Tag: cotton

Australians buy 56 clothing items a year

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Goondiwindi cotton farmer Sam Coulton, taking part in a cotton waste recycling trial. Image from Cotton Australia

I know what you’re thinking – Crikey, someone’s buying my clothing share! That was my immediate response to a new report from the Australian Fashion Council. My trusty proof-reader, She Who Buys Quality Clothes and Keeps Them for Decades, asked: “Does that include bras and undies?”

The Clothing Data report concludes that a lot of the clothing Australians buy every year ultimately ends up in landfill. As the report shows, 62% of global clothing is made from synthetic materials. They take a long time to break down in landfill, posing a significant environmental risk. Galvanised by the approaching renewables deadline of 2030, the rag trade is driving a national stewardship scheme.

Meanwhile, Cotton Australia teamed up last year with the Queensland Government, Goondiwindi Cotton and others to start a cotton waste recycling trial. The trial diverted about two tonnes of cotton waste from landfill. The waste materials, including Emergency Services coveralls, were shredded and the material spread on a Goondiwindi cotton farm.

A year on, farmer Sam Coulton said the cotton fields at ‘Alcheringa’ easily swallowed up the shredded waste.

“We spread the cotton textile waste a few months before planting in June 2021,” he said in a statement from CA. “By January and the middle of the season, the waste had all but disappeared, even at the rate of 50 tonnes to the hectare.”

Soil scientist Dr Oliver Knox said that at the very least the trial showed no harm was done to soil health. He said at least 2.070kg of carbon dioxide equivalents (CI2 ) was mitigated through the breakdown of garments in the soil rather than in landfill.

“Soil carbon levels remained stable and the soil’s bugs responded well to the added cotton material.”

Cotton Australia’s Brooke Summers said the trial would be replicated in the 2022-2023 season with the addition of a Gunnedah cotton farm.

Hanes Australasia, owner of many textile brands including Sheridan and Bonds, said the company was keen to add its support.

“We couldn’t be more excited about the success of the trial in Goondiwindi,” Hanes president Tanya Deans said. “To think that we might have a scalable solution for textile waste on our shores is even more exciting.”

The Australian Fashion Council’s Clothing Data Report reveals that Australia currently imports 1.42 billion units of clothing per year, which equates to 373,000 tonnes of cloth.

You’d probably assume, and you’d be right, that locally manufactured clothing forms a tiny proportion of the production, with 38 million  items of clothing produced annually.

On an outback trip in 2021, I bought two locally made polo shirts from Goondiwindi Cotton. Expensive, but I felt so virtuous. Most of our clothing, however, is made in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and emerging markets like Africa.

A good long time ago I was inspired to write a song “Where Do Underpants Come From?” after reading a book by Kiwi author Joe Bennett. I had some friendly correspondence with Joe as my song title was close to what he called his book “Where Underpants Come From.”

Joe was lured into writing the book after paying $8.59 for a five-pack of undies from a discount department store in Christchurch. He also lashed out on a quality pair of ‘Authentics’ for $5.99, then spent the rest of the day thinking – how could anyone possibly make a profit from selling five for $8.59?

After an initial rebuff from his agent – “Joe, it’s a crap idea. Best, Jim,” Joe set of on an investigative trail. Along the way, he trekked to China and other destinations following the supply chain from raw materials to manufactured cloth, garment-making, packaging and distribution.

If you can track this 2008 book down, it is entertaining, amusing and also illuminating, as Joe uncovers the trade’s importance to China’s emerging economy. As he says in the introduction: “There are plenty of better-informed books about China, but I suspect it is the only one that begins with a pair of underpants.”

As you may have discovered, if you deliberately go out looking for Australian-made garments, they are not easy to find and more expensive than imported items. When we first moved to Maleny in 2002, the cold winter set me off on a quest for some warm pyjamas. There was still a menswear shop in town at that stage and he showed me a pair of fleecy PJs in a black and white cow pattern. They were expensive and proved to be too warm for Maleny’s relatively mild climate (better suited for Tasmanians).

