistant, antimicrobial, and so on. Even pure cotton can be grown with pesticides.

These chemicals pose a myriad of concerns for the environment, both in the place of manufacture and due to chemicals released through washing. But what about the safety to the wearer?

The Basics: What Are Fabrics Made From?

If you look in your closet, you’ll likely find a number of different natural and synthetic fibers. Over 60 percent of global fiber consumption is comprised of petroleum based synthetic fibers, although some may be used for textiles other than clothing (like rugs or rope). Comparatively, cotton makes up nearly a quarter of textile consumption, with wool making up about 1 percent, and other natural fibers (hemp, linen, etc) accounting for 5 percent. The remaining 6.6 percent are wood-based cellulose fibers (e.g. rayon).

Natural fibers come from either plants or animals. Plants used for clothing include cotton, hemp and flax. Animal fibers are more diverse, even if some, such as yak, remain uncommon. However, sheep are not the only animals who can provide high-quality fiber: alpacas, goats (cashmere and mohair), rabbits (angora), yaks, camels, llamas, and even the wild alpaca relative, the vicuña, provide fiber used for clothing. Silk is also a natural fiber, made from the cocoons of the mulberry silkworm. Other animal products used in clothing are hides (leather), feathers (down) and fur.

While humans have used natural fibers for millennia, rayon, which is made from wood fibers with synthetic processing, was invented in 1894, and the first fully synthetic fiber, nylon, was invented in the 1930s. Other wood-based fibers produced with synthetic processing include modal and bamboo. Fully synthetic fibers, generally made from petroleum or coal products, are acrylic, polyester and spandex.

Toxicology research into clothing focuses less on the fibers themselves and more on the chemicals used in processing the fibers. Even a simple cotton T-shirt requires numerous chemicals to bring it to market. The question for consumers is not only how safe are the chemicals used, but what are you willing to sacrifice and how much are you willing to spend in order to get the chemicals out of your closet?

Chemicals WorthDyeingFor

Your clothes do not contain only cotton or rayon or polyester. They are also bleached and dyed. Dyeing also requires the use of a “mordant,” a chemical that helps the dye adhere to the clothing. While natural dyes can be used along with a mordant like alum or cream of tartar, unless your clothing says otherwise, you can be almost certain natural dyes were not used.

Three different dye chemicals (or groups of chemicals) are of most concern. Azo dyes can release chemicals called aromatic amines when you wear them, and they can be absorbed into your body. There are hundreds of different azo dyes, and a large number of them can release aromatic amines. Some of these aromatic amines are known to be toxic (or as scientists put it, they are of “toxicological concern”), and others have never been assessed for toxicity. The main concerns are that these chemicals can cause cancer, and they also may be allergens. A 2014 study found that 17 percent of clothing samples contained aromatic amines “of high toxicological concern,” including several that had them in higher levels than legally allowed in the European Union.

Second, quinoline is a chemical used in dying textiles that causes concern. According to another 2014 study, even though no human studies on their carcinogenicity are available, tests involving acute exposure of mice have demonstrated “quinoline and some of its methylated isomers to induce liver cancer.” That study found that quinoline was found in polyester clothing more than it was found in clothing made from other fibers. One study labeled quinoline a potential human carcinogen, and reiterated the correlation of quinoline with polyester.

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To Avoid Climate Catastrophe, We’ll Need to Remove Co2 from the Air. Here’s How.

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Author: Mary Hoff | Published: July 19, 2017 

Klaus Lackner has a picture of the future in his mind, and it looks something like this: 100 million semi-trailer-size boxes, each filled with a beige fabric configured into what looks like shag carpet to maximize surface area. Each box draws in air as though it were breathing. As it does, the fabric absorbs carbon dioxide, which it later releases in concentrated form to be made into concrete or plastic or piped far underground, effectively cancelling its ability to contribute to climate change.

Though the technology is not yet operational, it’s “at the verge of moving out of the laboratory, so we can show how it works on a small scale,” says Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. Once he has all the kinks worked out, he figures that, combined, the network of boxes could capture perhaps 100 million metric tons (110 million tons) of CO2 per day at a cost of US$30 per ton — making a discernible dent in the climate-disrupting overabundance of CO2that has built up in the air since humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest 150 years ago.

