dyes
Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
Big Wool wants you to believe it’s nice to animals and the environment. It’s not
Wool’s cozy image masks a polluting, violent reality.
Baltimore sisters score a hit with bamboo toilet paper
The duo have donated nearly 5,000 rolls to city residents during the pandemic.
How Tommy Hilfiger is working toward sustainability and inclusivity
From a massive solar roof to new equity programs to washing denim with lasers instead of water.
Opinion
www.nytimes.com
Wear clothes? Then you're part of the problem
Making, washing and tossing apparel has a big environmental cost.
Saving the ocean one outfit at a time.
The sea suffers for fashion. Kombucha leather and leased jeans to the rescue.
Around the world, people buy about 80 billion new garments a year, and Americans alone throw out 15 million tonnes of clothing. Global fast-fashion companies are having a heyday, with Zara owner Inditex and Swedish giant H&M; posting massive sales and regularly ranking on Forbes’s list of most-profitable fashion companies. Clothes have never been cheaper, and anyone can look like an Instagram fashionista or a GQ model for the cost of a couple of medium pizzas.
But this disposable fahion is the result of a global supply chain that hides the true cost of garments. While many companies tout their environmental responsibility, follow their supply chains far enough and you’ll find a labyrinth of independent mills and factories where fabric is woven, dyed, and sewn under sometimes-abysmal conditions. As a rule, fashion companies don’t own these factories, and may not even have direct contact with them, limiting their influence. Above all, these supply chains are nimble. If labor or environmental regulations tighten up in one place, as happened in Cambodia in 2017, buyers may just shift to a cheaper, more competitive locale.
Here at Hakai Magazine, we’re taking a closer look at the impacts of fast fashion on our oceans and rivers. It turns out that a few keystone materials in those fall lookbooks spell particular trouble for the coast.
Cotton
Over a garbled Skype connection, Shafiq Ahmad speaks of a time when people could drink the groundwater near his home in Pakistan. “But now we can’t use it,” Ahmad says. The water is unsafe, and the culprit, he says, is runoff from crops contaminated with pesticides. One of those crops is cotton, which can be found in a large proportion of fast-fashion garments.
Ahmad is Pakistan’s country manager for the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an NGO that works with farmers on the ground to fix some of the environmental issues related to cotton agriculture. One major issue is the impact the crop can have on the region’s water.
Textiles and cotton farming are big industries in Pakistan. The country is the world’s fourth-largest cotton producer after China, India, and the United States. Pakistan’s cotton crop consumes close to 20 trillion liters of water—equivalent to the capacity of more than eight million Olympic swimming pools—every year from the country’s lifeblood, the Indus River.
And the Indus is in trouble.
The river is born in the glaciers that cloak the mountain ranges north of Pakistan, the Himalayas and the Karakoram. From there it flows southward into Pakistan, where barrages and dams capture the precious water and divert it into tributaries and canals heading toward communities and farms. A staggering 75 percent of the Indus River’s water goes to canals for farming. By the time the river reaches its delta, it’s barely a trickle.
When the first industrial-scale dams were opened on the Indus in the mid-20th century, they sharply reduced the flow of water and sediment that continually replenished the Indus’s huge delta. Deprived of material, the sea began eroding the delta, up to 12 square kilometers per year since 1944. Salty water has pushed dozens of kilometers inland. Farmers and fishermen in the once-lush delta have witnessed the consequences of the sea’s incursion—the disappearance of the mangroves and freshwater fisheries that rely on mangroves for habitat. Meanwhile, climate change shrinks the Himalayan glaciers that supply the Indus, and increases the frequency and severity of drought in Pakistan.
The “water wars” hypothesis appears not so farfetched. As fresh water becomes scarcer around the world, it will become more precious and conflict over it will lead to violence, much as valuable oil contributed to conflicts such as the Gulf War. Cotton is far from the sole cause of the Indus’s woes. But it does need a lot of water and it’s become deeply interwoven with Pakistan’s economy, with hundreds of thousands of people relying on cotton and textiles for a living.
Ahmad explains that one solution is to rethink Pakistan’s irrigation infrastructure. With open canals instead of closed conduits, about half of the water flowing from catchments to farms makes it to the farmer. The rest is lost to evaporation. And in farms without modern irrigation infrastructure, irrigation means just flooding the field, which increases evaporation and contaminated runoff.
