Many of the jeans worn in Canada and the US start their journey in Mexico. The lure of low wages and lax enforcement of labour and environmental laws, combined with the elimination of tariffs under NAFTA and a weak peso, has attracted US jean manufacturers across the border.
The northern Mexican city of Torreon has replaced El Paso, Texas as the continent's blue jean capital. In 2000, Torreon produced an average of six million garments a week, 90% of which were exported to the US and Canada.
Farther south, in the state of Puebla, Tehuacan is another Mexican jean manufacturing centre, with 60% of its 400 garment factories producing jeans for the US market.
Labels like Guess, Levi's and Gap are stitched onto jeans of all shapes, sizes and styles churned out by Mexico's maquiladora factories.
Toxic Fashions
The latest wave in jean fashion calls for a highly labour intensive product, dipped in layer upon layer of toxic chemicals.
The journey of the jean, from fabric mills through the hands of cutters and sewers to the chemical baths of laundries, takes its toll on both workers and the environment.
Once the fabric weight is selected and the yarn is spun, either in Mexico or in the southern United States, the dying process begins. Chemicals are used in making blue dyes, and the darker the jean the more chemicals are involved.
For designer jeans, textile companies use sulphur treatment and mercerization (which involves treating the cotton in a caustic soda solution, and then neutralizing with acid to improve dye absorption).
Tinting - in which beige and yellow dyes are padded onto finished fabric by hand - is one of the latest fads. Hints of purple and green "overdyes" add another stage of chemicals to the mix.
Mexico's lax enforcement of environmental laws allows companies to dump dyes into surrounding bodies of water, polluting the groundwater that feeds nearby farms. The deep blue of the creeks surrounding jean factories in Tehuacan is the dangerous result of such unregulated dumping.
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The dyed denim is then snipped by cutters. Though some factories use computerized machinery to precisely slice their denim, many capitalize on the inexpensive labour Mexico has to offer for this very labour intensive step. The same is true for sewers who carefully feed the sectioned pieces of heavy denim through machines for up to 12 hours a day. Young women who sew at high speeds to meet unrealistic production quotas often suffer repetitive strain injuries, back problems, and eyestrain. |
Manual labour - and lots of it - is required to produce the desired vintage look... and, as a result, much of the finishing takes place in countries where the labour is cheap and the dollar is strong. |
Once the jeans are assembled, they are sent to laundries for additional chemical treatments.
Tinted, "dirty" vintage jeans add new labour intensive steps to the finishing process. Jeans are "crunched" by hand to create wrinkles in the dye, rubbed manually to remove the indigo, and sponged to add colour.
More expensive styles are first "dipped" in dyes, then baked in resin to keep the indigo dark and provide an aged, rigid denim look.
Another technique involves bleaching and stonewashing with enzymes to destroy the indigo. For instance, amylase is used to shrink the jeans and soften the fabric. Cellulase weakens the cotton fibre before the jean in thrown in a stonewashing process with pumice stones or other abrasive objects.
Laccase is replacing bleach in stripping the indigo dye from the jeans to give them an aged look. At this stage in the process, tinting and "overdyes" can be done by hand on the single garment rather than on the bolt of fabric.
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If kids knew the impact of their fashion statement on workers and the environment, they would realize toxic jeans are very unfashionable. |
Chemicals used in the laundries often end up polluting local waters. In many regions, the sheer volume of water used by laundries cannot be accommodated because of arid conditions and low water levels. Torreon is said to be one of the few Mexican cities with a sufficient water supply, however a water shortage is on the horizon |
The last toxic step is the drying and baking. The large dryers, heaters and ovens present a final problem. Mexican laundry workers are seldom protected from the toxic fumes released by huge dryers, heaters and ovens.
All that's left is for workers to "tag" the jeans, and the transformed denim is plastic wrapped, packed and shipped off to retailers and distributors in the US and Canada.
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Every day we're exposed to toxic substances - fumes from caustic soda and chlorine, contact with enzimes, detergents, peroxide, oxalic acid, sodium bisulphate, etc. |
The cost of the latest hand-finished jeans is more than the figure on the price tag in a brand-name designer store. Lax enforcement of health and safety and environmental laws is poisoning workers and communities in Mexico's jean producing capitals.
Maybe it's time to say, "No to toxic fashions."