Lackner is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists around the world who are working on ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, capturing carbon from the atmosphere using plants, rocks or engineered chemical reactions and storing it in soil, products such as concrete and plastic, rocks, underground reservoirs or the deep blue sea.

“We can’t just decarbonize our economy, or we won’t meet our carbon goal.” – Noah Deich

Some of the strategies — known collectively as carbon dioxide removal or negative emissions technologies — are just twinkles in their envisioners’ eyes. Others — low-tech schemes like planting more forests or leaving crop residues in the field, or more high-tech “negative emissions” setups like the CO2-capturing biomass fuel plant that went online last spring in Decatur, Illinois — are already underway. Their common aim: To help us out of the climate change fix we’ve gotten ourselves into.

“We can’t just decarbonize our economy, or we won’t meet our carbon goal,” says Noah Deich, co-founder and executive director with the Center for Carbon Removal in Oakland, California. “We have to go beyond to clean up carbon from the atmosphere. … [And] we need to start urgently if we are to have real markets and real solutions available to us that are safe and cost effective by 2030.”

Many Approaches

Virtually all climate change experts agree that to avoid catastrophe we must first and foremost put everything we can into reducing CO2 emissions. But an increasing number are saying that’s not enough. If we are to limit atmospheric warming to a level below which irreversible changes become inevitable, they argue, we’ll need to actively remove CO2 from the air in fairly hefty quantities as well.

“It’s almost impossible that we would hit 2 °C, and even less so 1.5 [°C], without some sort of negative emissions technology,” says Pete Smith, chair in plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the world’s leaders in climate change mitigation.

In fact, scientists from around the world who recently drew up a “road map” to a future that gives us good odds of keeping warming below the 2 ºC threshold lean heavily on reducing carbon emissions by completely phasing out fossil fuels — but also require that we actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Their scheme calls for sequestering 0.61 metric gigatons (a gigaton, abbreviated Gt, is a billion metric tons or 0.67 billion tons) of CO2 per year by 2030, 5.51 by 2050, and 17.72 by 2100. Human-generated CO2 emissions were around 40 Gt in 2015, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s almost impossible that we would hit 2 °C, and even less so 1.5, without some sort of negative emissions technology.” –Pete Smith

Reports periodically appear pointing out that one approach or another is not going to cut it: Trees can store carbon, but they compete with agriculture for land, soil can’t store enough, machines like the ones Lackner envisions take too much energy, we don’t have the engineering figured out for underground storage.

It’s likely true that no one solution is the fix, all have pros and cons, and many have bugs to work out before they’re ready for prime time. But in the right combination, and with some serious research and development, they could make a big difference. And, as an international team of climate scientists recently pointed out, the sooner the better, because the task of reducing greenhouse gases will only become larger and more daunting the longer we delay.

Smith suggests dividing the many approaches into two categories — relatively low-tech “no regrets” strategies that are ready to go, such as reforestation and improving agricultural practice, and advanced options that need substantial research and development to become viable. Then, he suggests, deploy the former and get working on the latter. He also advocates for minimizing the downsides and maximizing the benefits by carefully matching the right approach with the right location.

“There are probably good ways and bad ways of doing everything,” Smith says. “I think we need to find the good ways of doing these things.”

Deich, too, supports the simultaneous pursuit of multiple options. “We don’t want a technology, we want lots of complementary solutions in a broader portfolio that updates often as new information about the solutions emerges.”

With that in mind, here is a quick look at some of the main approaches being considered, including a ballpark projection based on current knowledge of CO2 storage potential distilled from a variety of sources — including preliminary results from a University of Michigan study expected to be released later this year — as well as summaries of advantages, disadvantages, maturity, uncertainties and thoughts about the circumstances under which each might best be applied.

Afforestation and Reforestation

Pay your entrance fee, drive up a winding road through Sequoia National Park in California, hike half a mile through the woods, and you’ll find yourself at the feet of General Sherman, the world’s largest tree. With some 52,500 cubic feet (1,487 cubic meters) of wood in its trunk, the behemoth has more than 1,400 metric tons (1,500 tons) of CO2 trapped in its trunk alone.

