Tag Archive for: Care What You Wear

Chemicals in Textiles: Risks to Human Health and the Environment

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Published: 2004

The Swedish Chemicals Agency (Kemikalieinspektionen) was assigned by the Swedish government to compile available and relevant information about the risks to human health and the environment from hazardous substances in textile articles. The intention of this report is to serve as a base for further work on developing risk reduction measures for hazardous substances in textiles at the EU level. The study includes three main parts: a. An overview of textile consumption in the EU and Sweden. b. A screening study with the aim to identify hazardous substances/groups of substances posing a potential risk to human health and the environment. c. A literature study of data on exposures and effects related to hazardous substances in textiles.

Increasing consumption of textile articles and use of chemicals The consumption of textile articles has increased rapidly in the EU during the last decades. Textile materials are produced in large quantities and are included in a broad variety of widely used consumer articles. Chapter 3 presents an overview of consumption of textile materials and articles in the EU and Sweden.

Increasing production and consumption of textile articles also mean an increased use of chemicals and raw materials. Large quantities of chemical substances are used in the production of textiles, from processing of fibres and raw materials to the final touch of the finished article.

Substances used in the production of textiles can remain in the final article as minor contaminant amounts, and articles may also contain substances formed by degradation. Other substances are intentionally added to textile articles in order to provide a specified function, such as colour or easy-care. Substances in textile materials may be released from articles and expose humans and the environment. Textile articles are used in a way that both consumers the environment can be exposed to chemicals released from the articles. An overview is presented in Chapter 4.

Information is needed in the production- and supply chains

Although large quantities of substances are included in textile production, there is no comprehensive overview of hazardous substances that may be present in textile articles placed on the market.

To assess the chemical risks related to the use of textile articles it is necessary to have information about the identity of the substances and their hazardous properties. Access to information on the contents of hazardous substances in textile materials and articles is important for the manufacturers, importers and suppliers along the production and supply chains.

The requirement in the REACH Regulation, Article 33 (Section 2.1.1) concerning the duty on suppliers to provide information on hazardous substances in articles is limited to Substances of Very High Concern that are listed on the Candidate list. Thus, this duty to provide information does not included e.g. dermal allergens. 7

The majority, approximately 80%, of the textile articles consumed in the EU are imported from a non-EU country, and it is also common to import semi-finished textile materials while the article is finally manufactured and labelled in the EU. The textile supply chains are often long and complex with a global span and important information is drastically decreasing in the many steps from producer to consumer. The flow of chemical information in the supply chains is generally not adequate. The knowledge about chemical contents in textile articles should be made more readily available by increasing and improving the information exchange along the supply chain.

One step towards improved information exchange along the supply chain is the international initiatives in the SAICM programme Chemicals in Products (Section 2.3). The legal information requirement on suppliers of substances in articles needs to be further developed.

Identifying chemical substances related to textile articles

The study presented in Chapter 6 was performed to identify substances with a reported use in textile production. The REACH registration (Section 2.1.1) is one source of knowledge since data for hazardous properties and recommended use for substances should be included in the registration. Further data was also collected from several databases.

The focus of the screening study was to identify substances of potential risk to human health and the environment. Approximately 3 500 substances were identified as relevant for use in textile. However, the actual use and the presence in the final textile articles have not been verified for all these substances. It should be noted that this identification approach managed to cover only a part of all the substances that may be found in textile articles.

Of the identified substances about 2 000 substances are not yet registered under REACH. Due to the volume limit for registration and the limited obligations to register substances present in imported articles, the REACH registration data is insufficient for risk assessment of many substances used in textiles. In some cases REACH registration data for risk assessments was not easily accessible for evaluations of specific uses, and for about one third of the identified substances the REACH registrations was the only source indicating textile use.

Improved quality of data and increased availability in the REACH registration would facilitate and improve the decision-making regarding risk reduction measures for hazardous substances in textiles.

