Downloaded from YTS.MX
[♪♪♪]
[Mark Angelo]: My dad, in the late '60s,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
brought home a photograph of Earth
as seen from outer space,
and I was so impressed by it,
but one, it made me realize, in the overall scheme of things,
that our planet is quite small and quite finite.
The other thing that was very noticeable
is, I mean, clearly it's a blue planet,
but of all the water on this Earth,
97% is saline, it's in the oceans,
2% is locked up in ice.
That only leaves us 1%
that's found in lakes and rivers,
and a lot of that water is not accessible.
So really, when you talk about it,
when you really you come down to it,
we have a very small amount of water,
and that's got to accommodate,
ot only the needs that humans have,
for drinking water,
but it's got to accommodate all of those other needs, agricultural needs, industrial needs,
so I think we have to treat water
in a much more respectful way,
I think we have to treat rivers in a much more respectful way,
than we have in the past.
[Kumi Naidoo]: The wars of the future
Will not be fought about oil.
The wars of the future is going to be fought about water.
[♪♪♪]
[Narrator]: China: with more
than 1.3 billion people, this is the most populous country on Earth.
The stress to supply clean water is almost insurmountable,
as their rivers are flowing disaster zones.
Worldwatch Institute wrote
that 70% of China's lakes and rivers are contaminated,
which leaves little fresh water for the people who rely on them.
China has gone through a major transformation. Once an impoverished farming-reliant country,
it has now morphed into "The Factory of the World."
No other country exports more goods than China does,
but that came at a high price.
The widespread dumping of toxic chemicals
has poisoned rivers and groundwater.
Environmental issues in China.
You know, water pollution
is damaging the freshwater biodiversity,
but more than that,
it's also creating such a big public health risk.
You know, potentially now
we have hundreds of millions of people
exposed to water pollution.
[Narrator]: Ma Jun is one of China's
Most prominent environmental activists.
He was named
one of the 100 most influential persons in the worldby Time magazine.
Ma's book, titled "China's Water Crisis,"
was that country's first book
focusing on China's pollution problem.
So many people live along the rivers,
and in those countrysides, you know,
when the rivers got contaminated,
they would dig a well,
and then the shell aquifer easily got contaminated, then we started seeing people getting sick,
and then the extraordinarily high rate of cancer
and other diseases cropped up, you know,
cancer villages cropped up along those rivers.
And acknowledged as, you know, having unusually high cancers
associated with poor water quality.
They do have problems with drinking water supply,
with blue-green algal toxins,
so there's a high incidence of liver cancers
that are associated with that.
[Tianjie Ma]: It's always a disturbing experience
looking at these pictures,
so sometimes I choose not to look at them too often,
but you have to go there and you have to document them,
otherwise these people's voice doesn't get heard,
and they need people to be aware
that the cost of development that China is suffering from.
[Bunn]: The approach that's been taken in China up until now
Has been, you know,
firstly focused on development and the economy, and that's been done with a full acknowledgment
of what that will do to the environment,
so I think a full understanding
that the environment will pay the price of that,
and now they've reached the point in that development
where acknowledging the social and environmental
and the health problems associated with it,
ow is the time to act.
[Tianjie]: Recently we have big cities
Where their whole drinking water source
are being threatened by pollution.
You have, in past years, several cases
where, like, cities with several million population
Because they fear that their drinking water source
is being contaminated.
[Bunn]: They've gone through a very, very rapid stage
Of industrialization,
so, you know, in the last 40-50 years,
we've seen massive industrialization,
a lot of hydropower development,
and a lot of industries developing
without adequate pollution control,
cities that are growing at an incredible rate,
so, you know, the number of cities of millions of people
has really expanded,
and so the waterways have taken the brunt of that development,
and as you can imagine,
many of them are in an appalling state.
[Narrator]: In response to widespread
environmental and health problems,
activists in China
focused their investigations on water pollution, and discovered one of the major sources
led them to the western markets,
with the fashion industry as one of the key suspects
in the destruction of China's lakes and rivers.
These activists have produced campaigns
to create consumer awareness on the issue.
These are toxic substances
released into our precious lakes and rivers
by textile manufacturers,
just for printing and dyeing our clothes.
Fashion is too beautiful to have anything to do with this mess.
We're here to challenge it.
[Narrator]: Dhaka, the largest city in Bangladesh,
and one of its dirtiest.
The toll of becoming
The world's second-leading clothing exporter, after China,
can be seen and smelled
from the riverbanks surrounding Dhaka.
Is one of the most polluted rivers in the world,
and the manufacturers of cheap clothing
can claim some of this responsibility.
The outflow from Bangladesh's garment and tannery industries
has contributed heavily
to what experts describe as a water pollution catastrophe.
[Angelo]: Looking at the city, what I have seen so far,
it's a sprawling city,
a huge city of 15 million people,
sixth biggest in the world,
also I can see that pollution is an issue here.
It was recently ranked
as the second worst city to live in
from a quality of life and environmental point of view,
and certainly things like textiles and tanneries
are a part of that.
I do plan on getting in the river in the days ahead,
I do plan on visiting the tanneries,
and certainly it's my goal
to learn a lot more about these issues.
[Narrator]: Mark Angelo,
A celebrated international river conservationist
and member of the Explorers Club,
is on a global expedition
taking him to some of the most polluted rivers
around the world.
His goal is to document
the state of the waterways of our planet,
and his research leads him to Bangladesh,
where he is about to discover
the dark side of the fashion industry.
[Angelo]: I had read a lot about the Buriganga river.
I knew that it was
one of the most polluted rivers on Earth.
This is an area, and particularly, this river
is a place that's heavily impacted
by the textile and tannery sectors,
so I thought it was important to come and see it
and get a feel as to how it got to this state
and what could possibly be done to turn things around.
And as I stand here,
When I catch the wind in the face, the smell is unbelievably bad.
It's atrocious.
It's hard to imagine a stream more polluted than this one.
About a third of the pollution that comes into here is sewage,
most of the sewage in the city is untreated,
but about two thirds of the pollution here
is all from the tanneries up river,
it's all industrial pollution, chemicals, heavy metals,
so this waterway is so polluted it cannot sustain any life,
and the pollution gets so bad during the dry season
that there are parts of this canal
that you can literally light on fire.
Who speak out
against the government and factory owners
who are ignoring costly environmental regulations,
but there are some who take pollution very seriously.
One such man is Pinaki Roy.
As the deputy chief reporter for Dhaka's Daily Star,
Pinaki's beat is the environment,
but his passion is for the river.
[Roy]: I have passion for them.
I was born here and grown up here.
I love rivers.
Well, people who live by the river,
they really feel sad about the situation,
about the condition of the river now,
so they say, "Can't you do something
so that the river is clean again?"
[Narrator]: Pinaki investigates in areas
where textile companies group together
behind high brick walls.
It's here where he gathers evidence of rampant pollution.
While companies make it difficult to see what's going on
in their guarded compounds,
tell-tale channels all lead to outflows
that release toxic liquids
straight into the rivers surrounding the city.
