Rikki Cargo
Guess what? Jeans aren’t really green. The most sustainable pair you’ll slip on are the blue jeans that feel like cardboard boxes on your legs or the pair you find at the thrift shop; otherwise it’s a crapshoot as to how they get distressed like you want them to be. Sustainable? To a degree, depending on what the company wants to tout as “eco,” with initiatives ranging from the use of natural reactants vs. toxic indigo baths to planting trees or giving back to countries that have suffered at the hands of the denim industry.
On that note, we turn our eyes to images like these released recently from Greenpeace on Ecotextile News. The site claims that “Two Chinese textile factory towns in Guangdong province, that together make millions of pairs of jeans and underwear, are now heavily polluted with chemicals released from textile production.”Situated on a tributary of the Pearl River Delta, Xintang is a huge denim producer. Its jeans and apparel business began in the eighties, but thanks to our unquenchable thirst to look like rugged Americans, the last thirty years has enabled an entire economy to become completely dependent on the denim production chain in Xintang. According to Greenpeace, the town produces over 260 million pairs of jeans a year, equivalent to 60 percent of China’s total jeans production, and 40 percent of the jeans sold in the USA.
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