Behind Fashion: Environmental Debts Of "Cowboy Town"

The washing room discharged dark brown sewage with a little bluish blue color. When the sewage flows through the fence, the larger suspended solids are withheld. After entering the grit chamber and the sieve filter, after filtering again, it enters the regulating tank, the anaerobic pond, the oxygen consumption tank, the sedimentation tank and the oxidation pond. At this point, the nauseous sewage finally reaches the "standard", and after treatment, it can be supplied to the washing workshop for recycling.

This is the treatment process of jeans washing water sewage in Guangzhou Chuangxing Garment Group Co., Ltd.

However, in the location of Chuangxing group, "

Recently, international

Also included in the "green peace" pollution blacklist, and also known as the "underwear town" of Guangdong Shantou Valley Rao town.

Joy and sorrow of "cowboy town"

On the afternoon of December 1st, the reporter walked into Dun village, Xintang Town, Zengcheng, Guangzhou.

The denim garment industry is one of the three pillar industries in Xintang town. It has formed a complete industrial chain around the denim garment, such as spinning, dyeing, weaving, finishing, printing, garment making, washing and bleaching.

And dun village is one of the earliest gathering places of Xintang cowboys.

Unlike most villages in Guangdong, the southern village is not Cantonese in the streets.

"There are more outsiders here than the locals."

An old man in Dun village told reporters.

The village is located on the southeast side of Xintang town.

According to public information, the total area of Dadun village is 8 square kilometers, with 17 cooperatives, 7408 permanent residents and more than 60 thousand foreign population.

According to reports, the village's industrial output value in 2007 was 800 million yuan, and the tax revenue was nearly 100 million yuan.

The village of Da Dun feels more like a town.

Farmland is not visible locally. There is no rural area.

From the village of dun dun village to the riverside, all the way is cowboy clothing processing factory. The locals are doing it, and the migrant workers are doing it.

Reporters saw that local cowboy factories were mostly small family workshops, and even in the streets and lanes and ancestral halls, a large number of villagers were rented into "factories" for cowboy processing.

It is understood that the cowboy industry in dun dun village has been developed since the 80s of last century.

Like many textile industries in Guangdong, dun village began to develop from the "raw material processing".

At that time, many clothing merchants in Hongkong went to Xintang to do the processing.

Because of the good results, the processing garment factories developed rapidly, and produced cluster effect locally. With the active support of local policies, the Xintang cowboy garment industry soon formed a gathering scale. Many Xintang people started their own garment factories.

To this day, reporters in the vicinity of Dun village see that every household is still engaged in "incoming processing".

In a workshop with only 4 workers, two men were ironing jeans, they were outsiders, and two women workers were sewing jeans for their locals.

And in the streets and lanes, there are old women everywhere cutting their heads.

The male worker who is busy ironing jeans told reporters that the boss and he are all from Hubei, where they can do the processing of materials and help iron a pair of trousers. The boss can earn more than 3 wool, of which 1 are more to the ironing worker, and the cost of rent is also deducted.

For the town of Xintang, although the town's automobile, motorcycle and its spare parts manufacturing industry has become the other two pillar industries in the town, jeans are still the biggest card in the town.

According to the data of Xintang town government network, there are more than 2600 denim clothing enterprises and related supporting enterprises in Xintang, accounting for 60% of Xintang's industrial enterprises, with an annual output value of about 20000000000 Yuan.

Outside these more than 2600 enterprises, there are obviously factories and factories that are hard to count.

According to data provided by Greenpeace, an environmental protection organization, nearly 3000 denim clothing enterprises and related manufacturers in 2009 were concentrated on a few square kilometers of land near single Dun village.

More than 60% of the country's denim clothing comes from the town of Xintang. 40% of the denim garments exported from the whole country come from Xintang town.

The statistics of Xintang town government show that from January to November last year, the output value of Xintang's textile and garment industry was 21 billion 768 million yuan, an increase of nearly 50% compared with the same period last year, while the output value of automobile and spare parts industry, motorcycle and spare parts industry decreased slightly over the same period, and the drop was about 6 billion yuan.