Though its size is clearly exceptional, the General gives an idea of trees’ potential to suck CO2 from the air and store it in wood, bark, leaf and root. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a single hectare (2.5 acres) of forest can take up somewhere between 1.5 and 30 metric tons (1.6 and 33 tons) of CO2 per year, depending on the kinds of trees, how old they are, the climate and so on.

Worldwide forests currently sequester on the order of 2 Gt CO2per year. Concerted efforts to plant trees in new places (afforest) and replant deforested acreage (reforest) could increase this by a gigaton or more, depending on species, growth patterns, economics, politics and other variables. Forest management practices emphasizing carbon storage and genetic modification of trees and other forest plants to improve their ability to take up and store carbon could push these numbers higher.

Another way to help enhance trees’ ability to store carbon is to make long-lasting products from them — wood-frame buildings, books and so on. Using carbon-rich wood for construction, for example, could extend trees’ storage capacity beyond forests’ borders, with wood storage and afforestation combining for a potential 1.3–14 Gt CO2 per year possible, according to The Climate Institute, an Australia-based research organization.

Carbon Farming

Most farming is intended to produce something that’s harvested from the land. Carbon farming is the opposite. It uses plants to trap CO2, then strategically uses practices such as reducing tilling, planting longer-rooted crops and incorporating organic materials into the soil to encourage the trapped carbon to move into — and stay in — the soil.

“Currently, many agricultural, horticultural, forestry and garden soils are a net carbon source. That is, these soils are losing more carbon than they are sequestering,” notes Christine Jones, founder of the Australia-based nonprofit Amazing Carbon. “The potential for reversing the net movement of CO2 to the atmosphere through improved plant and soil management is immense. Indeed, managing vegetative cover in ways that enhance the capacity of soil to sequester and store large volumes of atmospheric carbon in a stable form offers a practical and almost immediate solution to some of the most challenging issues currently facing humankind.”

Soil’s carbon-storing capacity could go even higher if research initiatives by the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a U.S. government agency that provides research support for innovative energy technologies, and others aimed at improving crops’ capacity to transfer carbon to the soil are successful. And, points out Eric Toensmeier, author of The Carbon Farming Solution, the capacity of farmland to store carbon can be dramatically increased by including trees in the equation as well.

“Generally it is practices that incorporate trees that have the most carbon [storage] — often two to 10 times more carbon per hectare, which is a pretty big deal,” Toensmeier says.

Other Vegetation 

Although forests and farmland have drawn the most attention, other kinds of vegetation — grasslands, coastal vegetation, peatlands — also take up and store CO2, and efforts to enhance their ability to do so could contribute to the carbon storage cause around the world.

Coastal plants, such as mangroves, seagrasses and vegetation inhabiting tidal salt marshes, excel at sequestering CO2 — significantly more per area than terrestrial forests, according to Meredith Muth, international program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“These are incredibly carbon-rich ecosystems,” says Emily Pidgeon, Conservation International senior director of strategic marine initiatives. That’s because the oxygen-poor soil in which they grow inhibits release of CO2 back to the atmosphere, so rather than cycling back into the atmosphere, carbon simply builds up layer by layer over the centuries. With mangroves sequestering roughly 1,400 metric tons (1,500 tons) per hectare (2. 5 acres); salt marshes, 900 metric tons (1,000 tons); and seagrass, 400 metric tons (400 tons), restoring lost coastal vegetation and extending coastal habitats holds potential to sequester substantial carbon. And researchers are eyeing strategies such as reducing pollution and managing sediment disturbance to make these ecosystems absorb even more CO2.

And, Pidgeon adds, such vegetation provides a double climate benefit because it also helps protect coastlines from erosion as warming causes sea level to rise.

“It’s the perfect climate change ecosystem, especially in some of the more vulnerable places,” she says. “It provides storm protection, erosion control, maintains the local fishery. In terms of climate change, it’s immensely valuable, whether talking mitigation or adaptation.”