BCI’s farmers now grow 12 percent of the world’s cotton. They say they have reduced water use in Pakistan by 21 percent and pesticide use by 17 percent, and increased profits by 37 percent. BCI also works in the largest cotton producing countries, China and India, but neither these two countries nor the United States is facing as dire a water management situation as Pakistan.
“The biggest challenge for us is governance of water and distribution of water,” Ahmad says, adding that the river is misused by many parties. Those who are allocated a lot of water from the catchment basins and canals often waste it; if farmers then find themselves without enough water, they may pump more illegally from the ground, lowering the already polluted water table. Pumping a water source dry for cotton has precedent: north of Pakistan, the Aral Sea—drained for irrigation during the Soviet era—stands as witness that even the largest fresh watersheds can be mismanaged to decimation.
Leather
In North America, people often own more leather than they realize or care to admit. Closets are typically stuffed with footwear, from Blundstones and Birkenstocks to Keens, Adidas, and Doc Martens. In the United States alone, consumers spend nearly US $30-billion annually on footwear, and that figure doesn’t include what families dish out each year for many other leather goods, including handbags, gloves, and jackets.
All these purchases drive a global leather industry with tentacle-like supply chains that many of us rarely think about. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, the world’s manufacturers produced nearly 1.8 billion square meters of lightweight leather (both bovine and sheep leathers) for the fashion industry, almost enough to blanket the Hawai‘ian island of Maui. Much of this fine leather came from small tanneries in developing countries, where labor costs are rock bottom, and environmental and workplace health regulations are often poorly enforced. So what’s the true cost of our love of fashionable leather?
Look at Bangladesh, a land of meandering rivers and tropical floodplains along the Bay of Bengal. In 2016, more than 200 tanneries vied for space in a teeming industrial quarter in the capital city of Dhaka, along the floodplain of the Buriganga River. To transform perishable animal skin into durable leather, factory workers soaked animal hides in a series of toxic baths containing nearly 40 different acids and several heavy metals including chromium, a known carcinogen. The hides absorbed just 20 percent of these chemical brews: the rest was waste. In all, Dhaka’s tanneries discharged nearly 22,000 cubic liters of toxic effluent daily into the Buriganga River, which ultimately flows into the Bay of Bengal.
Under this chemical onslaught, the Buriganga River is dead. The water smells like rotten eggs and is devoid of oxygen, Imamul Huq, an environmental scientist and vice chancellor of the University of Barisal in Bangladesh, notes in an email. “No aquatic life exists in the river,” Huq adds. (In addition, a 2016 study reports that more than 200 kilometers away, some ocean shores in eastern Bangladesh are now polluted with heavy metals from tanneries and other industries in the Chittagong region.) Faced with an environmental disaster along the floodplain of the Buriganga River, the Bangladeshi government forced Dhaka’s leather factories to move to a new industrial park in 2017, and it has promised to install an effluent treatment plant there. But the opening of the plant was delayed, and in February, residents raised fears that the transplanted tanneries were contaminating a second river, the Dhaleshwari.
Other developing countries face similar problems. In China, untreated tannery wastewater has poisoned the Hutuo River, turning it into a channel of toxic sludge. And in the Philippines, tannery effluent and other industrial wastewater discharged into the Marilao River has contaminated some shellfish beds in Manila Bay.
There’s plenty of incentive to produce a more river- and ocean-friendly leather. In Bangladesh, engineers are test driving technologies for reducing water consumption and chromium use in tanneries. Others are looking for sustainable alternatives to leather. Some fashion companies offer goods made from “vegan leather,” a synthetic mainly composed of polyurethane (PU) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC). No animals are slaughtered to produce this synthetic leather, but PU and PVC come with their own serious health and environmental problems. PU and PVC factories often use a solvent known as dimethylformamide—a carcinogen that exposes workers to increased risk of testicular and oral cavity cancer. In addition, studies show that PVC leaches dioxins in landfill sites.
So researchers are now searching for cleaner alternatives. In New Jersey, scientists at the American firm Modern Meadow are attempting to mass produce collagen—the protein in animal skin—from living cells, so they can biofabricate leather for the fashion industry without killing any animals. Elsewhere, research teams are experimentally producing a form of leather from a popular drink stocked in many grocery stores—kombucha.
