Blog # 19: Journey from Cotton Crop to T- Shirt.

• To start the journey we should know, there is a globally production of 25 million tons of cotton that are being produced in different countries as: Benin and Burkina Faso in Africa, China, Uzbekistan, Australia, India and U.S           

        

             

Cotton crop around the world.

• Due to our T-Shirt obsession and because of the nature of the cotton crop which need very much water to grow, some communities aren't getting enough water to drink.

Hunting water in Burkina Faso.

        

• Besides of the water shortage, some of these countries have been facing pollution, due to pesticides utilization in cotton crops. This kind of crop is using 25% of world's insecticides.

Cotton Crop workers

• Increasing the negative facts, excessive use of pesticides is harming workers who frequently suffer vision problems and nerve diseases among others in the long list.

                                                                          

• To continue on trail,  tons and tons of energy which is fueled by oil drilling or coal or even something else nasty,  are going to be used  to get to thread the raw cotton.

Carding Machine Used to comb and brush the raw cotton.

• Next step, Bleaching the cotton, Chlorine is usually used, not mattering it can become a neurotoxin or even worst a carcinogen, cotton industries are still using this kind of chemicals to bleach the cotton even if they are going to dye it

Chlorine in powder

Bleaching the cotton

• To get it worse, even if Formaldehyde causes respiratory problems, burning eyes, cancer and allergic skin reactions, it is necessarily used to make cotton, soft, wrinkle-stain and odor resistant, fireproof, moth-proof and anti-static.

Another chemical used in Cotton Industry

• Finally fabric gets shipped to a factory anywhere in the third world, where once again will be a source of work at same time is going to become a human rights violation (considering dismal working conditions and terrible wages in some of the countries a day).

In some countries, the legal minimum wage is still only $3.75 a day.

• When finished, T-shirts are shipped everywhere in the US, to find its way to Us for under $20.

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After reading; Story of Stuff: True cost of Cotton t-shirt, I'm pretty sure there is no money that can pay the True Cost of this item, because the environmental and health deterioration caused by the different stages of the Materials Economy (Extraction-production-distribution-consumption and disposal) will never be recovered by money now neither in the future.