The focus of this study is functional chemicals as they are expected to be present in textiles at relatively high concentrations. However, auxiliary chemicals and unintended degradation products may also be present in the textiles and cause harmful effects on human health and the environment, but these types of substances are not covered by screening study due to the limitations.

Substances of potential risk to human health

Approximately ten percent of the identified 2 400 textile-related substances are considered to be of potential risk to human health. These substances are all functional chemicals, which are expected to be present in the final article at relatively high concentrations, and include azo dyes of direct and acid application type and fragrance. There may also be other types of substances, such as auxiliary chemicals and impurities/degradation products, that can be of potential risk to the human health. The concentration of such substances are generally lower 8 in the final textile article than the concentration of functional chemicals and therefore they were excluded from the scope of the screening study.

The identified azo dyes of direct application type have properties that are associated with an increased risk of cancer and developmental effects, whereas the identified azo dyes of acid application type and fragrances have properties that are associated with an increased risk of allergy.

The relevance of azo dyes was also confirmed by studies in the open literature. Azo dyes of direct application type are mainly used in cotton textile while azo dyes of acid application type are mainly used in polyamide. Since both cotton and polyamide are common materials on the EU market there is a potential for large-scale human exposure to azo dyes of direct and acid application type. These dyes are loosely bound to textile fibres and in particular small children sucking or chewing on textiles could be highly exposed. The dyes also have properties indicating that they are persistent in the environment and may accumulate in the aquatic food chain, which could lead to an indirect exposure of humans through dietary intake. For small children, ingestion of indoor dust, which to a large part consists of textile fibres, may also be an important exposure route to textile-related substances for small children, especially since textiles constitute a large part of the surface in the indoor environment.

The presence of hazardous substances in textiles, including azo dyes of direct and acid application type, should be further investigated.

Carcinogenic, reprotoxic and/or sensitising substances (allergens) should be avoided in articles with direct and prolonged skin contact. Although the methods we used to identify substances of potential risk involve many assumptions and limitations, the results are consistent and give reasons for further investigations, especially of azo dyes of direct and acid application type but also fragrances.

Substances that may cause severe health effects should be avoided in articles with direct and prolonged skin contact.

The overall scientific literature points out disperse dyes as the main cause of textile-related allergic skin reactions and disperse dyes were also identified as substances of concern in our screening study. In addition to the disperse dyes, we identified acid dyes as a group of sensitising substances of potential risk to human health that previously have not been associated with textile-allergy to any great extent. It is thus likely that the disperse dyes is not the cause of all reported cases of allergic skin reactions, for example certain acid dyes could also cause cases of allergic skin reactions.

Based on the findings of our screening study more than 200 allergenic textile-related substances, as for example acid-type dyes, could contribute substantially to allergic skin reactions. The testing of dermal allergy to sensitising dye substances used in textiles should be developed. Substances of potential risk to the environment Approximately five percent of the identified 2 400 textile-related substances are considered to be of potential risk to the environment. These chemicals are all functional chemicals which are expected to be present in the final article at relatively high concentrations. The evaluation of the function chemical substances clearly pointed out azo dyes of direct and acid application type as substance groups of potential risk to the environment. The 2 400 substances also include auxiliary chemicals or impurities.

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Death From Above

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Author: Christopher Collins | Published: April 17, 2017

It’s December in Quitaque, and from dusk till dawn, convoys of trucks brimming with freshly picked cotton barrel down Highway 86, destined for gins in nearby Silverton and Roaring Springs. There, giant vacuums draw the cotton into the bellies of whirring machines and then, emptied of their cargo, the trucks race back to the fields to be repacked. During harvest season, the roadsides of this part of the Texas Panhandle are lined with little white drifts of cotton.

Cotton farming is big business in this region, where most of the state’s $2.2 billion crop is grown. Quitaque, a community of 387 people about an hour and a half southeast of Amarillo, is surrounded by a phalanx of cotton farmers who each year plant tens of thousands of acres. The town is an island in a vast white sea.

