Read the full transcript of Priyanka Ladha’s talk titled “Is Your T-shirt Poisoning Your Skin?” at TEDxCSTU 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Hidden Dangers in Our Clothing
Today, if I were to take these plastic bottles and then melt them and add a bunch of scientifically proven chemicals which cause cancer, reproductive issues, respiratory problems, skin diseases, and a whole bunch of other problems, and then mix it up together, boil it, and then ask you, “How many of you will be willing to touch this?” A hundred percent of you would say no. But what if I were to tell you that most of us in this very room are not just touching it, but are also wearing it? Welcome to the toxic world of the fashion industry.
Since the age of five, I’ve grown up around textiles and artisans, thanks to my father, who’s a textile designer and an entrepreneur. Growing up, I’ve started building three sustainable fashion tech companies, the third one being at Stanford. All my life, I asked one simple question: How do I make fashion sustainable again? How do I stop the dependency on these toxic chemicals in the fashion industry?
Currently, the fashion industry uses 25% of the global industrial chemical production in the world. How do we fundamentally change that? So today, I believe the first step to this problem is awareness. And in the next seven minutes, I want to show all of you how the fashion industry is very cunningly adding all these chemicals to our clothes, right under our noses, and we don’t even know it.
The Three-Part Recipe: Fabric, Dye, and Treatment
Fabric: The Polyester Problem
Did you know 70% of clothing today is made out of polyester, aka plastic?
It’s the same plastic that is used in these plastic bottles. The industry uses it because it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s everywhere. However, this polyester clothing is constantly shedding microplastics. So much so that these microplastics are becoming part of the air that we breathe, and via our skin, they are getting absorbed because of sweat, taking up microplastics in our body and creating problems like heart attacks.
Furthermore, these microplastics don’t go alone into our body. They take with them a bunch of chemicals in the form of dyes and toxins, and that’s where the main problem is.
For polyester, we cannot use the regular chemicals which we use for natural fibers to color them. So the industry uses dispersed dyes. These dispersed dyes are also made of the same molecular composition as the coarse fabric. That means they are also plastic in nature. These dispersed dyes don’t dissolve in water. They basically get absorbed into the core molecular component. And when we start wearing polyester fabric, we are practically wearing these toxic chemicals on our body.
There are 4,000 plus dispersed dyes today in the world. Not all of them are toxic, and many of them are not toxic individually. But when you combine them in multiple layers, that’s when the core problem begins. Along with this, the industry is notorious for adding humanity’s favorite chemicals like lead, mercury, and cadmium to our clothing.
In 2022, the CDC did research on children’s clothing, and they found that cute little Barbie skirts and raincoat jackets of children had 20% higher lead levels than permissible. Please remember that clothes that kids wear, they are not just wearing them, but they are also sucking on them by keeping them in their mouths. So what are we feeding our kids? Lead, mercury, and at what cost?
Treatments: BPAs and PFAS – The Supervillains
In 2021, the Center for Environmental Health, California, sent notices to 100 plus clothing brands, which had obnoxious amounts of BPAs in their clothing, be it socks, sports bras, and at least your clothing. BPAs are known endocrine disruptors. They mimic the same molecular compound and the hormonal balance that we have in our body. And so when they start entering our body via our skin and via these plastic compounds, they start creating havoc inside our body. You don’t require a lot of BPA to do it. It’s just one drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool that is sufficient to create havoc.
With BPAs, then comes their favorite, PFAS. So every time you get a jacket which claims to be water repellent, stain-resistant, anti-odor, anti-wrinkle, all of these big promises, just like your eggs, there is something nasty going on beneath the surface. And that’s coming due to PFAS. PFAS are your forever chemicals. They’re not going to die. They are like these red flags of your eggs. They’re always going to be there on the face of this planet.
And when these PFAS enter our body through the air, through microplastics, through our skin precipitation, they create a whole bunch of problems, ranging from thyroid diseases, skin problems, respiratory issues, cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, and a whole bunch of problems in our body.
The Regulatory Gap
Now, you might be thinking, why aren’t the regulators doing anything about this? As per the federal government law, there are only three regulations, and that too only for kids’ clothing. There is no regulation for adult clothing. And when there is no regulation, there is no incentive for the industry to actually adopt healthy practices. And they keep coming up with new ways of fooling around.
If you look at this periodic table, on the extreme right side, you will see a bunch of chemical compounds or elements called halogens. Around the 1930s, the industry started using chlorine. It took decades of research and court cases when the industry was finally banned from using chlorine. But the moment that happened, the industry then shifted to another halogen compound called bromine. And when the industry was about to be banned from using bromine, they brought in its cousin, fluorine, which we are currently using in our manufacturing.
Solutions and Recommendations
So now, after hearing me, if all of you want to run naked outside in panic, please don’t do that. We have a couple of solutions here:
Whenever you see these ultra-real kind of promises from the fashion industry, that is anti-odor, anti-repellent, and all bunch of “antis,” more often than not, they are using a coating of PFAS in their clothing. So ideally, I would recommend you to stop using those in your day-to-day activity.
Look at natural fibers as an option. Make cotton, wool, silk, and linen your best friends. They are not 100% pure, but they are less toxic than their synthetic counterparts.
I would encourage you to start changing your synthetic undergarments and replace them with organic natural fiber undergarments. Why? It’s because when we wear these undergarments, which are made out of polyester-spandex composition, they are very close to our body. It’s something that we are wearing on a regular basis, and we also tend to sweat a lot in our intimate areas. That becomes a ready fodder for these fabrics to leach out a whole bunch of toxic chemicals into our body.
Next up, I have an appeal to the regulators. When you come up with these safety limits of chemicals, please don’t look at them in isolation. Each of these clothing items, the synthetic fibers, use a combination of hundreds to thousands of chemicals for one fabric. So when you’re looking at these chemicals in isolation, you pretty much don’t have an idea as to how they’ll work in combination with each other. So, first, please start working on more research. Second, please take an example from what the government of California is doing. They came up with Prop 65, wherein they start working with all these clothing brands, and they have been asked to put a specific label which clearly says that these products can have cancerous substances in them.
Next up is for my beloved industry. Guys, we can do better. Every sixth person on this planet is directly or indirectly related to the fashion industry. It’s a $2.5 trillion economy. It’s 4.3% of the global GDP. And if we put our minds to it, we can start developing products which are more consumer-friendly. And we don’t have to think too hard for it. We have examples in the food industry and the makeup industry, which are now working on developing products which have fewer toxins in them, which are paraben-free, which are sulfate-free. And we can start taking cues from that.
Let’s make fashion a piece of art, what it is supposed to be. It’s an expression of self. And let’s not make it into a home of chemistry. Let’s make fashion which is good for the planet, good for the maker, and good for the wearer. Thank you.