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Study Calls for Rapid “Negative Emissions” As Scientist Warns “Shit’s Hitting the Fan”

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Author: Andrea Germanos| Published: July 19, 2017 

The “shit is hitting is the fan,” said noted climate scientist James Hansen, countering “this narrative out there…that we have turned the corner on dealing with the climate problem.”

Hansen is lead author of a new study that warns that there “is no time to delay” on climate change efforts and argues that they must go beyond just slashing emissions of CO2—”the dominant control knob on global temperature”—to extracting CO2 from the air, or “negative emissions.”

The team of international researchers writes that “the world has overshot appropriate targets”—a conclusion that “is sufficiently grim to compel us to point out that pathways to rapid emission reductions are feasible.”

The goal, they write, should be getting atmospheric CO2 reduced to less than 350 parts per million (ppm), as that would lead to global average temperatures decreasing to about 1 degree Celsius of warming relative to pre-industrial levels later this century. The Paris climate accord, in contrast, has a goal of keeping global average temperature increase to under 2 degrees Celsius, and an aspiration 1.5 degrees of warming. But, they argue, the problem with those

targets is that they are far above the Holocene [the epoch that began after the last Ice Age] temperature range. If such temperature levels are allowed to long exist they will spur “slow” amplifying feed-backs, which have potential to run out of humanity’s control. The most threatening slow feedback likely is ice sheet melt and consequent significant sea level rise, as occurred in the Eemian [the prior interglacial period], but there are other risks in pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range.

For a safer scenario that limits irreversible climate impacts, what needs to happen is a “rapid phase-down of fossil fuel emissions,” bringing the rate of emissions right away to 6 percent a year, alongside reforestation and agricultural practices that draw carbon from the atmosphere into the soil.

On the other hand, if CO2 emissions grow at a rate of 2 percent a year—that’s a slower rate than the 2.6 percent they grew each year from 2000 to 2015—it could result in a costly scenario. It could rack up a CO2 extraction bill of $535 trillion by 2100—an “extraordinary cost” that “suggest[s] that, rather than the world being able to buy its way out of climate change, continued high emissions would likely force humanity to live with climate change running out of control with all the consequences that would entail,” the researchers write.

Also, technological CO2 extraction methods have “large risks and uncertain feasibility,” they point out.

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Organic Consumers Association Glyphosate Fact Sheet

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[pdf-embedder url=”https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/OCA-Glyphosate-Fact-SheetFINAL.pdf”]

 

DOWNLOAD THE FACTSHEET HERE

The Uninhabitable Earth

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Author: David Wallace-Wells |  Published on: July 9, 2017

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

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Carbon Farming: An Introduction

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Author: Tobias Roberts | Published: July 7, 2017 

As we struggle to find ways to deal with the excess amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, much attention has been given to high-tech solutions and cutting fossil fuel use. While these are good and worthy discussions to have, carbon farming offers an opportunity to revolutionize the agricultural sector to improve soil and store excess atmospheric carbon where it belongs: in the ground.

CAN WE STORE CARBON IN THE SOIL?

We hear all of the time about the dangers that come with excess amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. During the last century or so, our civilization has released enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the air through the burning of fossil fuels, the deforestation of our forests, and the degradation of our soils.

Plants breathe carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. That seems like a pretty good compliment to us humans who do just the opposite. As our human quest for domination of the planet has increased, however, we have thrown that balance into turmoil.

Plants can take carbon dioxide floating around in the atmosphere and turn it into plant biomass. As those plants eventually die, their organic material decomposes into fertile top soil which is filled with carbon. The carbon dioxide that was floating around in the atmosphere causing global warming and climate change, is thus placed back into the soil through the process of healthy soil growth.

The main problem with this apparently simple and reasonable solution is that our current, industrial agricultural methods do nothing to promote the storing of carbon in the soil. Instead of promoting the growth of diverse and abundant plant biomass, we clear cut forests (the ecosystem with the densest biomass) for pasture lands. Instead of growing cover crops to add biomass to the soil, we use glyphosate and other herbicides to kill off any and all plant growth that “threatens” our monoculture grain crops.