Though the industry is a lifeline for Quitaque’s economy, and the lives of folks in town are tied to the work of neighboring farms, residents say the relationship has a big drawback: the repeated and indiscriminate spraying of pesticides that is killing trees, poisoning livestock and making people sick.

The cotton convoy is rushing up and down the highway as Jerry Beck, a portly, white-bearded man in his 60s, steps into the Caprock Cafe, a country diner run by his wife. Despite below-freezing temperatures, he wears a short-sleeved shirt with a pocket that bears the imprint of a chewing tobacco can. He looks every bit the former sheriff that he is.

Beck periodically spits into a Styrofoam cup as he explains that Quitaque is under siege by crop dusters, pilots hired by farmers to spray pesticides on fields to kill weeds and prepare the cotton plants for harvest. Sometimes the pilots miss their marks and inadvertently deliver a cloud of poison to people, plants and animals.

Beck has firsthand experience with the “chemical drift” problem, as regulators call it. In May 2016, a duster spraying a field near Beck’s house sent an off-target blast of paraquat dichloride, a toxic pesticide, wafting over his home. The next day, he noticed that his vegetable garden and fruit trees were starting to show signs of being poisoned, which he blames on the paraquat, according to his complaint with the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA). His biggest worry is that three of his grandkids were playing outside when the chemical drifted through his property.

“I remember thinking, ‘Boy, that ain’t good,’ because they were all exposed to it,” Beck said. In the following days, Beck’s granddaughters complained of headaches and difficulty breathing, problems that he attributes to the pesticide exposure.

The use of paraquat is tightly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because of the chemical’s extreme toxicity. It can cause death in humans, and even limited exposure can be “corrosive to the skin and eyes,” according to a risk assessment conducted by the agency. A 2009 UCLA study found that people exposed to paraquat are three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease. The chemical has been banned by the European Union and China.

The label printed on containers of Gramoxone, a widely used pesticide whose active ingredient is paraquat, warns against breathing the chemical’s mist and says to seek medical attention if the poison comes into contact with skin or clothing.

Based on interviews with 11 people in Quitaque, it appears that the chemical drifted at least 5 miles. Its path started behind Beck’s house on the south side of town, cutting a swath through downtown and moving farther east, where it spread to more rural areas. In its path were trees, gardens, livestock, pets and people.

Kim Reiss, who runs a commercial organic garden in Quitaque, claims the pesticide made her nose bleed. “That was so weird. I never have a bloody nose,” she said. Over the next few days, the fruits and vegetables in her garden began to die. The leaves of the plants were pocked with what she described as “cigarette burns” that kept getting bigger. Reiss said she lost $8,000 worth of produce. That’s in addition to the adverse effects of being exposed to pesticides before the fall harvest each year, when farmers hire crop dusters to spray cotton fields. “Usually, while they’re defoliating [the cotton], I spend a good portion of that time being sick,” she said. “They call it allergies. I call it being defoliated. It’s a strange place to choose to live.”

About a month later, in late June, Quitaque farmer and rancher C.L. Hawkins was repairing a fence in one of his fields when he says the wind carried a wave of pesticide onto him. “I was working on a fence right across the road, and he was sprayin’. Boy, I just went ahead and got out of there,” said Hawkins, who complained to TDA.

Then, in September, Quitaque wheat farmer and cattle rancher Paul Teegardin reported to the agency that the pesticide drifted onto grass he uses to feed his beef cattle. Though it was the first time he had filed a formal complaint, Teegardin said his land has been under assault by crop dusters for at least two years.

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Organic Cotton Market Grows as Consumers Demand Sustainability

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Published on: February 14, 2017

With growing concerns over sustainability and pollution globally, more organizations are beginning to turn to organic cotton when manufacturing textiles. Conventional cotton uses a very high amount of dangerous pesticides, and also requires a great deal of water. While organic cotton is more costly, it has a much smaller environmental impact. Additionally, as more people are beginning to factor in sustainability when buying clothing and other products, using organic cotton can give companies an edge over their competitors.