[Roy]: There are hundreds of thousands
of garments industries in Dhaka City,
and those industries basically, you know,
discharging their pollution, you know, everywhere,
so now, every part of the city,
you go to the river, and you'll find it polluted.
This is all the untreated effluent
Coming from the garments and dyeing industries
and directly going into the river.
This water is so toxic, there is no aquatic life,
And local communities,
they cannot use this water anymore.
They have set up industries for years,
but they have never set up ETP, effluent treatment plant,
so it is not that they don't have money,
it is all about intention.
They don't have intention about clean environment,
so that's why they don't do it.
They should respect the river, but they don't.
They are doing this just to increase their profit.
[Angelo]: One of my very first days,
I walked down and I found a boatman
and I asked him if he would take me out on the river,
and he was happy to,
but getting out on the river was a real eye-opener,
and it was depressing.
The colour of the water was ink black.
The water also had a thickness to it,
and as our oar cut through the water,
it the water literally rolled, almost like heavy oil.
The river was more chemical than water.
On my journey over the last couple of years,
I've seen so many rivers that are so, so polluted.
Probably the Buriganga, though,
is the most polluted of the rivers I've seen.
Some of the things
that I observed while floating the river,
just looking at the water, feeling the texture of it,
the smell of it,
knowing it was totally off, totally unnatural... that saddens me deeply.
[Narrator]: Much of Dhaka's pollution problem
emanates from this area of the city,
Hazaribagh,
home to more than 200 tanneries.
This is ground zero for a lot of toxic waste.
Raw material enters through the doors of the tanneries
to be transformed into wide swaths of leather
that will be shipped out of the country
and used in the manufacturing of shoes, purses,
and other leather goods.
What ends up on the fashion runways
and in many of our own closets
has its noxious beginnings
in this filthy section of the city.
I probably won't have to go to Hell
to find out how it looks.
If one goes to Hazaribagh tannery,
that would tell you probably how Hell looks like.
[Narrator]: Syeda Rizwana Hasan
is Bangladesh's chief environmental lawyer.
[Hasan]: Dhaka has been ranked
as the second most uninhabitable cities of the world,
and this extremely hazardous export-oriented industry
is actually contributing
to that process of making Dhaka uninhabitable.
I would say even 15 years back, the river water was usable.
You could still boat on the river
without having that bad smell.
We saw a living river,
what is now being described as a biologically dead river,
and what is more frustrating for us to see
is, despite all the movements to save the river,
despite the court coming forward to protect the river,
the condition of the river is deteriorating
with each passing day.
[Roy]: If you visit those rivers in any day,
you'll find that different colour,
you know, blue, red, black,
all directly going to the river.
[Narrator]: Pinaki Roy is following a lead
on a story he's working on,
taking him inside one of the tanneries
in the Hazaribagh area.
Normally, cameras are not allowed in,
but by focusing on Pinaki, the reporter,
we're able to capture a seldom-seen view
of what goes on
behind the walls of a typical tannery operation.
Who have been dealing with those chemicals directly,
they are touching those chemicals in bare hands,
without any gloves.
A lot of underage children, like below 18,
they work here,
and many of them do not have even boots, gloves.
They complain a lot,
but they think this is their fate.
Now, see?
Now they have a tea break, like, a working break, so after the break,
they are having their, you know, little snacks
in bare hands without proper cleaning,
so in this way,
maybe they consume a lot of chemicals. I have been doing this for a few years now,
and time to time I keep on visiting,
and I feel it's awful.
This is the heart of the tanning district,
widely viewed as being
one of the most polluted places on Earth,
and there are chemicals everywhere.
I smell chemicals, it totally pervades the air,
I feel like I'm breathing them in.
My throat burns, I feel it in my eyes,
so this is not a healthy place to be,
and yet there are 180,000 people that live around here,
almost 20,000 work here in the tanneries
and get exposed to this every day.
[Hasan]: If you go to the Hazaribagh tannery,
if you see how people are living there,
there are small children
who are passing through the tannery area every day
to go to the school,
and they have lost their sensory adaptation. They can't smell anymore. It's totally gone.
The physicians say people often come to them with gastric,
with ulcers, with chest pain,
and obviously with skin diseases and some diseases like cancer,
Local people won't complain,
because they know that even if they complain,
there is hardly any relief,
but I think the consumers have a big role to play there,
because your consumption pattern
doesn't have to be responsible only,
you have to make sure that it's not exploitative.
[Narrator]: Big box retailers from the West
Look to Bangladesh
for low cost/high output leather products and clothing. The cost in human suffering producing cheap clothing
has been well documented,
but for global brands
that buy clothing from Bangladeshi factories,
pollution rarely gets the same attention
as workplace conditions,
and local environmentalists
say global buyers have done far too little.
[Roy]: Accidents happened in the garment sector,
like a Rana Plaza accident
where more than 1,000 people died.
After that, I found in Twitter, in social media, you know,
a lot of criticism against those, you know, retailers,
who are buying from Bangladesh,
who are buying from those garments,
so there are a lot of criticisms,
and I would say, you know,
the buyer from the West, he wants cheaper clothes.
He cannot, you know, pollute our environment.
Buying these cheap clothes, they are also responsible,
because they are pushing these industries
for more and more cheaper clothes.
This is a question of ethics.
They are not caring about the environment.
There are some who just want to, you know,
make their production costs cheaper and cheaper.
For producing low-cost jeans, shirts, t-shirts,
people around the world buy them,
but the reality is that low-cost clothing
has a very high cost attached to it.
Look at what we've seen
from both an environmental and public health perspective,
it's a calamity,
and this kind of disaster is something that I've seen
on river after river after river,
so once again I think a key point
is that there is often a very high cost
attached to low-cost clothing.
[Hasan]: Just because you want to get something
At a lower price
doesn't mean you would allow a precious resource like a river
Doesn't mean you would allow people
to die in some other part of the world
because they don't have
a regular health monitoring system, and you would never know
that by buying something at a lower price,
you are actually contributing
to the death, illness, suffering of people
in some other part of this world.
If people of Bangladesh do not have water tomorrow,
They'll have to find another place
to go where they'll have water,
which means that we'll have to migrate out,
which means that the rest of the world
will also be disturbed
if we are disturbed in this very small country, and everyone has a responsibility
to protect the mother Earth.
If I am an environmentalist,
I can't say I care only about the rivers of Bangladesh.
I have to care about the rivers of the world.
[Angelo]: These are conditions
that the workers there have to live with every day, so you can't help but wonder
the toll that's taking on their health,
and I don't think it was a coincidence
that we did not see very many older people
working in the tanneries.
I think if you have to work with those chemicals every day,
in those conditions every day,
I think that's the recipe for a much shorter life.
[♪♪♪]
[Narrator]: India, a nation of extreme contrasts,
with some of the most sacred, and dirtiest,
rivers in the world.
It's difficult to imagine today,
But for some farmers who live on the banks of the Ganges,
there was a time in living memory
when the water in the river was clean enough to drink.
Today, the rivers they revere as goddesses
are in severe decline.
Some of India's greatest rivers begin as pristine water sources,
but not far downriver, they become open flowing sewers.
One of the key issues
is what to do with the excrement of about 600 million people who are defecating in the open.
