Dirty Laundry

Claudia Deutch has an interesting interview with George Feldenkreis, Chairman of the Perry Ellis clothing label in the Saturday edition of the New York Times (which I am increasingly convinced is a more interesting paper than the vaunted Sunday bundle).

Most people don't think of their clothing as having much of an environmental footprint. To the extent it's come up, the conversation has tended to center on raw material. Under the heading 'Green and Fashionable', Feldenkreis discusses challenges the company faces greening the 72 million garments it sells each year, and how hard it is to obtain sufficient quantities organic cotton.

Growing cotton, of course, consumes vast quantities of both water (often in places where it is scarce) and pesticides. Various alternatives including the near-totemic hemp are often discussed as the answer.

What rarely comes up is the tremendous environmental impacts that occur once processing begins.

As NRDC has delved deeper and deeper into the Chinese production chain supplying clothing to big American retailers, we have become more and more aware of the tremendous mess that is being created.

A page one story this week the Wall Street Journal describes the devastating toxic legacy flowing into local rivers from a massive 230-acre textile plant in Dongguan that supplies Nike, Wal-Mart and Lands End among others.

In fact, the Journal points out, the textile industry is among China's dirtiest:

In addition to heavy metals and various carcinogens, fabric dyes may contain high levels of organic materials, and thread is often dipped in starch before it is woven into fabric. The breakdown of large amounts of organic compounds such as starch can suck all the oxygen out of a river, killing fish, and turning the water into a stagnant sludge."

After residents complained that pollution from the mill had turned their river dark red, investigators discovered a pipe buried under a factory floor through which, each day, the company was pumping 22,000 tons of water contaminated in chemical dying operations straight into the local waters.

There's no shortage of easy blame to go around here – corrupt officials, lax standards, greedy companies, careless retailers. They're all part of a larger set of economic circumstances brought about by intense economic forces. The article points out prices on fabric and clothing imported to the U.S. have fallen 25 percent since 1995 thanks to competitive pressures traveling in both directions across the Pacific. That means a lot of corners are being cut, literally as well as figuratively.

"Prices in the U.S. are artificially low," Andy Xie, former chief economist for Morgan Stanley Asia, who now works independently, tells WSJ readers. "You're not paying the costs of pollution, and that is why China is an environmental catastrophe."

The article notes that problems like these have escaped the scrutiny of even the best, most sincere corporate social and environmental initiatives, because the environmental disaster is unfolding farther down a tangled network of supplier relationships than they are used to looking. The Gap, for instance, has almost 100 people monitoring 2,000 contractor factories worldwide, but they are looking only at companies sewing the clothes -- not the ones dying fabric.

Ultimately, that's no excuse. But our own experience in China confirms that even following these webs – never mind untangling them – is tremendously difficult. It is a challenge that will be at the centerpiece of our work in China in the coming months.

It's an area that Mr. Feldenkreis, Wal-Mart, the Gap and everyone else in the business needs to be looking at, too.