The excessive tillage of soils year after year actually takes carbon out of the soil and sends it into the atmosphere. Farming, then, instead of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and placing it into the soil is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
What is Carbon Sequestration and Carbon Farming?

Carbon Sequestration is a fancy scientific term that denotes the storage of carbon in a stable solid form. In other words, the opposite of carbon dioxide gas that is floating around our atmosphere in excessive quantities. Carbon sequestration occurs when plants have chemical reactions that turn the carbon dioxide gas into inorganic compounds such as calcium and magnesium.

KEEP READING ON PERMACULTURE RESEARCH INSTITUE 

Here’s Why Thousands of People Are Calling on Zara and H&M to Drop Some of Their Suppliers

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Author: Sara Spary | Published: July 5, 2017 

More than 128,000 people have signed a petition calling on H&M and Zara “and other fashion giants” to stop sourcing from producers linked to pollution, after a report claimed factories linked to the brands were damaging local waterways and emitting “noxious gases”.

The Changing Markets Foundation launched the petition last week after publishing a report that claimed to have found evidence of pollution surrounding major viscose fabric manufacturing sites in China, Indonesia, and India.

H&M was found to be buying from eight polluting factories and Zara was buying from four, the report said, though the foundation acknowledged that both businesses had been “among the most transparent” in dealing with the inquiries with regards to their suppliers.

Viscose is a manmade clothing material similar to silk in appearance, but cheaper. It is bought by major fashion brands and is made from wood pulp that is treated with chemicals. The report, published earlier this month, claimed that pollutants from viscose production had seeped into local waterways and air, killing aquatic life and making water undrinkable in some instances.

While the petition specifically targets H&M and Zara, the report also named Tesco, Asos, and M&S among businesses thought to be supplied by factories in those regions.

“Cheap production, which is driven by the fast fashion industry, combined with lax enforcement of environmental regulations in China, India, and Indonesia, is proving to be a toxic mix,” the report claimed.

The petition, so far signed by 129,134 people, states: “The clothes you sell have been directly linked to devastating air and water pollution at viscose factories in Asia. As customers across Europe, we demand that you immediately commit to a zero pollution policy and timeline, work with producers to transition to clean technologies, and stop purchasing from producers who fail to comply.”

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Toxic Clothing Affects Everyone

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Author: Dr. Mercola | Published: June 27, 2017 

In September 2016, American Airlines rolled out new uniforms for more than 70,000 employees — the first uniform overhaul in 30 years. Soon after, reports started coming in from about 100 pilots and 3,000 flight attendants that the uniforms were making them sick. A variety of symptoms were reported (some occurring only while the personnel were wearing the uniforms), such as rashes, itching, eye swelling and a general feeling of malaise.1

Twin Hill, a unit of Tailored Brands Inc., which supplied the uniforms, has conducted testing, with nothing suspicious showing up that may cause the symptoms, and so far American Airlines has not recalled the uniforms, although they’ve given some employees alternative pieces and allowed them to wear their old uniforms while the matter is sorted out.2 While this may seem like an unusual story, it’s not unheard of for clothing to make people sick.

In fact, the average piece of clothing not only may be made from potentially allergenic materials (like latex, Lycra or spandex) but also may be contaminated with a variety of chemicals used during the manufacturing process.

The clothing industry is actually one of the most polluting industries on the planet, and the textiles they produce may be laced with irritants and disease-causing chemicals, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important to wash new clothes before wearing them. Even then, however, it may not make the clothing entirely safe.

What Kinds of Chemicals Are in Your Clothes?

Depending on where your new clothes were manufactured, they may contain multiple chemicals of concern. Among them are azo-aniline dyes, which may cause skin reactions ranging from mild to severe. If you’re sensitive, such dyes may leave your skin red, itchy and dry, especially where the fabric rubs on your skin, such as at your waist, neck, armpits and thighs. The irritants can be mostly washed out, but it might take multiple washings to do so.

Formaldehyde resins are also used in clothing to cut down on wrinkling and mildew. Not only is formaldehyde a known carcinogen, but the resins have been linked to eczema and may cause your skin to become flaky or erupt in a rash.3 Nonylphenol ethoxylate (NPE), meanwhile, is a toxic endocrine-disrupting surfactant used to manufacture clothing.

