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By Root 1026 0

environmental regulations are less stringent, the amount of pesticides, and their toxicity, is even greater, while workers are provided with even fewer safety precautions. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization points out that farmers in many developing countries use antiquated, dangerous equipment, which is more likely to result in spills and poisonings.18 According to the Pesticide Action Network’s Organic Cotton Briefing Kit: “In India, 91% of male cotton workers exposed to pesticides eight hours or more per day experienced some type of health disorder, including chromosomal aberrations, cell death and cell cycle delay... Pesticide poisoning remains a daily reality among agricultural workers in developing countries, where up to 14% of all occupational injuries in the agricultural sector and 10% of all fatal injuries can be attributed to pesticides.”19

To top it all off, at harvest time the plants are sprayed with toxic chemical defoliants that strip off the leaves so they don’t stain the fluffy white bolls and so the bolls are more accessible to the mechanical pickers or “strippers.”20

We’ve now left the cotton fields, but we’re still not even close to the finished product: my T-shirt. Taking the raw cotton and turning it into fabric requires a whole litany of industrial processes. The energy-sucking machines involved include a cotton gin that separates the fiber from the seeds, stems, and leaves, followed by machines that bundle the fibers into bales so they can be transported elsewhere, where more machines undo the bales, fluff the cotton, and press it into sheets called laps. Then come carding, combing, drawing, and spinning machines, which produce cotton thread. Finally weaving or knitting machines transform the cotton thread into fabric. But it’s still not the soft, bright fabric of my white T-shirt. It needs to be “finished.” This can involve “scouring,” which means boiling the fabric in an alkali like sodium hydroxide to remove impurities.21

Next up: the color. Since my T-shirt is white, it’s going to get an especially strong dose of bleach—but even colored T’s get bleached before being dyed. (The dying process often uses benzene, heavy metals, formaldehyde fixing agents, and a whole host of chemicals, and because cotton naturally resists dyes, one-third of them run off into wastewater.) But back to my white one: to bleach its fabric, I can only hope hydrogen peroxide was used, but many companies outside the United States and Europe, where most garments are produced, are still likely to use chlorine.22 Chlorine is toxic on its own, but if it gets mixed with organic (carbon-containing) material, as can happen once the chlorine leaves the factory in wastewater, it becomes a carcinogen and neurotoxin.

In the last stage before the fabric is trundled off to the sewing machines (or sometimes after it is sewn and assembled) it’s usually treated to become what the textile industry calls “easy care,” which means soft, wrinkle resistant, stain and odor resistant, fireproof, mothproof, and antistatic. Here we have one of the fabulous legacies of our post-1950s infatuation with science’s capacity to “simplify” our lives. So which magic potion did scientists find would keep fabric so carefree? Formaldehyde.23 This dangerous chemical (usually used as a building block of materials like resins and plastics) not only results in respiratory problems, burning eyes, and cancer, it can cause allergic contact dermatitis when it touches the skin.24 Um, I don’t know about you, but my clothes come into contact with my skin all the time. Other popular ingredients in this stage are caustic soda, sulfuric acid, bromines, urea resins, sulfonamides, and halogens.25 These can cause problems with sleep, concentration, and memory... and more cancer.

Needless to say, it’s not only we wearers of cotton whose health is at risk: factory workers processing the fabrics are especially impacted, and the contaminated wastewater from these factories ultimately affects the entire global food chain. In fact, about one-fifth of the global footprint