Quality lasts though and 15 years on I consigned the bottoms (the waistband elastic was gone), to the rag box. I gave the top to a musician friend who loves to dress up when she performs. I hate to think how many cheap pairs of boxers have lost their cling and gone to the rag box over the ensuing years. She Who Buys Quality Clothes and my sister-in-law (the theatre wardrobe mistress) keep trying to get me to lift my sartorial game. We go to the ballet regularly, so I don the bag of fruit I bought in Rome in 2010 and a pair of English shoes bought (in England) at a time when I was on a rare spending spree. Twelve years on, they are in good nick but alas, the tan Italian suit look came and went. Do I care?

The textile industry is important to Australia’s economy ($27 billion a year), but it is coming at a cost to the environment. The Guardian attended a meeting at which AFC chief executive, Leila Naja Hibri, admitted that the fashion industry had a “deserved” reputation for its negative impact on the environment.

“There needs to be a change in the way we design, produce, use and dispose of products,” she said.

On top of the huge amount of landfill, the textile industry also relies heavily on fossil fuels and other chemicals. Globally, 98m tonnes of non-renewable resources are used in the fashion industry, including oil to produce synthetic fibres, fertilisers to grow cotton, and chemicals to produce dye.

The Australian Fashion Council (AFC) is leading “a consortium of industry disruptors” to create Australia’s first National Product Stewardship Scheme for clothing textiles. The consortium includes brands, manufacturers, retailers, re-use charities, fibre producers, academics and waste management companies. The goal is to improve the design, recovery, re-use and recycling of textiles (with 2030 in mind), with National Waste Policy Action Plan targets.

The report, funded by the Australian government, said the annual cost to consumers was $9.2bn, meaning Australians were paying on average just $6.50 for each item of clothing.

The AFC has used the report findings to call for a levy on clothing imports to reduce textile waste. At the other end of the fashion cycle, roughly 260,000 tonnes, or 10kg a person, reaches landfill each year, the lead author of the report, Peter Allan, said.

This week I did my bit to help avoid adding textile waste to landfill, dropping off a near-new hoody to a local op shop. Perhaps it was a tight fit to begin with, but a couple of washes later, I’m like a footy player having to get someone to help me don the jersey. As a tape measure-wearing assistant in jeans shop once said (I was 40-something and shopping for a 30-inch waist), – “Um, you used to be a 30-inch waist. Sorry.”

 

 

Moving North Queensland water to Murray-Darling

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Barron Falls demonstrates North Queensland water excesses. Photo by Coral Sea Baz

Australia’s mismanagement of water is coming home to roost now, with the highly visible deluge in North Queensland in sharp contrast to the water-starved Murray-Darling Basin.

Far North Queensland residents and emergency workers are still struggling to cope with the worst floods in living memory. Tully, arguably the wettest place in Australia, had 955mm over 27 days since New Year’s Day, about a quarter of its annual rain. Townsville broke all records with 1,200mm falling in just nine days, which accounted for unprecedented flooding and the decision to open the floodgates of Ross River Dam.

Residents of the seaside Townsville suburb of Balgal Beach, seemingly impervious to flooding, found out otherwise.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) recorded North Queensland rainfall totals in January and the first week in February ranging from 1,036mm (Cairns) to 1,325mm (Townsville) The highest weekly total in January was 766mm at Whyanbeel Valley. Crikey, that’s a few millimetres more than the annual rainfall for Australia’s second-largest inland city, Toowoomba.

Last time we were in that fair city (September), the only green grass around was in the city’s three parks, watered by Council to celebrate the Carnival of Flowers. That was the month parts of the Western Downs were added to the 53% of Queensland’s drought-declared local government areas.

Meanwhile in Southern states, BoM made the telling observation that annual rainfall in 2018 was the seventh-lowest on record (since 1900) for the Murray-Darling Basin.  Rainfall was low over the south-eastern quarter of the mainland in 2018, with much of the region experiencing totals in the lowest 10% of records.

This is brought into sharper focus when we are told that parts of Australia’s mainland from around Newcastle in NSW to Euroa in Victoria are now included on the United Nations’ list of the Top Ten Global Water Hotspots (see further reading).