You certainly don’t want to be exposed to NPE if you can help it, but when consumers wash their clothes, NPEs are released into local water supplies where wastewater treatment plants are unable to remove them. When NPEs enter the environment, they break down into nonylphenol (NP), a toxic, endocrine-disrupting chemical that accumulates in sediments and builds up in fish and wildlife. In an interview with “clean-fashion pioneer” Marci Zaroff, Goop outlined some of the common chemicals likely to be found in your clothing:4

Glyphosate, the most-used agricultural chemical, is an herbicide used to grow cotton. It’s linked to cancer and found in cotton textiles.
Chlorine bleach, used for whitening and stain removal, may cause asthma and respiratory problems and is found in fiber/cotton processing, including in denim.
Formaldehyde, which is carcinogenic, is used to create wrinkle-free clothing as well as for shrinkage and as a carrier for dyes and prints. It’s common in cotton and other natural fabrics, including anything that’s been dyed or printed.
VOCs, solvents used for printing and other purposes, are common in finished textiles, especially those with prints. VOCs may off-gas from clothing, posing risks such as developmental and reproductive damage, liver problems and in some cases cancer, particularly to workers.
PFCs, used widely in uniforms and outdoor clothing to create stain-repellant and water-resistant fabrics, are carcinogenic, build up in your body and are toxic to the environment.
Brominated flame retardants, used to stop clothes from burning (although this is questionable), may be found in children’s clothing. These chemicals are neurotoxic endocrine disrupters that may also cause cancer.
Ammonia, used to provide shrink resistance, is found in natural fabrics. It may be absorbed into your lungs and cause burning in your eyes, nose or throat.
Heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium and others, may be used for leather tanning and dyeing. They’re highly toxic and may be found in finished textiles, especially those that are dyed or printed.
Phthalates/Plastisol, used in printing inks and other processes, are known endocrine disrupters.

Clothing Chemicals Are Largely Unregulated

You may assume that if you’re purchasing clothing in the U.S., it’s safe and free from toxins, but this isn’t typically the case. Zaroff told Goop:5

“The magnitude and multitude of toxic chemicals in the fashion and textile industries is out of control. Even though some carcinogens are regulated (for example, formaldehyde, linked to cancer, is regulated in the U.S.), most brands are still manufactured overseas, where regulation is far behind. And only the most toxic chemicals are regulated in the U.S., which means there are a huge number that are unregulated but likely to cause allergic reactions.”

This is an issue both for the people who wear the clothes as well as the environment. Textile dyeing facilities, for example, tend to be located in developing countries where regulations are lax and labor costs are low. Untreated or minimally treated wastewater is typically discharged into nearby rivers, from where it spreads into seas and oceans, traveling across the globe with the currents.

An estimated 40 percent of textile chemicals are discharged by China.6 According to Ecowatch, Indonesia is also struggling with the chemical fallout of the garment industry. The Citarum River is now one of the most heavily polluted rivers in the world, thanks to the congregation of hundreds of textile factories along its shorelines. Clothing designer Eileen Fisher even called the clothing industry the “second largest polluter in the world … second only to oil.”7

Leading Clothing Companies Commit to Using Sustainable Cotton by 2025

Genetically engineered (GE) cotton is widely used in the clothing industry, but while it maintains a natural image, it’s among the dirtiest crops in the world because of heavy use of toxic pesticides. It also takes a heavy toll on local water supplies, as hundreds of liters of water may be necessary to produce enough cotton to make one T-shirt.8

Prince Charles is among those who has voiced his support for more sustainable cotton production, noting that cotton production is “all too often associated with the depletion of local water supplies and the widespread, and sometimes indiscriminate, use of harmful pesticides [that] can take a heavy toll on human health.”9

Fortunately, earlier this year 13 clothing and textile companies, including Levi Strauss & Co., Eileen Fisher, Nike, Woolworths Holdings and Sainsbury’s, signed the Sustainable Cotton Communiqué, which commits to using 100 percent sustainable cotton by 2025. Worldwide, more than 20 million tons of cotton are produced annually in more than 100 countries.10 The 13 companies that signed the sustainable cotton initiative account for 300,000 tons of cotton each year.11