Currently only a small percentage of the global cotton market is organic, as it takes time to convert a traditional farm to an organic one, and production is more expensive. But there are many benefits to producing organic cotton, and not just to the health of the environment. It also impacts the wellbeing of the farmers and other nearby people.

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Did People Suffer For Your Cotton Shirt? DNA Tagging Lets You Track Its Origins

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Author: Elizabeth Segran | Published on: March 22, 2017

Cotton is a dirty crop, often tinged with human suffering.

Consider the farmers in India, the world’s largest producer of cotton. There, the crop is generally harvested on small farms, where families go into debt to buy seeds from Monsanto, a seed supplier that dominates 90% of the Indian market. As I’ve reported before, it only takes one bad year for a family to lose everything. This has led to an epidemic in suicides, with an estimated 300,000 farmers taking their own lives over the past two decades in order to spare their children the consequences of this debt.

Given devastating figures like these, many consumers understandably want to know more about the origins of the cotton they buy. A solution to that problem is not as far away as you think: Pimacott, the American division of the Indian cotton supplier Himatsingka, has been working on a technology that uses DNA tagging to allow you pinpoint exactly where your cotton comes from. As its name suggests, Pimacott only develops pima, a variety of cotton that is grown largely in the San Joaquin Valley in California and in particular regions of Peru. Because the company focuses on high-end cotton, it needed a way to assure customers that they were getting authentic and unadulterated pima, especially because raw pima might be brought overseas to be woven and turned into products.

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You Can Help Save the Environment by Wearing Eco-Conscious Clothing

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Author: Fix.com | Published on: March 15, 2017

When you reach into the closet and choose your clothes or scour the racks at your favorite retailer, the choices you make have an impact on the environment.

Jeans manufactured in the USA or made to fair trade standards, organic cotton T-shirts, and sweaters that can be washed in cold water and hung to dry are far gentler on the Earth than clothing manufactured in sweatshops overseas from chemical-laden fabrics.

Opting for a “green” wardrobe means paying close attention to fabrics, countries of origin, and laundering requirements, and considering how to dispose of clothes that are torn or no longer trendy.

The decision to emphasize environmental sustainability in your wardrobe is easier than ever. Here are some tips to get started.

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Our Cotton Colonies

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Author: Meta Krese | Published: March 20, 2017 

A major thread of the British Empire, the crop helped weave the efficient and ruthless structures of today’s globalized economy. The T-shirts we buy at retailers like Gap and H&M may feel far removed from the bloody past of a crop synonymous in

the 19th century with slavery and sweatshops. But when one follows the global supply chain of cotton growers, workers, traders and factory owners, it becomes increasingly apparent that capitalism has not, in fact, traveled far at all from its bloody origins.

Cotton is a flexible crop. It will grow anywhere rain is plentiful and temperatures remain above freezing for at least 200 days a year. Archaeological records show that humans have cultivated it for millennia in Africa, India, Central America and South America. As early as the 7th-century B.C.E., Herodotus described the army of Xerxes I of Persia wearing clothes of exceptional beauty “made of wool that grew on trees.”

Europe was late to the game, relying on linen, flax, silk and wool through much of the Renaissance. When the English India Company brought cheap and colorful calico and chitz to Britain in the second half of the 17th century, they were an instant hit. Europeans loved that the lively colors didn’t fade with the first washing.

To squash this new competition, European textile producers used all kinds of leverage against the Indian cotton industry. France outlawed cotton entirely in 1686; England passed a partial ban on Indian cotton in 1701 and a stricter ban in 1721; Spain, Prussia and other nations followed suit with various restrictions.

Businessmen eventually saw an opportunity for profit, however, and began building a European cotton industry grounded in colonialism and slavery. The cheap cotton harvested by enslaved people in North America allowed Britain to undercut India’s prices. According to historian Gene Dattel, Britain was importing 1.2 billion pounds of cotton annually from North America by 1860. Nearly 1 million workers in Britain’s mills and factories rendered the cotton into garments that made up 40 percent of national exports.

