Apparel Industry Chain: How To Rationally Face The Poison Of Fashion?

Fashion toxic?

The poison of fashion is like a snake in the industry chain. It is difficult to get rid of all the links in the industrial chain.

But there is no need to talk about the color change.

How to comb this environmental chain button and how to rationally face the poison of fashion?

The complexity of the industrial chain

The clothing industry is a complex industry with a high degree of subdivision and many links involved in the industrial chain.

To clarify the pollution problem of the fashion industry chain, we must trace the source.

Take cotton as an example, as a natural fiber raw material, spraying insecticides and other pesticides in cotton planting stage will easily cause cotton to be polluted.

Synthetic fiber raw materials may involve heavy metals, formaldehyde, chlorinated phenols, organotin and other harmful substances / indicators during the production process.

Li Mingdong, the Certification Manager of Testex Swiss textile certification company in Beijing, told reporters in an interview.

It can be seen that pollution in the fashion industry chain is impossible to guard against.

According to the reporter's interview, in the production process of textile and clothing, the most easily involved part is dyeing and finishing, because a large amount of chemical additives should be added.

Fu Guangwei, director of the China Textile Industry Association's testing center, said: "some harmful substances are not directly applied to production, but are inevitably contained in auxiliaries, such as formaldehyde.

But traditionally, formaldehyde in such auxiliaries is to be disposed of after leaving the factory.

Wet process (including dyeing, cleaning, printing and fabric finishing) in textile production produces a large number of wastewater containing toxic and harmful substances.

Such waste water has become a clue to Greenpeace's investigation. The two cases reported by the Greenpeace Corporation, namely, YOUNGOR textile industrial city and Zhongshan Guotai dyeing and finishing Co., are all sampling and testing of their waste water.

It is understood that YOUNGOR group's business has expanded to the entire industry chain, "YOUNGOR" three words are not limited to clothing brand, the detection of "YOUNGOR" is the textile industry city.

These two factories are suppliers of many famous clothing brands at home and abroad, such as Adidas, Nike, Puma, Lining, and so on. If pollution is true, the clothing industry chain front-end links such as dyeing and finishing are also involved.

Although the "cancer" is buried deep in the front of the industrial chain, the clothing brand has become the preset liability bearer, making consumers talk about the color of drugs and talk about the color change of drug-related brands.

In this regard, there is a saying that the brand itself is fully capable of controlling their impact on the environment, and the brand should eliminate the toxic and harmful substances used in the production process with suppliers.

Do brand enterprises really have such appeal and execution?

Brand enterprises' weakness

In terms of fabric and accessories, a conventional garment product may consist of dozens of materials.

On a pipeline, everyone does their jobs. The clothing brand has to do more work through creativity.

So clothing brands usually have a large number of suppliers.

The head of a brand clothing company in Beijing said reluctantly in the interview: "we do not want to imagine that every fabric should be tested first and tested for 800 yuan at a time.

If there is a real problem, then it will be difficult to calculate the loss of the time limit.

Even so, we will not have any luck in this link. If the clothes were found in the shopping mall, the problem would be a fine of tens of thousands of dollars.

It can be seen that the fabric inspection at the early stage has brought protection to the brand enterprises and brought more burdens.

According to Fu Guangwei, the country has not yet been able to detect the fabric before it flows to the market. Before using it, clothing companies can only find the third party testing to ensure that the fabric is no problem.

"Responsible brand enterprises will designate laboratories to inspect all the batch numbers of raw materials and conduct comprehensive testing of the colors of fabrics.

If enterprises do this, many quality problems will be eliminated, and of course, the cost of testing will be very high.

The controllable range of brand enterprises is limited, and for upstream suppliers, of course, they can not answer all the answers.

More complicated is that a supplier usually contracts with several brands.

Because the product cycle is short and the trend changes faster, these supply contracts are also short-term.

Therefore, it is not easy to make the brand enterprise play a leading role in the industry.

