Last time you did your laundry, you probably washed chemicals into the water system that will stay there for years. You probably didn’t realize it. But the textile industry uses a vast array of chemicals to create, dye, and process the clothes they sell, and when you buy a new shirt or skirt or pair of pants, some of those chemicals are still on the fabric. And when you wash them, those chemicals slough off, get washed down the drain, and end up in rivers and lakes.
As part of its campaign to convince the textile industry to stop using chemicals, Greenpeace measured the concentration of these chemicals—nonylphenol ethoxylates, or NPEs—on swaths of clothing before and after washing them. Some of the world’s most popular brands—Nike, H&M, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein—made the clothes from which these swaths were cut. The concentration dropped for all of the samples they tested, indicating that the chemicals had found their way into the water. Some samples lost about 10 percent of their chemical concentrations; some lost as much as 94 percent.
...Places like the European Union and the United States, where governments are working to minimize the dumping of these chemicals in waterways at home, have outsourced their pollution to countries with fewer protections. Most of the chemicals that are used to make our clothes get dumped in places like India and China, where they’re made and dyed. This new research shows, though, that as long as the textile industry uses these chemicals, they’ll follow consumers back home.