Studies have found that untreated sewage
is the single most important source
of water pollution in India.
While more than half a billion people
rely on one of its most holy rivers, the Ganges,
they also contribute to its abuse
in the most elemental way.
[Angelo]: Varanasi is an amazing city.
It's known as the eternal city.
It embodies the essence of Hinduism,
and because of its close proximity to the Ganges,
it's a very well-known pilgrimage site.
More than a million pilgrims come here every year.
Some come to take a holy dip at this location
to cleanse their soul, cleanse them of their sins.
Others come to spend their final days here.
They'll die here
and have their ashes scattered in the river in the belief
that that will aid in their path towards heaven.
It will liberate the soul and free them
from that never-ending cycle of reincarnation.
This city has an incredible spiritual energy,
and nowhere else on Earth
does life, death, and religion blend so seamlessly.
I've always loved India, I've been here many, many times,
but I've always been disappointed
in the state of the Ganges river.
It's a river that I have come to know really well,
I've been to the headwaters, I've been to the mouth,
I've paddled or travelled along much of the rest of it.
It's not the biggest river in the world,
it's not the longest,
but it may be the most venerated,
particularly by the 500 million people
that live within its basin.
[Sunita Narain]: I think it's when faith,
Which is very powerful,
becomes your weakness.
I mean, there is no doubt
that the Ganga has tremendous self-cleaning capacities;
It's why there is such a sense of the fact
that this is a river which can regenerate itself,
It is also something that we have to accept
that that river is polluted.
We have defiled it beyond its cleansing abilities,
and that we have to clean it up,
and it's crying that it needs cleaning up.
[Narrator]: Religion and science
Are uncomfortable bedmates in India.
To live by the Ganges and see obvious pollution
doesn't sway those who believe
in the river's ability to cleanse itself.
Religious men,
who hold great influence with India's population, believe in the river's purity and sing its praises,
while environmentalists hope their influence
would be used to convince more people
to clean up the river.
[singing]
[Narain]: I think it's the people who hold the faith
that must talk to people and make them understand
that yes, the river
has intrinsic self-cleansing abilities,
and we have faith
that the river is the most important being,
but yet, we as a modern society have even breached
its own abilities to clean itself,
and we have to do something about it,
and you have to be able to bring science into religion.
The fact is,
if you have dissolved oxygen levels of zero, the river is dead, call it what you want.
You just haven't officially cremated it,
but it's dead.
[Narrator]: Allahabad.
Nowhere in the world is faith exhibited
more than in this city.
Here at the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges rivers,
110 million people gather to celebrate the Kumbh Mela.
[Narain]: We are a country which holds rivers sacred,
and yet we are committing hydrocide.
We are deliberately murdering our rivers.
And if you worship nature,
then the last thing that you can do
is to defile it or degrade it.
[Avikal Somvanshi]: We are going for Kumbh Mela.
It's happening today, and it's massive.
Like, last Kumbh Mela in 2001
saw a crowd of almost 70 million people
turn up during the festival.
Each of the bathing days which have passed,
the crowd has been 15% to 25% more
than what they had estimated,
so we're going to, most probably,
we are going to have 20 million, 25 million today.
Of this size and scale anywhere in the world, okay?
I think it's important to understand that they come
because they worship the river, they celebrate the river.
Growing up, Kumbh was something spectacular,
Something which my city is known for.
It's the biggest gathering of human beings on Earth.
As I have aged now,
I have realized that excitement
was actually a kind of fear which I harbour,
'cause the things I had to live with,
before the Kumbh started and after the Kumbh finished,
is something which is nothing to be proud of.
[♪♪♪]
Which is called Sangam,
where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet,
so it's that area
where all the activities are surrounded.
[Narain]: It's time, in India,
that we did some very serious stock-taking
about what's going wrong
and why are we, a generation of Indians,
becoming a generation which is losing, to my mind,
its most sacred asset, a river.
[Angelo]: The Kumbh Mela is this spectacle,
this great celebration of the Ganges River,
and the fact that all the human waste
from the 100 million visitors there at present
is allowed to seep into the soil or flow directly into the river,
I think that's wrong.
I love this country, I love the culture,
I love the customs, the colours, even the chaos,
but I've always been saddened
about the state of the Ganges river,
particularly knowing that it is revered so much
and it is worshipped as a goddess,
and it seems like a bit of a disconnect
that it can be worshipped on one hand,
and we can allow her to get so polluted on the other.
For them, the river is still a goddess and still holy,
O matter what is flowing in the river.
You'll tell them the river is getting polluted,
they'll say yes, the river is getting polluted,
it's very dirty, the water is so bad,
but risking your own salvation by avoiding to do the ritual
Is something they cannot fathom with.
The Kumbh is a tough one,
But, I mean, I take back from it. I mean, I'm a...
I mean, I'm a Hindu,
but not the one who would go to the river for rituals,
more for the beauty of it,
but I take back with it enormous awe,
and the river means so much to so many people in my country,
and I think that is what is beautiful.
[Narrator]: On a day like this,
When three times the population of New York City
gathers on the river's banks,
the government has ordered cities upstream
to stop polluting the Ganges
so that the faithful
will have a clean river to bathe in.
Kanpur, a city of four million,
Is among the world's top 10 cities
with the worst air pollution,
and is the second most polluted city in India.
It's the leather capital of the region,
And the tanneries have been ordered
to shut down during the Kumbh Mela,
and, for the most part, they have.
Today being one of the main bathing days,
this drain seems to be closed,
but after the main bathing days,
it will be as usual.
You can see the black viscous chemicalized water
going to the river.
[Narrator]: The tannery district,
established along the Ganges river
during the British colonial rule,
is Kanpur's economic mainstay
and a major source of pollution.
[Jaiswal]: Kanpur hosts 400-odd leather factories and tanneries,
and these tanneries use dyes, acids,
basic chrome sulfate,
other heavy-metal containing chemicals,
and the wastewater they generate
is a cocktail of these chemicals
which are lethal to human health and other life also.
[Narrator]: Zafar Lari owns a mid-sized tannery in Kanpur,
And while he understands
that the tannery district may be suffering
from a poor reputation among environmental groups,
he also believes that it's a perception not deserved,
and he denies that any of his tannery wastewater
runs into the Ganges.
I think they have some misconceptions,
misunderstanding,
It is about more than three kilometres far from here.
It is impossible to send a drop of water
directly to the Ganges.
[Jaiswal]: This is a mixture of tannery wastewater.
It contains a variety of chemicals,
the same chemicals
which are used by leather factories and tanneries.
I believe the water that comes from the tannery area
is not with the effluent from the industry.
It could be...
I hope it could be domestic waste.
It is quite impossible
the water should directly goes anything from the Ganges.
It is impossible.
First we have a drain system, then we have a channel system,
then we have the municipal water discharge system...
It is quite impossible.
Exactly it is impossible. We can say that.
[Narrator]: At the edge of the tannery district
Sits a holding area
containing streams and ponds filled with noxious liquids. From this area, large pipes shoot out
and run for many miles,
heading towards the Ganges river.
This water is being put into this irrigation canal.