Kombucha is made by stirring sugar, bacteria, and yeast into black or green tea: as the mixture ferments, it forms long fibers of cellulose. In Australia, Alice Payne, a lecturer in fashion at Queensland University of Technology, and her colleagues and students have experimentally cultured kombucha leather and designed fashionable apparel from it. By allowing the kombucha mixture to ferment for two to three weeks, the Australian researchers created a pliable skin-like membrane 10 millimeters thick that looked a little like tofu. It was slimy, but it had the texture of leather. Once the team members washed, oiled, dried, and sealed the material, they fashioned handbags, clothing, and footwear from it. The “shoe styles vary from casual slip-ons to more conceptual designs with handmade wooden heels and soles,” Payne and her colleagues noted in a 2016 paper.
But kombucha leather isn’t ready for the fashion industry. “Growing a consistent piece is difficult,” notes Payne in an email. And kombucha leather, she adds, is less durable than animal leather. To encourage other innovators to help solve the problems and pave the way to commercialization, Payne and her colleagues have posted online simple instructions for making this sustainable material. In decades to come, kombucha leather could be a promising alternative to animal hides. HP
Denim
What looks more comfortable, down to earth, and innocuous than a pair of well-worn jeans? With their traditional design and 19th century watch pocket, blue jeans seem to come from an earlier, simpler time. But the blue jean industry has become something of an environmental battleground today. Jean factories frequently produce the trademark blue color by soaking cotton a dozen or so times in giant vats containing a synthetic indigo dye often produced from fossil fuels. And the artfully faded look, misleadingly known as stonewash? It comes from workers blasting the fabric with silica or stripping the dye with toxic chemicals rich in heavy metals.
Like tanneries, denim factories are often located in the developing world—out of sight, and out of mind of Western consumers. One of the world’s biggest producers of denim is a gritty looking city in China’s Pearl River Delta—Xintang. According to one 2016 study, Xintang’s factory workers produce a whopping 200 million pairs of jeans a year, but they and their neighbors pay a steep price for the industry.
The local river has turned a strange black color from the dumping of untreated dye water from the factories. And scraps of denim and other factory sludge rot along riverbanks. In 2010, Greenpeace researchers conducted a study in Xintang and neighboring Gurao, sampling water and sediments from the river. Nearly 80 percent of the samples were contaminated with heavy metals. One sample contained a level of cadmium, a heavy metal toxic to humans and aquatic life, that was 128 times greater than the limit set by the Chinese government. “Not only are the substances in the wastewater poisoning aquatic systems and depleting fish stocks,” writes Kim Hiller Connell, an environmental scientist at Kansas State University, in a 2015 book chapter, Xintang’s jean factories are dumping their effluent “into water utilized by millions of people.”
Today, research teams are working on new dying technologies that use much less water: one such system alters the molecular structure of cotton fibers so they absorb dye more readily. This reduces the use of water by 90 percent. But some fashion designers aren’t waiting for scientific fixes. Mud Jeans, for example, is going the sharing economy route, with its Lease A Jeans program. In this model, the consumer rents a pair of Mud jeans by paying a one-time €20 (US $24) membership fee and a monthly fee of €7.50 for 12 months: any time after that, the buyer can send back the old jeans and lease a new pair, paying the same monthly fee. Meanwhile the company recycles the worn-out jeans: workers cut them into pieces, mechanically extract the fibers, and produce new articles of clothing.
“This is moving in the right direction—leasing, repairing, lending,” says Kirsten Brodde, who leads the Detox My Fashion campaign for Greenpeace Germany. “All these small companies are paving the way. They are the business models for tomorrow.” HP
Plastics
By the time we thought to look, they were everywhere. Tiny squiggles of plastic, almost too small to detect with the naked eye. These plastic microfibers are scattered throughout the ocean, from the surface to the bottom and everywhere in between. When washed, synthetic garments such as acrylic, polyester, and fleece shed microfibers, which end up in the ocean through wastewater discharge. Indeed, of all the microplastics that wash up on coastlines around the world, more than 85 percent are fibers, outnumbering other types such as microbeads from cosmetics or shards broken down from larger plastic pieces. So, how bad are they?
Unlike plastic bags or bottle caps, quantifying what these ubiquitous fibers do to marine fauna is tricky. “In the real world, it’s impossible to see if it’s causing harm,” says Peter Ross, director of the Ocean Pollution Research Program at Ocean Wise Conservation Association.
According to Ross, it’s also unclear how much harm microfibers would do to a human who ingests them. But lab tests show how these fibers can be a serious problem at the lower end of the ocean’s food chain.
