A T-Shirt Is No Simple Thing
Most of us buy products without thinking about where they are from. But if you are a scientist, or one of the growing number of environmentally conscious consumers, you think about the impact of a product all across its life, or the “lifecycle.” Environmental impacts occur at many points during a product’s life: when the raw material is extracted and processed, when the item is shipped to the store, and when it is used by the consumer, and ultimately, when it is disposed of.
For example, a T-shirt, it turns out, is no simple thing. Before it lands on your back, it jumps around the world. The price of a T-shirt may be low, but we are paying for the shirt in ways that harm the environment and our health.
The life of a cotton T-shirt could begin in China, Kenya, Egypt, the United States or Uzbekistan. These countries are all large growers of cotton. Once harvested, raw cotton lint is likely sent to areas with low labor costs, such as Asia or Latin America, to be spun into yarn, knitted, sewn and dyed. The shirt is then shipped to markets around the world. That means that if you’ve bought a T-shirt in London, it could have been grown in Texas, manufactured in China, and shipped to a European distribution center before arriving in your bag. Of course, after you purchase it, you will wash and dry it many times. Hot water for washing and energy for drying are significant impacts. The lifecycle of the T-shirt ends when you throw it away, and it is likely it ends in a landfill.
The most serious impacts in the lifecycle are often at unusual places: for a T-shirt, it is growing the cotton and the washing/drying during ownership. Despite occupying only 3% of the world’s land area, cotton uses more pesticides than any other crop, as well as 25% of the world’s insecticides – many of which are known carcinogens. Some studies show that home washing and drying of T-shirts can account for nearly 60% of the energy used throughout the T-shirt’s lifetime. This is primarily through energy-intensive hot-washes and drying cycles.
The simplest solution? Follow these tips, and remember these facts the next time you buy a T-shirt:
This essay was provided by Esty Environmental Partners, an environmental management consultancy based upon twenty years of work by Dan Esty, a professor at the prestigious Yale University and one of the world’s leading corporate environmental strategy thinkers and advisors in the U.S.
