Every year about 2 billion jeans are produced worldwide. That is a lot of jeans! Jeans are also typically made out of cotton which is very resource and labor intensive.
According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, “99% of the world’s cotton farmers work in the developing world where low levels of safety awareness, lack of access to protective apparatus, illiteracy, poor labelling of pesticides, inadequate safeguards, and chronic poverty each exacerbate the damage caused by cotton pesticides to low income communities.” Unfortunately this is where a lot of communities are located and they are the most vulnerable to exploitative work. One major example is India, it is home to more than one third of the world’s cotton farmers. Cotton accounts for more than half of the pesticides used annually even though cotton only covers 5% of land under crops. Cotton farmers are in a hazardous line of work, according to one study, “in a single 5 month observation period, 97 cotton farmers experienced 323 separate incidents of ill health. Of these 39% were associated with mild poisoning, 38% with moderate poisoning, and 6% with severe poisoning.” Spraying pesticides is very toxic to your health and unfortunately many cotton farmers are people of color. According to the study, “between 25 million and 77 million agricultural workers worldwide suffer from acute pesticide poisoning with at least 1 million requiring hospitalization each year.” These symptoms include: tremors, headaches, seizures, vomiting and even death. The long term effects of spraying pesticides are severe depression and impaired memory. Children of color are disturbingly, directly involved in the cotton pesticide application in India and Uzbekistan. “In Pakistan, Egypt, and Central Asia child laborer's work in cotton fields either during or following the spraying season,” according to the Environmental Justice Foundation. This is truly disturbing to know kids are being forced into this dangerous work with little protective gear if any at all. The most commonly used pesticide for cotton farming is a pesticide called Aldicarb which, “absorbed through the skin can kill an adult.” Imagine a kid spraying that without any knowledge in how dangerous this chemical is, truly heartbreaking. Another hazardous substance used in dyeing the jeans is synthetic indigo dye which makes the jeans blue. According to a study, it is “toxic, carcinogenic reducing agents are used for this purpose and fume generated during dye reduction causes different health hazards.” Denim manufacturers also are using synthetic material to cut costs. They mix it in with the cotton. According to the Daily Mail, “synthetic clothes contain toxins including brominated flame retardants and perfluorinated chemicals which are classified as cancer-causing by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHi everyone, I’m Elizabeth! I am a Chinese American and Canadian environmental activist focused on creating awareness on environmental justice issues and tying them to fast fashion and our waste and climate change crisis. I’m very open about my mental health. I talk about these important topics on my platform Archives
March 2021
Categories
All
|