Clothing and the Toxic Chemicals Used to Manufacture it

With the rise of the fashion industry and mass retailer brands, producing clothing at a massive scale under the lowest costs has led to the heavy use of chemicals in order to manufacture and preserve clothes.

The non-organic cotton industry is the highest user of the herbicide glyphosate, a substance that is considered a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The accumulation of exposure to glyphosate through food and your skin can profoundly affect your mitochondria and also put you on the path to conditions linked to dysfunctional mitochondria, including metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, cancer, and high blood pressure.

The dangers of chemicals in clothing

The chemicals used to produce clothing don’t always wash out, especially those used for bleaching, sizing, dying, straightening, reducing shrinkage, resisting stains and odors, fireproofing, mothproofing, and reducing wrinkles and static.

Even natural fibers like cotton and wool could have been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, dyed, and treated with compounds that make them fire-, odor-, stain-, water- and wrinkle-resistant. Here you can find help when searching for highly trained and experienced housekeeping staff in Tacoma. Petroleum-based synthetic fibers like polyester and nylon likely pull even more chemicals into the mix.

One such imbedded chemical is formaldehyde, a volatile organic compound (VOC) and probable carcinogen, according to the EPA and National Cancer Institute.

What you can do:

• When buying new clothes, look for ones that are as close to natural as possible. Look for organic cottons and wools and fewer synthetics like polyester and nylon. Avoid  “wrinkle-free” and “stain-resistant” to ensure that nothing is being added to your clothes that you don’t want there.
• Dermatologists say that washing your clothes before wearing them can help protect against allergic contact dermatitis.
• Research a brand’s manufacturing process and avoid “fast fashion” brands which sell clothes at extremely low prices, given that in order to sell clothes at low prices, they have to outsource their manufacturing to questionable suppliers.
• Buying only the clothes you need can also help avoid further creating waste and polluting the environment.
• Make sure to always learn about the manufacturing practices of the products that you buy.

By buying organic cotton, produced with natural, eco-friendly crop care solutions, you can help clean the air, conserve water, improve soil health and ensure better working conditions for farmers. As a natural pesticide, neem is one of the tools when it comes to combatting cotton aphids and nematodes – some of the biggest hurdles when producing cotton – in an all-natural way.

Have you already made the switch organic cotton? Let us know in the comments below!