KEEP READING ON MERCOLA.COM

The Best Organic Cotton Sheets to Keep You Cool All Summer

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Author: Rebecca Straus | Published: June 8, 2017 

Conventionally grown cotton is considered the world’s dirtiest crop due to its overwhelming use of pesticides. In fact, cotton is responsible for sucking up a whopping sixteen percent of all pesticides used on commercial crops worldwide. That’s obviously terrible for the environment—not to mention our water supply—but it’s also a threat to your health while you sleep if you’re not snuggling up with organic sheets.

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It turns out that traces of these pesticides have been found on cotton textiles, such as sheets, towels, and clothing, even after washing. That’s bad news considering the World Health Organization calls eight out of the top ten pesticides used on cotton moderately to highly hazardous to human health. (Read up on the thirteen serious health conditions linked to Monsanto’s Roundup.)

Instead of turning your comfy, safe bed into a toxic zone, you can sleep more soundly by switching to organic cotton sheets. Here you’ll find some of our favorite high-quality organic sheet sets that will last you for years to come. Plus, not only are organic bed sheets free from toxins, they’re also made with 100 percent cotton, rather than a mixture of cotton and polyester or rayon, making them breathable and cooling for hot summer nights.

KEEP READING ON RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 

Your Fleece Jacket Pollutes the Ocean. Here’s the Possible Fix.

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Author:  Mary Catherine O’Connor | Published: May 25, 2017 

By now you’ve probably heard the news: your favorite fleece sheds hundreds of thousands of tiny synthetic fibers every time it’s washed. Those fibers often skirt through wastewater treatment plants and make their way into aquatic organisms that eat the floating fibers. That’s bad for the fish, because the fibers are vectors for toxins and can retard their growth, and it could be bad for people who eat the fish.

This shedding puts outdoor manufacturers in a bind: many want to protect the outdoors, but they also want to sell product. Consumers who love their warm fleece are also faced with a dilemma.

Some brands have taken steps to address the threat of microfibers, which are considered a type of microplastic pollution. In 2015, Patagonia asked university researchers to quantify how much fiber its products shed during laundry—the answer was a lot. And the Outdoor Industry Association has convened a working group to start examining microfiber pollution. But here’s the thing: rather than using money to develop a process that prevents the shedding, most brands are still focused on defining their culpability. Because there are other sources of microfiber pollution in the sea, such as fraying fishing ropes, these brands want to be able to know for certain how much they’re contributing before they move further.

That won’t be an easy task, but Mountain Equipment Co-op, an REI-like retailer headquartered in Vancouver, recently gave microplastics researchers at the Vancouver Aquarium a $37,545 grant to help scientists develop a tracking process. The yearlong project will be led by the aquarium’s ocean pollution research program director and senior scientist Peter Ross. The first step is to create a database of fibers from up to 50 different textiles commonly used in MEC’s house-brand apparel.

This won’t be a simple spreadsheet with the names of the polymers, like polyester or nylon. Each piece of outdoor apparel is treated with chemicals like a durable water repellant (DWR). Then there’s the kaleidoscope of colors in each brand’s catalog. Those variants give the fibers a unique profile, sort of like a fingerprint. To capture those fingerprints, Ross and his team will use a machine called a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, which looks at the fibers on a molecular level.

Once that database is created, the researchers will subject the fibers to saltwater, sunlight, wave action, freshwater, and bacteria to mimic the types of weatherization that they would experience in the field. In fact, one set of fibers will be staked out in Vancouver Harbor and another in the Frasier River estuary. A third set, for the sake of experimentation, will be artificially weathered inside the aquarium’s lab. After increments of time—30, 60, 90, and 180 days—the fibers will be reexamined and any changes in those polymer fingerprints will be documented and added to a database. The hope is that sometime in the future, a random synthetic microfiber could be pulled from Vancouver Bay, analyzed, and determined to originate from an MEC jacket.

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