OUTDOOR wear from many of the world's leading brands is coated with environmentally damaging and hormone-disrupting toxins, the environmental group Greenpeace has warned.
The group tested 14 rain jackets and rain trousers for women and children from 13 top brands, including adidas and Vaude, and found that every sample contained perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a substance within the perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) group, which is used to make clothing water-resistant but can reduce fertility and damage immune systems.
Products from Jack Wolfskin, The North Face, Patagonia, Kaikkialla and Marmot have the highest concentration of PFOA, Greenpeace said in a report published this week.
Of the 14 pieces of clothing, 11 were made in China and three were made in Indonesia, Vietnam and Ukraine.
These man-made chemicals are so stable that they are difficult to remove from the environment. Instead, they reach drinking water, food and ultimately human blood and breast milk from such various sources as manufacturing and household wastewater, dust and the disposal of textiles, Greenpeace said.
The group is calling on textile makers to replace hazardous chemicals with harmless alternatives and it wants governments to step up regulation.
Some major brands have already moved in that direction, with Marks & Spencer following H&M's example and announcing that soon it will no longer use PFCs, as well as promising to eliminate all hazardous chemicals by 2020, according to Greenpeace's Kirsten Brodde.
If two of the biggest clothing brands in the world can do it and still meet customers' needs to stay dry and warm, then the rest have no excuse, she wrote on the group's website.
While she said laws to restrict PHOA in outdoor clothing haven't been passed, she pointed to what she called promising prospects.
Germany has planned to list the chemical as "an extremely worrying substance" and that using such a classification has been given consideration in several countries, including China, she told Legal Evening News.
Germany-based Jack Wolfskin and adidas have confirmed adding PHOA, but adidas insisted that its products don't pose health risks because the amount used is minimal.
Jack Wolfskin has promised to use a safer replacement before 2015 while adidas has pledged a "zero discharge of hazardous chemicals" policy in 2020, the paper said.
In July 2011, Greenpeace accused some top clothing brands that rely on Chinese suppliers of polluting rivers with heavy metals and PFCs.
Adidas, Nike, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, Abercrombie and Fitch, and China's Li Ning were among the brands identified following an investigation focusing on two major suppliers, the Youngor Textile Complex in the Yangtze River Delta and the Well Dyeing Factory Ltd in the Pearl River Delta.
The brands mentioned later confirmed they buy products from one of the two suppliers.
Both the European Union and the United States have banned wastewater discharges containing PFCs, but China has yet to implement a systematic chemicals management policy, Li Yifang, an official at Greenpeace, said earlier.
However, the responsibility for such chemicals must also lie with global firms, she added. "None of the corporations mentioned in our report has a comprehensive, publicly available policy that ensures their suppliers are eliminating hazardous chemicals from their supply chain, so we believe they are perpetuating toxic pollution," she said.
The group tested 14 rain jackets and rain trousers for women and children from 13 top brands, including adidas and Vaude, and found that every sample contained perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a substance within the perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) group, which is used to make clothing water-resistant but can reduce fertility and damage immune systems.
Products from Jack Wolfskin, The North Face, Patagonia, Kaikkialla and Marmot have the highest concentration of PFOA, Greenpeace said in a report published this week.
Of the 14 pieces of clothing, 11 were made in China and three were made in Indonesia, Vietnam and Ukraine.
These man-made chemicals are so stable that they are difficult to remove from the environment. Instead, they reach drinking water, food and ultimately human blood and breast milk from such various sources as manufacturing and household wastewater, dust and the disposal of textiles, Greenpeace said.
The group is calling on textile makers to replace hazardous chemicals with harmless alternatives and it wants governments to step up regulation.
Some major brands have already moved in that direction, with Marks & Spencer following H&M's example and announcing that soon it will no longer use PFCs, as well as promising to eliminate all hazardous chemicals by 2020, according to Greenpeace's Kirsten Brodde.
If two of the biggest clothing brands in the world can do it and still meet customers' needs to stay dry and warm, then the rest have no excuse, she wrote on the group's website.
While she said laws to restrict PHOA in outdoor clothing haven't been passed, she pointed to what she called promising prospects.
Germany has planned to list the chemical as "an extremely worrying substance" and that using such a classification has been given consideration in several countries, including China, she told Legal Evening News.
Germany-based Jack Wolfskin and adidas have confirmed adding PHOA, but adidas insisted that its products don't pose health risks because the amount used is minimal.
Jack Wolfskin has promised to use a safer replacement before 2015 while adidas has pledged a "zero discharge of hazardous chemicals" policy in 2020, the paper said.
In July 2011, Greenpeace accused some top clothing brands that rely on Chinese suppliers of polluting rivers with heavy metals and PFCs.
Adidas, Nike, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, Abercrombie and Fitch, and China's Li Ning were among the brands identified following an investigation focusing on two major suppliers, the Youngor Textile Complex in the Yangtze River Delta and the Well Dyeing Factory Ltd in the Pearl River Delta.
The brands mentioned later confirmed they buy products from one of the two suppliers.
Both the European Union and the United States have banned wastewater discharges containing PFCs, but China has yet to implement a systematic chemicals management policy, Li Yifang, an official at Greenpeace, said earlier.
However, the responsibility for such chemicals must also lie with global firms, she added. "None of the corporations mentioned in our report has a comprehensive, publicly available policy that ensures their suppliers are eliminating hazardous chemicals from their supply chain, so we believe they are perpetuating toxic pollution," she said.