“We know plastics create blockages and suffocate large animals,” Ross says. He thinks the same could be happening to little marine organisms. Research from 2013 on copepods—a kind of zooplankton—exposed to microplastic beads found that the plastic stuck to the animals, and when they ate the plastic, it obstructed their guts making it difficult to eat anything else. This supports the idea that microplastics may choke zooplankton. Microfibers could then work their way up the food chain, as larger animals gobble up the plastic-stuffed zooplankton.
Marine biologist and Hakai Institute researcher Sarah Dudas says oysters on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, are already harboring microplastics. They can filter them out within about five days, but only after they are exposed to a continuous stream of super-clean seawater, which is unrealistic in today’s ocean. Microfiber impacts are more than physical, they’re chemical, too. Like any other plastic, they can leach their composite chemicals into animals that have eaten them. And other pollutants can stick to plastic microfibers and poison animals too, though this has not been well studied. But any effort to get rid of them requires knowing where the fibers are coming from, a difficult proposition. Once they are swirling about in the ocean, there’s no way to tell what city, or type of garment, was the point of origin.
To find out, Ross is washing clothing with known components in standard washing machines, and then categorizing the chemical and physical signatures of the fibers. He hopes to create a library of fibers, from acrylics to polyester. Then Ross and his colleagues could test ocean water samples from around the world and measure their chemical signatures against the database to determine where the fibers came from. If a lot of microplastics of a certain kind appears in one place, for example, efforts to stop the source can be focused and, hopefully, effective.
Ross is partnering with Metro Vancouver and outdoor apparel companies MEC and REI to do this. Outdoor clothing is a big source of synthetic fibers. Yet while high-end apparel companies have an incentive to market better products to green-minded consumers, that’s not true of lower-end companies that focus on selling high quantities at low prices. The volume of microfibers washing onto shores, and finding their way into animals, including humans, may be high for a while yet. AK
Keep reading...Show less
Researchers look to nanomaterials to clean air, water and land.
First explored for applications in microscopy and computing, nanomaterials — materials made up of units that are each thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair — are emerging as useful for tackling threats to our planet’s well-being.
Researchers are looking to tiny materials to clean up air, water and land
Intro imagePhoto of pollution-absorbing nanosponge courtesy of Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Author profile image Writer Bhavya Khullar
@BhavyaSc Science journalist
Share
Tweet Facebook Share on Google+ Linkedin
August 18, 2017 — The list of environmental problems that the world faces may be huge, but some strategies for solving them are remarkably small. First explored for applications in microscopy and computing, nanomaterials — materials made up of units that are each thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair — are emerging as useful for tackling threats to our planet’s well-being.
Scientists across the globe are developing nanomaterials that can efficiently use carbon dioxide from the air, capture toxic pollutants from water and degrade solid waste into useful products.
“Nanomaterials could help us mitigate pollution. They are efficient catalysts and mostly recyclable. Now, they have to become economical for commercialization and better to replace present-day technologies completely,” says Arun Chattopadhyay, a member of the chemistry faculty at the Center for Nanotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.
Harvesting CO2
To help slow the climate-changing rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, researchers have developed nanoCO2 harvesters that can suck atmospheric carbon dioxide and deploy it for industrial purposes.
“Nanomaterials can convert carbon dioxide into useful products like alcohol. The materials could be simple chemical catalysts or photochemical in nature that work in the presence of sunlight,” says Chattopadhyay, who has been working with nanomaterials to tackle environmental pollutants for more than a decade.
Many research groups are working to address a problem that, if solved, could be a holy grail in combating climate change: how to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into useful products. Chattopadhyay isn’t alone. Many research groups are working to address a problem that, if solved, could be a holy grail in combating climate change: how to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into useful products. Nanoparticles offer a promising approach to this because they have a large surface-area-to-volume ratio for interacting with CO2 and properties that allow them to facilitate the conversion of CO2 into other things. The challenge is to make them economically viable. Researchers have tried everything from metallic to carbon-based nanoparticles to reduce the cost, but so far they haven’t become efficient enough for industrial-scale application.
One of the most recent points of progress in this area is work by scientists at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum and the Lille University of Science and Technology in France. The researchers developed a nanoCO2 harvester that uses water and sunlight to convert atmospheric CO2 into methanol, which can be employed as an engine fuel, a solvent, an antifreeze agent and a diluent of ethanol. Made by wrapping a layer of modified graphene oxide around spheres of copper zinc oxide and magnetite, the material looks like a miniature golf ball, captures CO2 more efficiently than conventional catalysts and can be readily reused, according to Suman Jain, senior scientist of the Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun in India, who developed the nanoCO2 harvester.