It irrigates around 2,500 hectares of land,
And you can see
that this water is not properly treated
and is not safe for irrigation.
In every family,
you will find someone afflicted
with some kind of a skin problem,
ranging from rashes, boils, numbness in the limbs.
It also contains known carcinogen chromium,
so maybe people have cancers.
Chromium has been reported in cattle milk
and also agricultural produce,
so this heavy metal has entered the food chain
and is finally reaching us
and affecting the health of the people.
[Narrator]: This stretch of the river
is extremely contaminated,
but life in the villages sitting on its banks
goes on as usual.
While filming there,
We observed a man poling his boat to shore.
His small craft was filled with a couple hundred fish.
He told us he had found his catch
just floating on top of the river.
Newspapers reported that the dead fish
were the result of a chemical spill
into the river earlier that day.
The man was cleaning the fish to feed his family,
and took the rest of his catch
to sell at the local market that afternoon.
[Angelo]: When a river has been so polluted or so abused
for many, many years,
you can't turn it around overnight.
I look at a country like India,
I look at this river we are on now.
It's going to be a huge challenge to turn this around.
There are huge issues
pertaining to sewage and industrial pollution, and on a river like the Ganges,
I think the young generation that's coming along,
I believe in the years ahead,
they will have the same reverence for this river
that their parents had,
but as part of that
I also think they'll see an obligation
to have a cleaner Ganges.
[♪♪♪]
[Narrator]: The Zambezi, a true life-giving river,
worthy of its reputation
of being one of the great rivers of the world.
Mark Angelo has made the trip here before,
a far different river than the Ganges,
and a place he finds rejuvenates his soul;
a nice reminder of what he works towards
for all rivers.
[Angelo]: The thing I love about the Zambezi
is the diversity,
and the wildlife here is incredibly prolific.
Animals gather in huge numbers beside the river
and often right in the river,
and to see all of that from a canoe, up close,
virtually at water level,
is an unforgettable experience,
so in many ways,
I look particularly at this part of the Zambezias an example of what a river can and should be.
[Narrator]: Mark Angelo is an internationally celebrated
River conservationist
and the founder of World Rivers Day,
an event held to clean rivers
in more than 60 countries around the world.
The United Nations has recognized his work
protecting what Mark calls
"the vital arteries of this planet."
Mark often mentions that rivers run through his soul,
in a journey that began
as a young boy growing up in Los Angeles.
[Angelo]: I grew up with an interesting background.
My parents were very much involved in old Hollywood,
the movie industry,
and it was a...
you know, Hollywood was a fascinating place
to grow up in the '50s,
but my interest took me elsewhere.
You know, I happened to live by the Los Angeles River,
a river that had been destroyed in many ways,
totally encased in a big concrete culvert,
and I used to hang out there a lot,
but I didn't have to be very old before I realized
that's not the way a river was meant to be.
On the other side of the coin, though,
we lived right next door to a place called Griffith Park.
It was a 4,000-acre urban oasis,
a wild oasis in the middle of the city,
and I could go out my door across the street
and be up in the hills and just hike for hours,
and I got to know
a lot of the small creeks and streams there,
so by the time I was 15 or 16, I was really into the outdoors. Then I went, at the age of 17, to the University of Montana,
and I got into fly fishing and paddling
in a very big way,
and that cemented things for me,
and at that stage,
I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life working in a field related to river conservation.
As I got older,
I started to look at rivers in a much broader way for the many values they possess,
and now I look at them
as literally life-lines in the broadest sense,
and at this stage of my life, whenever I'm on a river,
it does much to rejuvenate my spirit and my soul,
and the world seems a saner place.
[Narrator]: Jakarta, a city of 28 million,
the capital of Indonesia.
Cosmopolitan,
with wide avenues and top-of-the-line shopping, Jakarta is also at the headwaters
of one of the most polluted rivers in the world,
the Citarum.
This river of garbage is a shameful example
Of mankind's inhumanity to the environment,
and the crime largely goes unpunished by law.
The Citarum was once a gentle flowing river
where fishermen cast their nets,
pulling in a bounty of healthy fish
that fed their families.
Today, it's a river in crisis,
choked by the domestic waste of nine million people,
and thick with the castoffs
from hundreds of factories along its banks.
It's hard to imagine
that 80% of the population of Jakarta
relies on this river for their drinking water.
This river bubbles like a witch's cauldron
because of the pollution that has sunk to the bottom
and is off-gassing.
More than 500 factories,
most of them producing textiles
which require chemical treatment,
line the banks of this 200-mile river,
spewing waste into the water.
Everybody has the right to know
what is being discharged by a factory,
how much is being discharged, per day, per year, per month.
This information is important
so we know what is in our water and we can control it.
[Narrator]: In Indonesia, researchers allege
The textile industry is a major contributor
to the poor health of the Citarum River.
In Citarum, it is well known
that there are a lot of what we call anonymous pipes,
so this kind of pipe appears in the middle of nowhere,
like this, so the pipe is underground.
You can not really see
this factory that is dumping this, and also it is a shared pipe,
making it even more difficult to know who is the perpetrators.
[Narrator]: While the source of this particular pipe
is cloaked in mystery,
these researchers have had success
in uncovering what they call
"a criminal case of water pollution."
These three were part of a larger group
who spent two years
following a trail of pollution on the Citarum River.
Environmental activists collected samples of wastewater
discharged from the PT Gistex factory in Bandung,
an area known for its textile manufacturing.
[Meutia]: Before we actually took samples,
We did field research
making sure that this pipe really belongs to the company. We found that this company emits toxic material to the water.
[Narrator]: In a report titled
"Toxic Threads: Polluting Paradise,"
Greenpeace has published a story
of big brands and water pollution
in Indonesia.
In their report,
Greenpeace states that major international brands are conducting business with suppliers such as PT Gistex,
who has been linked to toxic water pollution
and murky business practices.
One of these brands, they write, is Gap,
which Greenpeace states
has been linked to toxic water scandals before.
Here in Indonesia, we have a textile manufacturer
That is supplying for Gap, and Gap is a global company,
And similar to other companies
that have been linked to pollution
in other places in Asia,
we have made demands for them to clean up the supply chain.
[Narrator]: We reached out
to Gap head office in San Francisco
for a comment on their connection to water pollution
and the PT Gistex factory in Bandung.
They wrote back stating:
"As for your question regarding PT Gistex,
we were alerted to the Greenpeace report
on PT Gistex in Indonesia
and confirmed to Greenpeace
that we do not source from their textile facility,
but that we do work with the parent company,
PT Gistex Group.
We reiterated to the parent company
the importance of adherence
to Gap Inc's code of vendor conduct,
including provisions regarding environmental health
and safety and chemical restrictions,
as well as compliance with Indonesian law.
Gap Inc. supports additional initiatives
that are underway to help conserve fresh water
and improve the environmental performance
of dyeing and finishing facilities."
We can't do too much about history,
but let's make sure moving forward
that the leaders of the fashion industry,
the leaders of all industries that engage in pollution,
are becoming much more aggressive
in cleaning up their act,
and to ensure that they do not have to make money
on the basis of environmental destruction.