“Cotton,” writes Dattel in Cotton and Race in the Making of America, “was the single most important contributor to Britain’s economic power and its rise to preeminence as a world empire.” Cotton became a springboard for the Industrial Revolution, and for a global economy that favored limitless accumulation of capital.

Today, cotton crops occupy about 2.5 percent of the world’s arable land. The industry is the primary source of income for hundreds of millions of farmers and factory workers. That income is typically meager, however. Cotton workers are the perennial losers in a global race to the bottom. Multinational clothing companies seek out the cheapest textile manufacturing hubs. Factories, in turn, buy the cheapest cotton they can find. Any added expenses, including higher wages, may prompt buyers to flee to ever-cheaper factories—sometimes leaving entire national economies in tatters.

In These Times followed the cotton life cycle from the fields of Burkina Faso to the factories of Bangladesh to the sales racks of Slovenia. Along the way, we spoke with the people who make the shirts, jeans and countless other items you wear every day, to understand the real wages of cotton.

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Your Next Item of Clothing Should Be so Expensive It Hurts

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Author: Marc Bain | Published: October 2, 2015

If you’ve ever found yourself buying clothes just because they’re cheap, or if shopping itself has become a form of entertainment for you, I’ve got a proposal: The next time you buy something, spend a whole lot on it. Enough that it makes you sweat a little.

The point is to make you pause and ask yourself, “How much do I really want this?”

In the US and much of the industrialized world, cheap clothes are everywhere. At any fast-fashion chain store, you’ll find piles upon piles of jeans that cost less than $20. The problem is, all that low-cost clothing is produced, sold, and finally discarded in mass quantities, which has serious consequences for the environment, the workers paid poorly to make them, and even the mental well-being of the people buying them.

As a fashion reporter, I like clothes probably more than most. But I also know all the troubling facts represented by those cheap t-shirts and jeans. For more than a year now, I’ve set myself a simple goal for every clothing purchase. It’s an entirely personal choice that I feel helps me buy less and enjoy my purchases more. My hope is that it also reduces how much I contribute to some of those issues mentioned above.

The goal is to spend at least $150 on each item of clothing. And I propose you give it a try.

Let me explain

The immediate reaction I get when I tell people about this goal—and I call it a goal because I don’t always live up to it—is that $150 is a lot to spend for a piece of clothing.

That’s especially true if your standard for pricing is a store like Primark, the insanely cheap Irish fast-fashion chain that recently opened its first US location. For designer fashion, where a t-shirt can easily clear $150, it’s actually a pretty low hurdle.

But it’s enough that it causes me to seriously hesitate, which is the real point. It forces me to think about just how much I want that item of clothing, how much I’ll wear it, and whether I think the value it offers is worth a significant cost.

Importantly, $150 is also enough that I can’t make these purchases all the time, at least not without sacrificing elsewhere or going broke. It’s an investment, rather than the cheap buzz of getting something new.But it’s enough that it causes me to seriously hesitate, which is the real point. It forces me to think about just how much I want that item of clothing, how much I’ll wear it, and whether I think the value it offers is worth a significant cost.

Now, not everyone should have the same dollar limit. Each person should determine a standard based on income and other financial responsibilities. But it should be just enough that it causes you to wince slightly. My limit—as a married, childless, working journalist, saving up to one day buy an apartment—might fall somewhere between that of a single parent on an hourly wage and that of a high roller like author Buzz Bissinger, who wrote of his addiction to Gucci in GQ. (If you’re shopping like Bissinger, though, setting a dollar floor isn’t going to solve anything.)

