China’s Textile Industry: How Dirty Are Your Jeans?

If you're a bit of a slob like me, you are wearing jeans to work today, and if, like me, you're a bit of a slob who doesn't manage hedge funds, your jeans are fairly run of the mill. My H&M specials today were made in Pakistan. But most of my other jeans are made across Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor in southern China, and may very well have been made in Xintang, the so-called Blue Jeans Capital of the World.

Xintang is one of many industrial towns on the booming Pearl River Delta, and one of 133 textile centers that have sprung up in China in the past decade. The specialty in the villages of Xintang is denim. A lot of denim — the town makes about 260 million pairs of jeans annually, roughly equivalent to 40% of the jeans sold in the U.S. in a year.

Textiles are a dirty business. Many fabric dyes contain hazardous chemicals like mercury, cadmium and lead, and in the Pearl River area, the industry has been criticized for years for dumping its wastewater into waterways. Xintang's local government, which is responsible for monitoring the environmental impact of its industry, has cracked down on polluting textile factories in recent years. But, as a Greenpeace China report released today reveals, simply moving the factories to new locations has only relocated the problem, not solved it.

China’s Textile Industry: How Dirty Are Your Jeans? - Ecocentric - TIME.com