[♪♪♪]
[Narrator]: China: this country has
some of the most beautiful rivers in the world,
but also some of the most toxic.
[Angelo]: Major river systems are often in pretty good shape
At the very top end,
but as they move down river, they degrade.
They pick up an increasing number
of pollutants and contaminants,
and that's very much the case
with the Li river here in Guilin.
In its very upper reaches,
it's one of the cleaner waterways in China,
but as it moves along,
it eventually merges with the Pearl.
It then becomes one of the most polluted.
Is a fundamental human need and a basic human right,
and yet here in China,
two thirds of its rural population,
almost 500 million people,
have to use water
that's been contaminated by human or industrial waste,
so gastrointestinal cancer
is the number-one killer here in the countryside.
Has been both a health crisis and an environmental crisis
due to a shortage
of the one resource that no one can live without,
and that's clean water.
[Bunn]: There are rivers there
where the chemical oxygen demand
takes out all of the oxygen,
so, you know, these are river systems
that have no dissolved oxygen.
There are levels of metal contamination
and other industrial effluent
that make it impossible for any living creature,
so there are certainly places
where all of the sort of natural features are gone,
and the water is virtually useless for all applications.
Get this bad?
It's a question environmental campaigners in China
have asked their government for many years.
We need to make them strengthen the enforcement.
We need to have our court open
to public environmental lawsuits,
but those are deep-rooted issues
which can not be overcome,
you know, easily,
so we decided the public must participate.
We need to have extensive public participation
to help address this issue.
[Narrator]: Environmental activists have spent years
investigating the root causes for China's river pollution,
but being in a Communist state, they've had to tread lightly.
[Tianjie]: When we do investigations,
we tend to be more careful
because our aim is to get the problem exposed,
but if you alert these polluters,
or make them aware that you are investigating them,
they might take some action to stop you.
[Narrator]: Tianjie Ma
And teams of toxic campaigners throughout China have been at the forefront of a long investigation
into the sources of chemical substances
finding their way into China's rivers.
They've discovered the textile industry
is a major contributor to China's river contamination.
[Tianjie]: You can find a lot of carcinogens in it.
A lot of the carcinogens are related to dye,
because the industry uses a lot of dyes,
and also you find chemicals
that may disrupt the hormone system.
We found chemicals that are really nasty
that can change the sex of a fish, for example,
and these kinds of chemicals are still heavily used in China,
even if some of them
have already been banned in Europe or in North America.
We also find chemicals that are persistent,
which means when they get released into the environment,
they don't break down,
and they travel around the world,
so one toxic chemical
being released by a Chinese textile factory
may travel half of the globe
and end up in the Canadian Arctic,
where you can find it in the body of a polar bear,
so these are the really nasty toxic chemicals
that we are talking about.
[Ma]: The textile industry
Is one of the major sources of water pollution in China.
Every year it discharges
about 2.5 billion tons of wastewater,
and much of that not properly treated.
I don't think the consumers,
when they enjoy all these products,
they would know about this,
so what we need to do
is to try to go underground with our partners,
through this underground research,
to really bring out the fact of the pollution
and all its impact.
[Narrator]: Investigations proved that toxic chemicals
were being dumped into China's rivers,
especially by the textile companies.
The next step was to connect the dots
and identify the companies responsible for the pollution.
[Tianjie]: We started to ask this question,
"Who is doing business?
Where do these products go?
Where do people buy these products?"
So we started this chain of custody study
where we are trying to track where those products go.
We got links
that some of those products are actually sold to the world's biggest brand names,
like Nike, Adidas, Puma,
or fashion brands like Zara, H&M.
We started to have this picture
that when China is providing the whole world
with all that clothing,
at the same time we are suffering
all the pollution that is left behind,
so we found this really astonishing fact,
so we started to present all our findings
to the whole world.
We want to make people aware
that every single piece of clothing that you buy
comes with a cost.
[Narrator]: Greenpeace took an aggressive stance
Against fashion,
staging world-wide protests
and releasing reports
documenting the pollution problem.
They set up a campaign
challenging some of the biggest brands in fashion
to detox their products,
while hoping that consumers would get the message
that some fashion comes with a large environmental price tag.
The reason Greenpeace started a detox campaign
was we found that our rivers across the world
were being deeply impacted
by the dumping of poisonous toxic material in our rivers,
done with absolutely no regulation, no oversight,
and sadly, many of the products that were being produced
Through this dirty polluting way of producing fashion
was actually the direct contributor
to massive amounts of river contamination.
[Orsola de Castro]: There is a joke in China.
They say that you can predict the "it" colour for the season by looking at the colour of the river,
you know, sort of if they've dyed more yellow,
then that's what the river will look like.
There is really no way out of it,
and it is depressing talking about it.
It does make you feel very powerless
to a certain extent.
It's particularly scandalous
how long it's been allowed to go on
and how little has been done
to highlight this problem for future generations,
who are ultimately the ones that will have to foot the bill
and really suffer the consequences.
That are very, very hidden and very secret.
I used to think "I wonder why."
I know why now, because the damage is so huge,
the damage that they have done is so huge,
but we will be demanding to know who makes our clothes,
where do they come from,
what are they made out of, increasingly, and the industry will have to accommodate those demands.
[Narrator]: Taken as a whole,
The textile industry is a huge, complex global entity, but if we focus on one iconic consumer product,
it offers a snapshot of how we all contribute
to the issue of industrial water pollution.
Investigators,
as well as some who work in the fashion industry,
have long known the dirty little secret
behind the manufacturing of blue jeans.
This iconic product
illustrates some of the most visible and gross pollution
caused by overseas production,
but it wasn't always this way.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, El Paso, Texas held the title
"blue jeans capital of the world,"
producing almost two million pairs of jeans per week.
Now, it's just a shell of its former self.
The once mighty Rio Grande, a great water resource,
ran directly through El Paso before it began to dry up,
but the real impetus
to El Paso losing the blue jeans manufacturing base was the signing of a free trade agreement
allowing clothing brands to look further afield
for lower-cost labour and production.
And the great question of this day
is how to ensure security for our people
at a time when change is the only constant.
I believe we have made a decision now
that will permit us
to create an economic order in the world
that will promote more growth, more equality,
better preservation of the environment,
and a greater possibility of world peace.
We are on the verge of a global economic expansion
that is sparked by the fact
that the United States, at this critical moment,
decided that we would compete, not retreat.
In a few moments,
I will sign the North AmericanFree Trade Act into law.
NAFTA will tear down trade barriers
between our three nations.
It will create the world's largest trade zone
and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.
[Narrator]: Soon after NAFTA's signing,
manufacturers left for Mexico
and eventually offshore
to China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.
Industry also exported immense environmental problems
simply because
the environmental regulations in those countrieswere not nearly as strong
as what exists in the United States.
So where did all those jobs and jeans go?
They came here,
Xintang, the new jeans capital of the world.
[Angelo]: Textiles are a huge industry in China.
Last year the country exported more than $200 billion
dollars in apparel,
and Xintang
is the blue jean capital of the world.
They produce about 300 million pairs of jeans a year,
a third of the world's supply.