Jain says that the nanoCO2 harvester has a large molecular surface area and captures more CO2 than a conventional catalyst with similar surface area would, which makes the conversion more efficient. But due to their small size, the nanoparticles have a tendency to clump up, making them inactive with prolonged use. Jain adds that synthesizing useful nanoparticle-based materials is also challenging because it’s hard to make the particles a consistent size. Chattopadhyay says the efficiency of such materials can be improved further, providing hope for useful application in the future.
Cleansing Water
Most toxic dyes used in textile and leather industries can be captured with nanoparticles. “Water pollutants such as dyes from human-created waste like those from tanneries could get to natural sources of water like deep tube wells or groundwater if wastewater from these industries is left untreated,” says Chattopadhyay. “This problem is rather difficult to solve.”
An international group of researchers led by professor Elzbieta Megiel of the University of Warsaw in Poland reports that nanomaterials have been widely studied for removing heavy metals and dyes from wastewater. According to the research team, adsorption processes using materials containing magnetic nanoparticles are highly effective and can be easily performed because such nanoparticles have a large number of sites on their surface that can capture pollutants and don’t readily degrade in water.
Chattopadhyay adds that appropriately designed magnetic nanomaterials can be used to separate pollutants such as arsenic, lead, chromium and mercury from water. However, the nanotech-based approach has to be more efficient than conventional water purification technology to make it worthwhile.
In addition to removing dyes and metals, nanomaterials can also be used to clean up oil spills. Researchers led by Pulickel Ajayan at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have developed a reusable nanosponge that can remove oil from contaminated seawater.
The technology shows promise, but it’s not yet ready for prime time.
“While the nanosponge is a good material to deal with oil spills, these results are confined to the laboratory,” says Ashok Ganguli, director of the Institute of Nano Science and Technology in Mohali, Punjab, India. “Large-scale synthesis is required if we have to remove oil from seawater which is spread over several miles.” Although scientists have yet to successfully synthesize nanomaterials for cleaning oil spills at a scale large enough for practical application, “this may become possible with more research and industry partnerships,” Chattopadhyay says.
Accelerating Digestion
Another area being explored for application of nanomaterials is in managing organic waste, which can pollute land and water if not handled properly. “Farms and food industry generate humongous amounts of biodegradable waste, and we must find ways to manage it efficiently,” says Debjyoti Sahu, a professor of engineering at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Karnataka in India.
One of the oldest methods to treat biodegradable waste is to dump it into tanks called digesters. These are full of anaerobic microbes that consume the material, converting it into biogas fuel and solids that can be used as fertilizers. But anaerobic digestion is slow.
Recent research showed that adding metal oxide nanoparticles to a food waste digester doubled the amount of biogas fuel produced compared to the digester without it.“Nanoparticles can accelerate the anaerobic digestion of the sludge, thus making it more efficient in terms of duration and enhanced production of the biogas,” says Kamalakannan Kailasam, scientist with the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, in Mohali, India.
Recent research showed that adding metal oxide nanoparticles to a food waste digester doubled the amount of biogas fuel produced compared to the digester without it.
“Iron oxide nanoparticles are nontoxic, and they should be added to sludge waste to enhance the rate of its degradation,” says Sahu.
Safety First
While nanoparticles have potential to solve environmental problems, the small size that makes them useful for environmental cleanup also raises special concerns about health and persistence in the environment.
“The long-term effects of using nanomaterials have not been evaluated yet,” says Chattopadhyay.
The U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and others are funding research to evaluate the potential effects of engineered nanoparticles on health and the environment. Researchers are also creating models to predict nanomaterials’ transport and fate in the environment as well as their potential effects on humans. If concerns that have been raised can be adequately dealt with, nanomaterials could play a big role in helping us cope with environmental challenges in the years ahead.
Editor’s note: Bhavya Khullar produced this feature as a participant in the Ensia Mentor Program. Her mentor for the project was Jessica Marshall.
Keep reading...Show less
These sheets are made with just three things: Cotton, rainwater, and wind power.
Blaynk’s undyed sheets are the color of unadulterated cotton, because they’re not dyed and crafted entirely without chemicals.
