Behind The Fashion: The Environmental Debt Of Guangdong'S "Cowboy Town"

Washing water workshop discharge slightly

This is jeans washing water and sewage.

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, I 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 the author.

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 in the local area, and there is no cottage in the countryside. What is taken is the Xiyuan, a senior residential area where cars come and go.

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.

I see that the local cowboy factory is mostly a small family workshop, and even in the streets and lanes and ancestral halls, a large number of villagers have been 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, I saw in the vicinity of dun dun village that every household is still engaged in processing of raw materials.

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 men who were busy ironing jeans told the writer that the boss and he were all from Hubei, where they could do the processing of materials and help ironing a pair of trousers. The boss could earn more than 3 cents, of which 1 were more to the ironing worker, and the cost of rent and other expenses should be 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.

Xintang town government statistics show that from January to November last year, the output value of Xintang's textile and garment industry was 21 billion 768 million yuan, up nearly 50% over the same period last year.

The output value of automobile and spare parts industry, motorcycle and spare parts industry decreased slightly over the same period, with a drop of about 6 billion yuan.