Detox Fashion (thank you Greenpeace)

Greenpeace is running an excellent campaign to detox the fashion industry. Sadly, textiles these days are full of toxic chemicals, chemicals which are harming the health and environment everywhere in their life-cycle, where they are made, and where they are used.

This video shows a bit of the background:

You might wonder why water pollution in China is a problem for us?

from: How to get rid of chemicals in fabrics. (Hint: trick question.)

http://oecotextiles.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/how-to-get-rid-of-chemicals-in-fabrics-hint-trick-question/

“How do these chemicals get into our bodies from the textiles?  Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and it’s highly permeable.  So skin absorption is one route; another is through inhalation of the chemicals (if they are the type that evaporate – and if they do evaporate, each chemical has a different rate of evaporation, from minutes or hours to weeks or years) and a third route:  Think of microscopic particles of fabric that abrade each time we use a towel, sit on a sofa, put on our clothes.  These microscopic particles fly into the air and then we breathe them in or ingest them.  Or they  fall into the dust of our homes, where people and pets, especially crawling children and pets, continue to breathe or ingest them.”

Going after  manufacturers to detox their practices is a logical step.

And it’s working:

Levi’s shapes up to become a Detox leader
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/Blog/levis-shapes-up-to-become-a-detox-leader/blog/43437/

read more here:

Toxic Threads – Product Testing Results
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/water/detox/Toxic-Threads/

And if you can’t wait that long for safer clothing, you can check the list of safeR options listed in the “CHEMICAL-FREE CLOTHING (WE WISH)” tab at the top of the page here and then work on detoxing those at home using decontamination protocols found here: https://seriouslysensitivetopollution.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/laundry-decontamination-protocols/

P.S.

I forgot to mention that if you are trying to get toxic chemicals out of your clothing, using conventional, everyday laundry products isn’t going to get you non-toxic clothes… Not when the laundry products themselves are full of toxic chemicals: https://seriouslysensitivetopollution.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/toxic-chemicals-in-everyday-laundry-products/