It has such a reassuring, healthy ring to it: organic cotton. Falling asleep at night, you imagine that amid organic sheets, you’ll experience a more restful, chemical-free slumber. And while it’s true that the cotton spun into the sheets may have been grown without pesticides, the “organic” label doesn’t cover that which comes after–all the processing, dying, and finishing that injects a fair amount of chemicals into the supposedly pure product.
Blaynk, a new bedding company, says its pushing beyond the “organic” label and creating sheets made from just two ingredients: cotton and rainwater. (Despite the extraneous “Y,” the company’s name is pronounced just like the word “blank.”) Founder Lauren Page’s grandparents opened a foam and fabric business in Rochester, New York in 1879; her first job was working for their company, which launched her career path in consulting for the textile industry. But as Page gained more exposure to manufacturing practices, she grew disillusioned with the idea that any textile produced by mainstream methods could ever honestly bear the designation of organic.
But organic cotton textiles are still a minuscule part of the overall textile market: Just 0.7% of cotton grown globally is done so without chemicals. The remaining 99.3% is the most pesticide-intensive crop worldwide, accounting for anywhere between 16% and 25% of total global pesticide use. For conventional and organic cotton alike, the post-harvest process is where the industry’s chemical footprint deepens: Spinning oils are generally employed to reduce friction as the cotton is converted into yarn, and strengthening chemicals like formaldehyde and flame retardants are added to the material as it’s woven to prevent breakage. Around 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution comes from textile production and dyeing; around 200,000 tons of synthetic dyes from the industry stream into the global water supply each year.
The idea that a quality textile could be produced without relying on chemicals, Page says, “is at the core of Blaynk.” Her company follows in the footsteps of those like Boll & Branch, whose founders similarly became disillusioned with mainstream cotton production and became, in 2016, the first Fair Trade certified bedding company. Blaynk partnered with Chetna Organic, a nonprofit organization, certified by Fair Trade USA, the Global Organic Textile Standard, and Fairtrade International, that works with cotton growers in India to grow non-GMO crops without pesticides.
Blaynk’s sheet sets range from $129 to $299. [Photo: courtesy Blaynk]
Through her research as a consultant, Page came across a textile manufacturer in southern India that was founded in 1947 and runs its operations on 100% wind power; she reached out to them to manufacture Blaynk’s products. To mitigate the water-intensive nature of fabric production, especially in drought-strapped India, Blaynk’s manufacturing partner collects and reuses rainwater to produce the sheets. While standard cotton bedding requires around 20 gallons of water to make, Blaynk takes just two gallons of rainwater, and has developed proprietary methods to spin, treat, and weave the cotton to be soft and durable without relying on chemicals.
The motivation for doing away with chemicals, Page says, was two pronged. On the one hand, Blaynk is tapping into an increase in consumer demand for clean, traceable products; its bed linens and crib sheets are undyed and unpatterned to highlight the cotton’s natural color, and while Page says she recognizes that unique and vibrant sheets are often something consumers seek out, she believes the company’s ethics and methods will attract people interested in eliminating chemicals from their homes. Those same people will also be willing to pay a premium: Blaynk’s sheet sets range from $129 to $299.
Around 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution comes from textile production and dyeing. [Photo: courtesy Blaynk]
The second factor in Blaynk’s production model, Page says, is the health of the workers. “If you think about not wanting chemicals in your home, think about what the constant exposure to chemicals does to people in the industry,” Page says. Studies have linked exposure to formaldehyde and synthetic dyes to high incidences of lung cancer, leukemia, and miscarriages among garment workers; Page hopes that by working with a manufacturing facility that avoids chemicals and provides healthcare and educational programs for its employees, the company will prove that better production practices equate to strong business.
ADVERTISEMENT
Blaynk is still very new: Page began researching alternatives to chemical textile production around a year and a half ago, and the Kickstarter launched August 8. But Page already has a plan in place for when people decide to switch out their current sheets for Blaynk: Every shipment comes with a prepaid label, which customers can affix to a box and mail their old sheets back to Blaynk’s offices, instead of adding them to landfill along with the 13 million pounds of annual textile waste that accumulates there. Page has formed partnerships with textile recycling companies like Miller Waste Mills, that will either upcycle or recycle the sheets. “This is so important to me—we all can recycle our paper and plastic fairly easily, but just because you’re getting new bed sheets shouldn’t mean you have to contribute to the waste,” Page says.
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
