The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [43]
Today, there are about one hundred thousand synthetic compounds in use in modern industrial production.1 They are so ubiquitous that most of the Stuff we’re used to having in our lives can’t be made without synthetic ingredients, or it can’t be made with quite the same qualities (not quite as shiny or stretchy or what have you). Now, synthetics aren’t inherently good or bad. Some are even made from natural ingredients while others are wholly developed in a laboratory. The distinction is simply that the new compound is something that didn’t exist naturally on earth.
The trouble with synthetics is that most of them are a big unknown in terms of their impacts on our health and the health of the planet. Because few of them have been tested in the half century or so that most of them have been around,2 we run a risk by using them and exposing ourselves to them. The old thinking about chemical ingredients was that low enough exposure prevented health risks. But as was proved in the groundbreaking research of Dr. Theo Colborn and Dr. John Peterson Myers, environmental scientists and coauthors (with Dianne Dumanoski) of the 1996 book Our Stolen Future, low-dose exposures over time can have tragic outcomes, with the worst fallout from even infinitesimal levels of chemical contamination showing up in the next generation(s) as reduced intelligence, lowered immunity, ADD, infertility, cancer, and other potential effects of which we’re not even yet aware.3 In the upcoming section on dangerous materials I’ll talk about the negative impacts of some of the synthetics that we’ve already been able to track.
But first, now that we’ve got the gamut of necessary ingredients—stacks of logs, tankers of water, mounds of metals, barrels of petroleum, piles of coal, yards of synthetic fibers, vats of chemical compounds, etc.—it’s time to peer into some factories and witness our Stuff being made.
Of course, the process of production looks different for different kinds of Stuff. But there are also similarities—for example, every single production process requires an input of energy, and right now this is nearly always provided by burning coal or oil. I decided to approach the overwhelming number of production processes that are out there by investigating just a few of my favorite things, along with a few of my least favorite.
My Cotton T-Shirt
What a great invention, right? It’s comfy, breathable, washable, absorbent, and versatile. I can wear it under a blazer to an important meeting, over a swimsuit at the beach, or with my jeans—plus or minus a sweater—in just about every season. I can pick one up almost anywhere, even the grocery store or drugstore, and I’ll only have to spend $6.99 or $4.99 or maybe even $1.99 if I get a multipack or catch a sale. What’s not to love? Well, let’s see...
I intentionally leave out agricultural products and food in telling the Story of Stuff; there are plenty of other people, books, and films covering those issues. But to unravel the story of my T-shirt, which provides a window into the whole textiles industry, we have to start out in the fields. Fluffy, thirsty, toxic: that could be the tagline for cotton, a shrub native to the tropics but today grown in the United States, Uzbekistan, Australia, China, India, and small African countries like Benin and Burkina Faso, with total global production at more than 25 million tons per year, or enough to make fifteen T-shirts for every person on earth.4
Cotton plants love water—in fact it’s one of the world’s most heavily irrigated crops.5 And irrigation—with the exception of drip irrigation, currently used in a mere 0.7 percent of world irrigation systems—wastes a lot of water through seepage and evaporation.6
One of the big issues with cotton and water brings us back to the concepts of virtual water and the water footprint introduced in the last chapter; cotton-buying countries are