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What’s the Second Most Polluting Industry? (We’ll Give You a Hint – You’re Wearing It)

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Author: Marina Qutab | February 15, 2017 

Have you ever taken a moment to look at the tag on your clothes to see where your clothes were made? Chances are, the tag will read: “Made in China” or another country outside of the USA. Although the label may seem harmless because a lot of our products are manufactured in different countries, there is so much more to the story than just a “made in ____”  label. We live in a “fast fashion” world, where companies produce high volumes of low-priced clothing at the expense of the environment and workers. Companies like Forever 21 and Zara process one million garments per day. Just imagine the resources involved, both human and otherwise. In the world’s least developed countries, an estimated 40 million people sew more than 1.5 billion garments in 250,000 factories and sweatshops each year. In many cases, these workers are not provided with basic workers rights, fair wages, and ethical working conditions.

The Environmental Consequences of Fast Fashion

Cotton, one of the fashion industry’s most frequently used materials, is among the most pesticide-intensive crops on the planet. It’s estimated that one pound of cotton requires at least one-third of a pound (136 grams) of pesticides. To help you understand, it takes half a pound (227 grams) of cotton to make the average t-shirt. In addition, cotton is a water-intensive crop. To produce one pair of jeans, it takes more than 1,800 gallons of water. It’s no wonder then that the $3 trillion fashion industry is the second most polluting industry, just behind oil.

Uzbekistan, the world’s sixth leading producer of cotton, is a clear example of how cotton can negatively impact a region’s environment. In the 1950s, two rivers in Central Asia, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya were rerouted from the Aral sea to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and nearby Turkmenistan. Today, water levels in the Aral are less than 10 percent of what they used to be just 50 years ago. As the Aral dried up, the communities and especially the fisheries that depended on the water supply crumbled. Over time, the sea became over-salinated and encumbered with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers from the nearby fields. Dust from the arid, exposed lakebed, containing these toxins and salt saturated the air, which created a public health crisis, negatively affected the farm fields for growing crops, contaminating the soil. The Aral is increasingly transforming into a dry sea, and the loss of what used to be a large body of water has caused the region’s summers to become hotter and drier and the winters to become much colder.

Uzbekistan is not the only example of how the conventional cotton farming industry has wreaked havoc on the environment and our health. Regions such as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, Pakistan’s Indus River, and the Rio Grande in Mexico and the U.S.

Although organic cotton is a much more sustainable alternative, this farming mechanism is rarely used – at only one percent of all the cotton worldwide being grown this way. Organically growing cotton does have its challenges, however. The crop is still water intensive and the clothing made from it may still be dyed unnaturally with chemicals and shipped to be sold globally.

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What Happens When Fashion Becomes Fast, Disposable and Cheap?

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Author: Zhai Yun Tan | Published on: April 10, 2016

When it comes to clothes these days, maybe you should ask: What’s your waste size?

You know you have those clothes sitting in your closet: That shirt you spent less than $10 on because it looked cool for a second, or that skirt you only wore once before it went out of fashion.

Fashion cycles are moving faster than ever. A Quartz article in December revealed how fashion brands like Zara, Gap and Adidas are churning out new styles more frequently, a trend dubbed “fast fashion” by many in the industry. The clothes that are mass-produced also become more affordable, thus attracting consumers to buy more.

“It used to be four seasons in a year; now it may be up to 11 or 15 or more,” says Tasha Lewis, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design.

The top fast fashion retailers grew 9.7 percent per year over the last five years, topping the 6.8 percent of growth of traditional apparel companies, according to financial holding company CIT.

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Cotton Trade: Where Does Your T-Shirt Grow?

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Author: Susanna Rustin | Published on: August 9, 2014

Moise Adihou stands by a rough wooden bench beneath a mango tree, surrounded by a small crowd that has gathered to hear his story.

“We were in the field,” he says. “Abraham came to visit after school to tell us he came first in his class. We were happy, so we wanted to celebrate.”

Adihou is a neat, sombre man in his 50s, and what he is describing took place in the village of Gaohungagon in the Zou department of Benin, West Africa. Abraham was 13 and Adihou’s eldest child.

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