[Narrator]: As early as 30 years ago,
this city had a small manufacturing base
making blue jeans.
What started off as just a few "mom and pop" operations
has blossomed into becoming a major exporter of blue jeans
to the world market,
with a huge environmental impact.
[Tianjie]: I think some consumers just don't realize
what kind of environmental impact
or environmental footprint
one single piece of jean would carry.
When producing one piece of jean,
actually it uses up a lot of water
for washing and other processes,
and also it releases a lot of polluted water
into the environment.
[Narrator]: Making a pair of jeans
can be a water-intensive process.
Levi's, the iconic manufacturer of blue jeans,
did a study of how much water
went into the making one pair of their 501 jeans.
They discovered it took almost 920 gallons of water,
400 megajoules of energy,
and expelled 32 kilograms of carbon dioxide.
Levis said that this was the equivalent
to running a garden hose for 106 minutes,
driving 78 miles,
and powering a computer for 556 hours.
[Ma]: We found that this industry
Is having one of the lowest, if not the lowest,
rate of water recycling.
They just want to use the water once,
and then they just discharge that into the rivers,
and they've got so much concentrated
in some parts of China,
so with that concentration of pollution,
the impact to that local region is very serious.
[Narrator]: It's been estimated that in a single year,
One large fashion brand uses the equivalent of water
that is in 43,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The textile industry
is one of the largest consumers of water in the world,
using 3.2% of all water
available to the human race every year.
[Angelo]: Textiles, environmentally,
can be a dirty business,
and the fabric dyes used for jeans
contain hazardous materials,
things like mercury, cadmium, and lead,
and the local industry here has long been accused
of releasing its wastewater directly into the Pearl River,
so while China has reaped huge economic benefits
from the textile industry,
that same industry has been a major contributor
to its water pollution problem.
We don't own the factories anymore.
If you own your factory,
you will have rules and regulation,
but also an instinct
to be extremely effective in your production,
and that includes managing your water
and managing your waste.
If you don't own your factory,
let alone know the majority
of where your clothes are being made,
you have absolutely no interest,
and a great facility to go to bed at night
thinking "That's not my problem."
[Narrator]: Orsola de Castro,
A leader in sustainable fashion,
has created a clothing line
made entirely from discarded materials.
She's concerned that her industry
is one of the world's biggest polluters,
with a business model based on high volume/low cost clothing,
what many critics call "fast fashion."
[de Castro]: The reason why we let fashion pollute so much
and we let it go this far
is profit,
rich fat men on boards
wanting to make more and more money.
I don't think that we can any longer sit by
while people are suffering,
and the planet is suffering,
for us to have economic gain.
If everybody on this planet
lived the way North America does,
we'd need, like, eight planets.
[Eric Dickstein]: You know, it's funny
Because these companies can pretend like they don't know what is going on,
but they absolutely do know what's going on.
They don't want to acknowledge it
because it means that they are willing participants
of destroying the environment.
You are completely responsible as a company
for how you're making your product.
Are they acting that way? Not necessarily.
For the most part, not at all.
Denim, the way that we look at it now,
the way that we have it now,
will be seen as fashion's greatest stupidity.
Distressed denim, insanity made visible.
It has become a huge hazard to the environment,
For the sake of clothing,
especially the type of clothing that we are wearing these days,
is criminal.
Maybe it's because the demand of the world
has gone crazy for this look
and they want stuff to be distressed
and stripes on it, and...
o vintage jean ever looked like that,
so there is a difference between the early processing,
which is really just to get it looked a little bit old,
a little bit worn here and here, fine.
Not even whiskers.
There weren't whiskers and all that stuff, you know? That's... come on, guys.
The chemicals used in order to create the looks,
Whether they are called the whiskers,
you know, the tear,
are beyond unbelievable and continuous.
There are the ones that make it look distressed through paint
or distressed through, you know, sandpaper, whatever.
One of the funniest scenes I saw in one of these denim factories
was this huge warehouse full of people
just literally sandpapering day in, day out.
Sandpapering denim
at 98% humidity while they worked,
because that's what you need to preserve the right chemicals,
which is an incredibly unpleasant way of working.
Breathing all this acid,
and that destroys your lungs.
Okay? People die.
Do we want now, just because we have a distressed jean,
you have, you wear distressed jeans,
and you kill somebody.
[Narrator]: Francois Girbaud is credited
As the man who invented stone-washed jeans.
Early on, he also began using chemicals
to get the distressed look in denim products.
We make a mistake at the beginning.
We were responsible.
When we start, first,
we don't realize how what we did was wrong,
because we did, we make a mistake.
We make a mistake because...
If you talk to me, okay, if we were talking,
I don't know, before 1989,
I tried to find everything more, more, more corrosive.
We make all these treatments and washing,
all the processes of washing we invent
during from '72 to '89, continuous invention,
Using everything, acid, etc., etc.,
but I realized the importance of our work,
what we did, what was the reaction,
because pollution of rivers, everything, we invented that.
[Enrique Silla]: The fathers of our industry,
people like Francois Girbaud, like Adriano Goldschmied,
they invented stone wash, they invented bleaching,
they invented potassium permanganate,
and at that time,
they were just trying to find a beautiful product
and a great product.
They didn't realize that these inventions, one day,
Will damage the ecology, the planet, and the rivers.
[Girbaud]: We have to slow down.
We have to slow down the chemicals.
If everybody, the consumer knows,
this beautiful white here is made by acid,
and this acid is something destroying the planet,
we are committing a suicide for the planet,
we are, surely, surely, we know, we go, we go...
What do we talk about new generations?
What we talk about that? It's no future.
If we continue like this, it's done. It's done.
Is that at the end of the '80s or starting of the '90s,
we have a tremendous delocalization of the production
from the U.S. to China,
from Italy, Spain, South Europe,
that were a strong production place,
to India, etc.,
so immediately,
all the big plants start to produce
without water treatment plants,
throwing all their dirty water to the rivers
and destroying the planet,
and at the same time,
the consumption increased tremendously.
In America, people buy four jeans every year,
in Europe, 1.5 jeans every year,
so consumption tremendously increased.
[Narrator]: In the past 20 years,
China has effectively doubled
the amount of textiles it produces.
At first glance, this represents good news for the consumers,
who benefit from cheaper clothing
and quicker turnaround in styles,
but as the prices plummeted in the fashion industry,
it was China's waterways and the people who rely on them
who were paying the price
of an increasing amount of untreated wastewater
being dumped into these rivers.
The toxic effects of industrialization
appear irreversible,
but history has proven that a biologically dead river
can be reversed.
40 years ago, this river was in real trouble.
There were no signs of life,
primarily because of the pollution in the river.
[Narrator]: Globally, we can learn
from the massive conservation efforts
and strict legislation implemented in London
against the dumping of toxins
that allows rivers like the Thames to regenerate.
[Angelo]: There are lots of signs of life here now.
There's 125 species of fish back in the river.
That certainly is a cause for hope.
[Narrator]: Milan,
one of the world's most important fashion capitals
along with London, New York, and Paris,
but we haven't come here to shop retail.
