Toxic Chemicals Exposed in High Street Fashion…and Greenpeace Textile Products

Image source: Ecouterre

Last month Greenpeace released a report entitled Toxic Threads: The Big Fashion Stitch Up which exposed numerous global fashion brands for using toxic chemicals during clothing production.

A selection of brands were chosen, clothing items brought and sent to labs for testing to identify any restricted substances. Brands highlighted to be selling clothing with high concentrations of NPEs (hormone distruptive), and/or with the presence of phthalates (hormone disruptive/carcinogenic), amines or azo dyes (can be carcinogenic) included Mango, C&A, M&S and Zara.

I do not agree with such chemicals being used during fibre/fabric/garment production, however I came across a rather interesting article in Ecotextile this afternoon: Toxic Chemicals Found in Greenpeace T-Shirts. Unfortunately a registration is required to read the Ecotextile article, but to sum up it appears that Greenpeace cannot practice what they preach.

Phthalates have been discovered in Greenpeace t-shirts and APE’s in Greenpeace headgear. The article states that Greenpeace has removed the textile products from sale along with suspending other textile merchandise sales. It appears that Greenpeace are none the wiser about what is within their textile products, much like the rest of the industry. The organisation has committed to ‘only be able to sell textiles again when the industry can produce toxic-free fashion.’

Greenpeace are encouraging customers to keep their wears as garment durability is as much a part of their strategy: 

The wearing of our textile products do not pose a health risk. The best way to be environmentally friendly is to make it last as long as possible, so that it stays in your wardrobe and not end up in landfill.

I have tried searching the Greenpeace website for such words, but I cannot find this.

It is interesting how Greenpeace are willing to condemn fashion brands for slip-ups in the incredibly complex global textile supply chain. Will the report be re-issued with their own textile products highlighted within?

Also what will become of the rejected stock they no longer plan to sell. Within the Greenpeace statement they make it clear they do not believe in land filling textile products that have not fulfilled their life. I will be very interested to find out what their solution is with this stock.

In light of the report, Zara has committed to go 'Toxic-Free' and M&S are currently working with Greenpeace to develop new chemical commitments.

Fashion to Die for?

Dialogue between Fashion and Death: a chapter in the book of the same name by poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi I found to be a fascinating text that draws upon the similarities between Fashion and Death, here personified as two sisters. The passage is a short, humorous conversation where Fashion convinces Death that they fall from the same tree, so to speak:

Fashion: …you and I together keep undoing and changing things down here on earth…

Fashion: I’m saying that it is our nature and our custom to keep renovating the world. But right from the start you threw yourself on people and on blood, whereas I’m generally satisfied with beards, hair, clothes, furnishings, buildings, and the like.

cause pain:

Fashion: I persuade and force all genteel men to endure daily a thousand hardships and a thousand discomforts and often pain and torment and I even get some of them to die gloriously for love of me.

Fashion: …doing everything my way, no matter how much it hurts them…

move at a different pace:

Fashion: …for whereas you run, I can go faster than a gallop, and whereas you faint by standing still in one place, I waste away.

Fashion ultimately concludes that she is one with Death:

Fashion: …some of my doings that are of great assistance to you.

Fashion: …I have caused the neglect and the elimination of the exertion and those exercises which favour physical well-being, and I have introduced innumerable others that weaken the body in a thousand ways and shorten life and have caused them to be valued highly.

Fashion: …I have put in the world such orders and such customs that life itself, both of the body and of the soul, is more dead than alive…

The work is not dated; however it can be assumed that Leopardi wrote it in the early 19th Century. You cannot deny that Fashion’s arguments still seem relevant today. The rich/poor divide must have been considerably wider during the era it was written indicating that fashion played a more important role in determining status or class, therefore sort after. Yet fashion is still incredibly important nowadays perhaps because it is more accessible. Fashion changes much more frequently in order to keep people interested, maybe even to remind us its there.

This increased speed has quite literally sucked the life out of us and the planet:

• The Aral Sea was almost completely drained in order to provide water for the ever increasing demand for cotton for the changing fashion garments.

• Poor working conditions and long hours of those who make fashion garments are struggling to live their lives.

• Chemicals from dying and laundry detergents, along with pesticides build up in our environment. They can cause disfigurements and even death.

• Not only this, but the fashion consumer has become robotic; buying, wearing, throwing, buying, wearing, throwing… Fashion has simply become monotonous and only seems to satisfy for shorter and shorter periods of time. Talk about soul destroying.

With fashion being identified with a close likeness to death, is there any way we can change this?