Confusion in dyeing and finishing process

Based on the "weakness" of brand enterprises, is it possible to "prescribe the right medicine" and strengthen the "green degree" of dyeing and finishing links?

YOUNGOR and Nakayama Kunitai issued a statement in public, with the help of the environmental protection department's test results, indicating that the sewage discharged by the company is in line with the national emission standards and international standards.

As of press release, our reporter contacted YOUNGOR's external publicity department. The head of the Department refused to explain more and told the situation in the "statement".

Later, our reporter contacted Zhongshan Guotai's external publicity department, which was interviewed by Mr. Chen.

"Our company is very strict in management and technology, and also requires upstream suppliers to issue test reports when supplying raw materials.

If there is really a problem, we also hope that the media can appeal to the industry to start from the source, so that the quality of dye auxiliaries can be guaranteed, and the content of harmful substances will be reduced. What we are more worried about is the supervision of dye auxiliaries.

In this regard, Li Mingdong gave a rational analysis, he said, textile and clothing, such as environmental problems, the reasons are mainly three aspects: first, whether the quality of raw materials is up to standard; two is the quality of dyes, auxiliaries and chemicals added in the production process; three, the control of the production process, such as the appropriate control of the process indicators in dyeing and finishing process, will affect the environmental protection of the terminal products.

He also mentioned that the Oeko-Tex standard system is to control the environmental performance of products in such a way of thinking. The standard system encourages every link of the industrial chain to bear responsibility for the product's environmental compliance and environmental impact reduction.

It is understood that in the printing and dyeing process, even if the same color of cloth, different dyed products will be dyed cylinder difference.

This requires dyeing and finishing enterprises to have excellent process management capabilities, so that the stability of technical indicators can not only guarantee product quality, but also reduce the number and error of detection.

It is not only difficult for dyeing and finishing enterprises to control the process, but also for the dyeing and finishing part of the test is not easy.

According to the Swedish chemical administration, more than 10000 substances are used in printing and dyeing alone, of which about 3000 are commonly used.

Given the huge amount of chemicals used in the textile industry, it is difficult to share and maintain information about chemicals in the industry. It is also difficult to make laws and regulations for the use of each chemical.

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Regulatory reality

It is precisely because of the complexity of the industrial chain and the possible loopholes. If we want to change the "non environmental protection" status of the industry, the detection of textiles is particularly critical, and the reality is not optimistic.

Because the process has not been standardized, there may be randomness in garment testing. Fu Guang Wei said, "if we really want to ensure that every garment that flows to the market is in line with environmental standards, the only way to ensure that every garment is disassembled and tested separately, then we have no clothes to wear and no feasibility."

This is a frustrating conclusion, but it must be faced.

Fu Guangwei also mentioned the "standard diversification". Now the whole country is a unified testing standard for all textiles and garments, which is not scientific in itself. He explained: "the quality and price of clothes are related. The cost of low-end clothing products is being compressed repeatedly. How can they perform the same quality inspection standards with high-end clothing products? Therefore, we need to establish a more scientific assurance system."

The unification of testing standards directly determines that supervision work can not go deep.

Fu Guangwei frankly admitted that at present, the domestic market is limited to spot checks on the brand clothing of the shopping mall. It is impossible for the two or three line circulation market to carry out testing and supervision, and the quality of clothing in these circulation areas is in a state of "out of control".

"Therefore, this time, the disclosure of Greenpeace organization should be faced with a correct attitude. We can not say that the brand involved is not good. They are already excellent enterprises in the industry.

But since there are problems, we have to solve them.

To tell consumers, in recent decades, the supervision of the state has become more and more standardized, but the improvement of textile and clothing quality monitoring and the environmental protection process of fashion industry are not achieved overnight, and are related to economic development, production technology and consumption level.

I believe it will only get better and better.

Fu Guangwei showed his attitude in this way.