Rather, we've made the journey
to a small town outside of Milan
where a textile company has adopted a new technology
in order to change the way that denim is produced.
Forty years ago, the situation was completely different,
o rules for the water,
so you didn't care about the water pollution,
about the chemicals.
So, the middle of the '70s to the middle of the '80swas, I think, a real mess in Italy for everybody.
We put money in the water treatment,
we put money to pay attention in what we are doing,
and only when you put money you can understand
that you are using chemicals that you don't need.
[Narrator]: Luigi Caccia,
the second-generation owner of Italdenim,
manages one of the leading companies in Europe
for the production of denim.
His company was one of the first
to embrace Greenpeace's detox campaign.
Our first point is to make business,
but at the end,
we can understand only by going deeper,
to understand how many dangerous things we are making
just to make a pair of denim.
[Narrator]: Luigi says it's hard
for his company to compete with offshore denim companies, many who don't put any money into pollution controls.
[Caccia]: The worst are using the chemicals in excess.
The price is lower, the quality is pretty good,
so how can I compete with this?
This is the big difference
between us and the rest of the world,
the way we make it.
[Narrator]: In many ways,
Italdenim follows the pattern of many other companies in the production of denim,
but there is one major step that Italdenim implements
in the treatment of their cotton
that eliminates toxic chemicals and reduces water usage
by up to 80%.
The production of denim begins
with the arrival of cotton to the processing facility,
where the raw product is broken down
into thin strands that wrap from machine to machine
to build up a strong yarn.
Once the yarn is spun, the roll is ready for dyeing.
This is where Italdenim has taken a huge turn
and changed the processing of denim.
Italdenim turned to the ocean
for a solution to standard chemical processing.
They learned that by using the exoskeleton of shellfish
crushed into a fine powder called "Chitosan,"
they could enhance the dyeability of denim.
The Chitosan is very simple.
It's the shellfish of the crab or the shrimp
that is thrown away from the food industry.
It is recovered, transformed into Chitosan,
and it goes into the circular economy,
because we reutilize something
that someone else has thrown away.
[Narrator]: Chitosan is a natural
and incredibly strong fixing agent
that reduces the amount of chemicals used
to make your blue jeans blue.
[Caccia]: This is the Chitosano.
It is a completely 100%
atoxic and biocompatible product.
We use, mixing with simply water,
so we put in the water here, like this,
and we get, at the end, this kind of pasta.
There is no danger in touching.
This cream goes to the machine,
and we apply it directly on the yarn.
So here is where we apply the Chitosano.
We don't need anymore any fixing agent,
because the Chitosano, with the light,
fixes like a shell around the yarn,
and protects the yarn and the colour too.
You don't need to put other chemicals like PVA,
this micro plastic that goes into the water,
that goes into the river,
and it goes into the sea,
and it goes into the fish for sure.
It's impossible to stop.
We want to reach the 360 degrees using of Chitosano,
and we could eliminate a huge quantity of chemicals.
This is one step
that is a revolutionary step into the textile denim industry, and I think it is one of the ways
to approach the future of this job.
[Narrator]: This is breakthrough science
in the textile industry,
and if adopted by large brands,
the positive impact on the environment
can't be overstated.
The first point is to make something
that helps you to save money.
If you save chemicals,
first of all, you save money, then you save nature, but first of all, you save money.
[Narrator]: Through cutting back on water usage
and introducing their water-recycling process,
Italdenim has reduced
their industrial waste footprint.
The plant also recaptures steam and produces its own power.
There has been an enormous investment
in building this infrastructure
to produce an environmentally friendly fabric.
The cost to the brands for this fabric
is only pennies more
than fabric produced in a third-world country.
[Caccia]: These are all small things
That a small company like us has made.
If a big company makes it,
it's 10, 12, 100 times more the effect.
Everybody need to push these guys. We need to tell to the brands
that there is the possibility to make it different.
[Narrator]: In this city
in the southeast corner of Spain,
in an industrial park,
sits a small company that is on the cutting edge
of eco-friendly blue jean processing.
Using two common elements, light and air,
they've come up with ingenious methods
that have the ability
to replace traditional, polluting methods
of distressing jeans.
We completely changed the way a jean is produced.
If you look into jeans finishing,
you have two areas:
one area we call "wet processing,"
that includes a tremendous amount of water,
and the other area we call "dry processing."
Dry processing includes
a tremendous amount of work, of labour. So there are three technologies.
One is sandblasting,
that today is forbidden around the world.
The second one is potassium permanganate spraying,
which is about spraying a chemical product
that is very dangerous if you breathe,
so it's just spraying a product just to create a local abrasion,
and the third one is what we call manual scraping,
which is just scraping manually the jeans physically,
one by one, just to create some areas that look worn.
For just finishing a pair of jeans, you know,
which means a lot of water just for the finishing.
Why don't we just, in terms of finishing,
lower that impact
so you, as a consumer, you have the right
to ask the brand that you are wearing
where that jean came from,
and how it's being manufactured or finished.
[Narrator]: Jeanologia is using lasers
as one tool to distress the jeans.
By using light, they are able to eliminate
the indigo blue colour in raw denim.
It sounds easy, and it is,
but you still have to be creative
in order to replicate
the worn look that consumers are seeking.
[Silla]: Basically, what lasers is doing
is using the light to eliminate,
or physically sublimate, the indigo from jeans,
and to transfer any image that we create in a computer
So we can make digital pictures
of authentic, old, true, worn jeans,
and we can take the details from there,
we can play with these images, pictures in a computer,
And then we can transfer this
and engrave this through the energy of the light
in a jean in seconds.
[Narrator]: Jeanologia is also taking water out of the equation
by loading jeans
into what looks like a commercial washing machine. To give jeans the washed-out, worn look,
they're using an element
that we take for granted every moment in our lives: air.
[Penades]: The G2 gets the air from the room,
And then gets the oxygen out of the air,
and it converts oxygen, O2, into ozone, O3,
And it does the job that a normal stone-wash process
would do for hours and hours of energy
and loads and loads of water,
and many other products also that are harmful for nature,
Efficient, and waterless technology.
[Silla]: The good thing,
and that's the beauty of this technology,
is that we eliminate water without increasing the cost,
If you have two jeans,
one is damaging the planet, the other one not,
both looks equal and the price is the same,
I mean, no one would choose the wrong one.
I mean, there is no excuse.
[Narrator]: To help sell the laser and ozone technologies
to brands who age denim with chemicals,
the company has enlisted
the help of one of the godfathers of denim design,
a man with a newfound mission
who now wants to help clean up the mess he helped to create.
Because when you do a garment in the ozone,
of course you can't just do one garment,
you have to do 11 pounds wet or dry.
Absolutely, but what is interesting
is completely we are not using chemicals.
Just inside...
All there is is electricity, an air line, and that's it.
That's it. Air.
[Narrator]: Francois started working
with this denim facility,
a place where new technologies
are bumping into the old ways of distressing jeans.
Francois was an innovator with passion and sensitivity,
and I think that's what's needed.
It's the passion and sensitivity that drive design, and design, in a way, shows you care.
I did create the first stretch jean,
In my humble opinion, in my not such humble opinion.
