Mens jacket with reclaimed t-shirt print applique, by Deborah PaulinoWhy remade versus newmade clothing? The average American discards 68 pounds of clothing and other textiles each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 10 million tons of unwanted clothing every year puts immense pressure on U.S. landfills. Imagine if all that fiber was recycled?

Production of synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester consumes nonrenewable resources, primarily petroleum, while emitting greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and releasing toxic wastewater containing organic solvents, heavy metals, dyes, and fiber treatments. Nylon is also very difficult to recycle. Producing fiber from recycled polyester is easier and produces only 15 percent as much air pollution as using raw materials, but the product is of lower quality than virgin polyester.

Fibers made from renewable raw materials are typically no more earth-friendly than polyester. For instance, rayon is made from wood pulp coming from mature forests through a process that pumps out large quantities of air and water pollutants. (A newer wood-based fiber called lyocell has a lighter impact on the environment but is nowhere close to displacing rayon.)

As they are commonly handled, wool-producing sheep can cause soil erosion, water pollution and biodiversity loss. And wool processing often uses large volumes of chemicals to clean fibers, prevent fabric shrinkage and improve washability. Leather manufacturing, especially the tanning step, is notorious for its use of toxic chemicals, including heavy metals and nasty, organic compounds.

Then there's King Cotton. The United States produces 8.5 billion pounds of cotton fiber each year, but that fills less than a third of the nation's always expanding demand for textiles. Fully 25 percent of the world's cotton crop, in the form of lint, thread, fabric or finished products, ends up in the United States or Canada.

Cotton is grown on less than 2 percent of U.S. farmland but accounts for one of every four pounds of pesticides sprayed. Currently in the global south, estimates suggest that half of total pesticide use is on cotton.

Genetically engineered cotton that produces a caterpillar-killing toxin is being promoted as a way to reduce pesticide use. But that will be a temporary fix, as the cotton bollworm and other insects are sure eventually to develop resistance to the toxin. In India, for example, the engineered crops could lose their protection within three or four years if their acreage continues to grow.

Almost 22 billion pounds of weed killer are applied annually to U.S. cotton (pdf) -- more chemical per acre than is sprayed on soybeans and three times as much as an acre of wheat gets. To curb the soil erosion that's all too common on cotton land, "no-till" methods have been introduced on a large scale. But they require even heavier spraying of herbicides.

Even after a field has succeeded in producing a good crop, it isn't finished being sprayed: To ease harvest, defoliants are used to strip leaves from the plants.

Cotton fiber usually undergoes extensive processing even before it is spun into thread, including treatment with caustic sodium hydroxide to remove waxes. Most cotton thread or fabric is bleached to allow dying to the desired color. Anti-wrinkle technology can involve dangerous or even carcinogenic compounds like formaldehyde.

And all such treatments are big water users. Bleaching the cloth for a single shirt generates as much as 15 gallons of polluted wastewater.

Before being shipped off to a big factory or backroom sweatshop, most cotton thread or cloth is dyed. With the world textile industry using 10,000 different dyes and pigments, it's little wonder that environmental agencies have some difficulty keeping up with dye pollution.

Dyeing does more environmental damage than any other manufacturing step, and it's hard to hide. Villagers living near dyeing plants in southern India have reported that drinking water flowing from their taps can be red one day, green the next.

Booming demand for brightly colored cotton shirts and dresses has led to increased use of so-called "fiber reactive dyes" that bind to the cotton fiber, keeping it color-fast. Many such reactive dyes are toxic and can pass right through water-treatment facilities untouched. Some, such as azo dyes, are not easily broken down in the environment.

Dye effluents can contain any of a long list of hazardous metals: copper, cobalt, chromium, nickel, zinc, lead, antimony, silver, cadmium or mercury. Little is known about the fate or effects of chemical compounds called "auxiliaries" that are used to improve performance of the dyes.

Then there are the microenvironments that apparel and textile workers endure. A review of studies done worldwide up to 2003 showed that, compared with unexposed populations, textile and dye workers tend to have more nasal, throat, bladder and gastrointestinal cancers. Some cancers are more commonly associated with synthetic fabrics, others with cotton.

The growing consumption of organic cotton is not a panacea. It's fine as far as it goes, but benefits are limited to curtailment of chemical use. Bale-per-acre yields tend to be lower, so feeding our cotton appetite organically would require plowing up even more acres. And cotton has a lot of other impacts that most organic production doesn't address. More than half of the irrigated agricultural land in the world is sown to cotton, and that depletes water resources and can lead to ruin of soils through salinization. Land cultivation for cotton production, which is often more intense on organic farms, is already responsible for huge losses of soil through erosion. Each acre of cotton represents a lost acre of natural ecosystem, whether it's Texas grassland or Central American forest. Damming of rivers for irrigation projects destroys even more ecosystems.

Whatever the intentions of domestic entrepreneurial companies like Gaiam, Inc. -- who's corporate statement, "we believe that all of the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land form an interconnected system that can be seen as a single entity" -- or American Apparel, Inc., with its reputation for avoiding sweatshop labor, the practical result of their efforts is to add to the bulk of new material jammed into the nation's collective closet, not replace it.

Thrift stores are a less wasteful way to dress, but they account for a tiny share of total sales. Goodwill Industries saw $1.8 billion in sales in 2006 -- a fraction of 1 percent of the market for new threads. The Salvation Army handles several hundred million garments each year, but that's only a couple of percent of new-product sales.

Most donated clothes end up being baled and shipped to impoverished countries, and that isn't necessarily doing anyone a favor. There is evidence that imports of hand-me-downs from the West undermines the ability of African nations, for example, to clothe their own populations independently of foreign charity or apparel brokers

To read the full article go to http://www.alternet.org/story/69256/

I'll write something myself when I've finished developing the web site.

Deborah