It was widely acknowledged that the first Planet Textiles in China was a ground-breaking event on sustainability in the textiles sector in China, according to delegates who attended the event where traceability, transparency and toxicology were the main issues of the day.

With around 200 people packed into the Renaissance Hotel in Pudong, Shanghai, and with pressure group Greenpeace in attendance, Phil Patterson, chair of the not-for-profit environmental textile group RITE, pulled no punches when he noted “the Greenpeace Detox report should be broadly welcomed by the industry as it has rightly highlighted textile dyeing and finishing as a major environmental problem. However, it has missed an opportunity to flag up more pressing environmental problems and its call for zero toxic discharge is unrealistic.”

The Detox report from Greenpeace highlights the presence of trace amounts of a persistent organic pollutant chemicals called nono phenols (NPE) and other harmful chemicals in samples of wastewater discharges taken at two textile processing facilities, Youngor Textile City Complex and the Well Dyeing Factory Limited in the Yangtze and Pearl river deltas. These factories are being used to make clothing and textiles for companies such as Puma, Nike, adidas, H&M, Li Ning and others.

“Greenpeace is selecting a country that is making significant progress on environmental issues,” noted Patterson, “There are other regions of the world (most notably on the Indian sub-continent) where the problems of textile effluent are much more urgent where rivers are being turned into seas thanks to huge, unregulated discharges of salt from cotton dyehouses.”

He also claimed that ‘zero discharge’ of all chemicals in the textile sector is “not realistic”. The pressure group is pressing leading brands to commit to zero discharge of toxic chemicals from supply chains by 2020 - something which Puma, adidas, Nike and H&M all appear to have signed up to. Ilze Smit, from Greenpeace Netherlands defended the Detox position saying that “zero discharge was achievable” and said the textile sector should adopt the “precautionary principle and a preventative approach to chemicals management. “If we do not use harmful chemicals in the first place at the start of textile production, then there is no way they can be present in waste water discharge,” she said.