The first ones were just garment washed.
There was no bleaching or anything like that.
It wasn't necessary.
It took 40 years,
40 years before we started to understand
that what we did was wrong.
[Golding]: We are all a bit guilty of all that,
Francois, Adriano, or any of us,
but I think it's the degree to which it's gone, you know?
I'm sure there's many other examples in life
where somebody starts something quite naively.
[Narrator]: A young denim designer,
Eric Dickstein,
has had to learn the business by trial and error
while keeping to his core belief
in making an ethical jean product.
Denim is one of the biggest commodities in the world.
If you travel to China,
where most of the world manufactures
for the mass consumers,
well, you end up with having rivers
that are turning blue.
They're like, illuminating
because of the chemicals that are in the water.
It's hard to find out the truth sometimes.
You know, what I learned is that people close their eyes.
That's really what I learned.
I learned that no one really wants to talkabout the little monster in the closet,
so you don't learn the details,
because people don't want to talk about them,
because at the end of the day, it's not a selling point.
Oftentimes you learn by someone doing it the right way,
ot the wrong way,
because the guy who's doing it the right way
will tell you all the things
that are going wrong in the industry.
It's definitely people that are trying to make change
that will often tell you what is actually going on.
We can control the amount of ozone that's generated,
how long we can expose the jean to the ozone,
and really control the fading,
and still get that beautiful kind of contrast
and highs and lows
without using any toxic chemicals,
and without using any pumice stone,
and that's really, I think,
one of the more detrimental parts to denim laundry. [Narrator]: Lukus Eichmann and Eric Dickstein
are a new breed
of jean designers and boutique manufacturerswho are committed to transparency
and producing ethical jeans.
Their output is a microdot in the global production
that companies like Levi's, Gap, Old Navy and other large brands
have in the world marketplace.
What's important is that they're on the cusp
of a growing movement
of many small ethical labels around the world
who are concerned with the massive pollution
being created in the current jeans landscape.
So the option was, you know,
go with that kind of old-school mentality and the existing infrastructure that's out there
where they're using toxic chemicals
and potassium permanganate and pumice stone,
which has a huge carbon footprint
to mine and haul,
and creates a huge amount of waste afterward,
or kind of come up with something new,
invest money in the way that we make the jean,
and completely control every element
of how the jean is processed in the wash,
and make a really beautiful product,
and prove to the whole industry it can happen.
When you're doing something new,
there's fewer clients to deal with,
so basically you're building a brand;
Wiser Wash, Eco PRK, that's a brand,
and their brand is healthy, lifestyle,
environment, positive,
which are awesome things,
but there is not enough people
jumping on that bandwagon at this point,
but as soon as the big boys,
the people that probably control most of the market,
say "Yeah, we got to jump on that movement,"
there will be no difference in price.
I don't think it necessarily has to cost more,
and actually we see a return on investment
in a larger setting, you know,
in a pretty short period of time,
because you are subtracting the cost of those chemicals.
You're using less water,
and so, at the end of the day,
there is going to be savings for the manufacturer.
The challenge that we see and hear
directly from other manufacturers
is really just overhauling their whole infrastructure,
'cause so far
they've just kind of been putting bandaids on, or adding things because it exists already,
so it is expensive for an existing player
to refurb their whole factory,
and that's why I think a lot of the change
is coming from brand-owned factories,
or people who have a concern
on the front end of the business.
[Narrator]: In our conversations with people
Like Ma Jun, Orsola de Castro, and Francois Girbaud,
they all voiced the same refrain,
that big brands and big retailers in the west
have been able to outsource their production,
and therefore,
they think they've outsourced the responsibility. In the past 55 years,
the U.S. has outsourced their clothing production
to developing countries,
translating to low prices and increased consumption.
The statistics are insane,
something like 80 billion garments of clothes
are being delivered out of factories,
and those are the ones that make it out,
so we don't think about all of the ones
for those 80 billion amount of garments
that come out of factories,
probably an equal amount has been made in factories,
but it's wrong, and that's discarded,
so, you know, it's landfill, they're discarded into water,
I mean, you know, it just goes on and on and on.
[Narrator]: In her book "Overdressed,"
writer Elizabeth Cline wrote,
"As any economist will tell you,
cheaper prices stimulate consumption,
and the current low rate of fashion
has spurred a shopping free-for-all,
where in the United States
consumers are buying and hoarding
roughly 20 billion garments per year."
The consumer did not wake up one morning saying,
"Actually, I am fed up of spending.
I want to buy five pairs of jeans
for a fraction of the price."
We were literally introduced to this concept
by the fashion industry
as a new business model,
which is entirely to do with increasing profits.
[Narrator]: We're depleting our natural resources.
We've permanently altered our climate.
In China, where most of our clothes are produced
and where a burgeoning population
is gaining a taste for fashion,
we are creating another environmental crisis
for the planet.
But we can't blame one country.
We have to look globally
and realize that by buying so much clothing
and treating it as disposable,
we are putting a huge weight on the environment,
and it is simply unsustainable.
When the name of the game is fast and cheap,
Is it any wonder that the costs of protecting the environment
are often nowhere to be found
in the operating budgets of companies
who supply our insatiable appetite for fast fashion?
Critics of this trend agree that something must be done.
The change will happen.
How quickly is determined by the consumer.
Just choosing to buy a responsible product
versus a conventional product,
you are going to make change.
But I think it's our job as a brand,
and the community of designers and brands that exist,
to help educate consumers.
I don't think that any consumers, you know,
if they know about what is going on in our rivers
and, I mean, all this impact on the local communities,
sometimes they have very serious health impacts,
I don't think they're going to continue to be silent.
I think they will, you know,
I hope that they can use their buying power
to try to influence...
influence the factories and also especially the brands,
the brands, and through them to try to push them,
pressure them, to green their supply chain.
I think that's doable.
The only thing we would say,
just to get the historical record right, we have never really gone after a company
before asking them politely
through reports, through meetings, to change.
In those meetings, generally, the CEOs would say, you know,
"Of course we agree with what Greenpeace is saying,
we're working on it,
here's a thick plan
of our environmental sustainability approach," and so on and so forth.
But then what we find
is once they get back into their day-to-day job, they slip back into a "business as usual" approach.
There is no urgency.
If anything, the best they are doing
are baby steps in the right direction,
and we want them not to just do symbolic greenwashing things,
We want them actually to make the changes
that ultimately is going to be good for the environment,
and good for the long-term sustainability
of their businesses.
In 2025, the need of the water for human will be double, but every day we are killing the water
for stupid stuff like a pair of blue jeans.
The future of the fashion and textile industry
over the next immediate few years,
will be looking at transparency, traceability,
So, it all starts with a "t," easy to remember, you know,
let's do something about it pretty quickly.
I think all corporations
Have to be accountable for their environmental practices, and no one, no one has a right to damage or destroy a river, so I do think more within the textile sector
have to commit, truly commit,
to a fashion industry without pollution.
I also think in the end the consumer has a lot of power,
and if more and more of us sought out clothing
that was made in an environmentally friendly manner,
that would go a long way to improve things as well.
[♪♪♪]