Many readers will be familiar with the crisis facing the Murray-Darling system: blue-green algae, millions of dead fish, the Darling River drying up; water being diverted for irrigation to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and rice. The recently published report by the South Australian Royal Commission found that the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan must be strengthened if there is to be any chance of saving the river system. Professor Jamie Pittock of the Australian National University writes that the Commission found systemic failures of the Basin Plan, adopted in 2012 to address over-allocation of water to irrigated farming. The Commission’s 111 findings and 44 recommendations accuse federal agencies of maladministration and challenge key policies that were pursued in implementing the plan.

Amid revelations of water theft, the awful legacy of dead fish in the oxygen-deprived Darling River and outback towns running out of water, plenty of people are having their say.

This week, South Australian independent Senator Rex Patrick dared to confront the cotton industry, demanding that growers justify the use of water and the right to grow that export crop. (The same could be said of rice, Ed.)

This is a long-running saga. In 2011 an article published by the Permaculture Research Institute explored a report that revealed Australia as the world’s largest net exporter of ‘virtual’ water (exported virtual water is defined as water consumed to create crops, livestock and industrial products for export). The report blamed the agricultural sector for the vast majority of the total volume of water exported from Australia in this way (72,000 gigalitres of virtual water exported overseas every year).

I’m not a scientist, hydrologist or environmental engineer, yet the answer seems desperately obvious. We need to channel and export North Queensland water to the arid south-eastern states and inland Queensland, NSW and South Australia.

One only has to think for five minutes about the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity/irrigation scheme to see we are more than capable of funding, building and maintaining large and ambitious infrastructure projects.

Sydney food technology engineer Terry Bowring told The Courier-Mail in 2010 about his $9 billion plan to move water from the Burdekin and other north Queensland rivers to arid parts of inland NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Mr Bowring’s plan involved channelling about 4,000 gigalitres of water a year. The water would be transported 1,800kms by canals, with 60% of the water sold to irrigators. The rest would go to cities such as Toowoomba and Brisbane for domestic use.

Mr Bowring told FOMM yesterday the plan was similar to the Bradfield scheme proposed in 1938. Until Mr Bowring’s plan surfaced (he’d been working on it for years), no-one had taken Dr John Bradfield’s scheme forward to include costings.

Mr Bowring said the costings were based on experiences from the US, where he worked for some five years. The system would take six years to build but only four or five years to recover costs.

As with the Bradfield scheme, critics said the Bowring plan was uneconomic and impractical. The telling thing is that it would only take about 13% of the water that flows from the Burdekin to the ocean. Typically, more water flows to sea from the Burdekin than the Murray-Darling Basin and all city dams combined.

Mr Bowring, who is in his 80s, said he has no intention of pursuing the plan, but will make his research available for future use.

The other side of this argument was provided by the (then) Federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.

The 28-page report generally scotches the idea, which is often raised when there are weather extremes in the north or the south.

“Moving water long distances is costly, energy intensive, and can have significant environmental, social and cultural impacts,” (item 1 under Key Facts).

“Using water that is locally available is generally more cost effective than transporting water long distances. Current studies show that local options, such as water conservation, desalination and recycling, cost around $1–2 per thousand litres; a supply from 1500 kilometres (km) away would cost around $5–6 per thousand litres.”

However the immediate problem is to make the Murray-Darling system a Federal and State priority, no matter the financial or political cost. It is shocking to consider that outback towns like Walgett, Wilcannia and Bourke have either run out of drinking water or are under extreme water stress. These events seem to have flown beneath the media radar that picked up on the early 2018 water crisis in Cape Town (South Africa).

The real danger is the risk to the fragile ecosystem of a river system that spans 77,000 kilometres of rivers over one million square kilometres across four States and the ACT. Environmental challenges include excessive water being diverted for agricultural, the blue-green algae that killed millions of fish, and salinity (in 2016-17, 1.84 million tonnes of salt was flushed out to sea through the Murray mouth).

As the Australian Conservation Foundation summed up, in an advertisement posted on social media:

“The heart-breaking death of these fish is no natural disaster. Powerful corporate interests and their cashed up lobbyists are bleeding our rivers dry. For too long, state and federal governments have let them get away with it.”

Further reading: https://www.fabians.org.au/australia_s_water_crisis (a (long), technical article by Watermark Australia’s Dr Wayne Chamley).

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