Can China Turn Cotton Green?

That "all-natural" cotton T-shirt in your closet? The one with the eco-friendly message brightly printed on the front? Ounce for ounce, it could be the most environmentally toxic item of clothing you own. From the water and agrichemicals lavished on cotton grown in some of the world's driest regions (approximately one-third of the pesticide and fertilizer produced worldwide gets sprayed or dusted on cotton), through multihued rivers of waste streaming from textile mills to landfills bulging with castoff clothing, the life cycle of the humble cotton tee has left ecological wreckage in its wake.

As both the world's leading producer and biggest importer of raw cotton and its top exporter of cotton fabrics and apparel, China has experienced much of the damage. The expansion of industrial-scale cotton farming in the arid western Xinjiang province has been linked to the advance of the vast Taklamakan Desert, whose dunes have swallowed entire towns. In China's industrial heartland, untreated dye wastes stain drainage ditches in vibrant synthetic hues, contributing to pollution that renders most Chinese rivers undrinkable and a few even dangerously toxic to the touch. So when China's leaders sought advice from international researchers on how to reduce the ecological cost of their country's trade, it was natural for cotton to be put atop the list for scrutiny.

And perhaps it was no less inevitable that scrutiny would extend to America and other major cotton producers, shedding light on how divergent political and economic cultures can hinder the achievement of greener trade — even when the country at the center of that trade is focused sharply on sustainability.

China's environmental woes go far beyond its role in fashion, of course. One official conceded in 2006 that the cumulative cost of environmental damage and pollution-related health care was effectively offsetting all of the country's widely envied 10 percent annual economic growth. But few industries bind China's interests more closely to those of the United States than cotton textiles. In addition to all those Chinese-made T-shirts and other gear stocking the shelves in the local mall (more than $30 billion worth a year), China is the No. 1 foreign customer for American-grown cotton, buying as much as 45 percent of its exported harvest in a typical year. Beyond China's two-way trade with the U.S., cotton is one of the world's major agricultural commodities, the economic support in whole or part of one-sixth of humanity, when all stages of the cotton life cycle are included. It's also a central catalyst in a wide array of environmental issues, from falling aquifers in irrigated growing regions to nutrient overloads that nourish fish-killing algae blooms in lakes and oceans.

With the scale of pollution's drag on the Chinese economy becoming evident earlier in the decade, China's State Council (its rough equivalent of the federal cabinet) directed its research arm, the Development Research Center, to seek advice on bringing the trade vital to China's prosperity into balance with its ecological resources. The DRC in turn commissioned a low-profile Canadian research center to oversee an international network of experts, funded in part by Switzerland, in a review of three trade streams with the worst environmental records. Sharing the short-and-dirty list with cotton were wood products and electronics.

"They asked us to help envision a sustainable trade strategy," explains Mark Halle, the Swiss-raised American who directed the project from Geneva, with colleagues at the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg, Canada. The scope of the study was to include the three industries' full-spectrum impact, from product cradle to grave. And the DRC made it clear that China's leaders were looking for pragmatic solutions, not idealized visions. In particular, whatever strategies emerged from the research had to be compatible with China's World Trade Organization and other trade commitments.

The unusual request represented "a unique opportunity" for the IISD team to inject research results directly into policymaking at the pinnacle of China's power structure, says Jason Potts, a Montreal-based staff member who oversaw the nuts-and-bolts development of methodology. Under Potts' direction, the three research teams, involving academics and members of national academies of science from France, Britain, Germany, China, Canada and Switzerland, brought three general questions to each trade sector under study: What were its main environmental impacts? What was most influential in the industry's supply chain, market structure or participant population, in driving those impacts? What effective steps could China's national government take toward a lighter environmental impact?

The objective, as Potts saw it: "sensible policy recommendations that work with the market."

The team led by Pan Jiahua, director of the Research Centre for Sustainable Development and Environment at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, had no trouble identifying the environmental stains on cotton's production record. In several regions that China relies on to meet its enormous demand for raw cotton, irrigation diverts more water than is sustainably available, straining resources and damaging ecosystems from Central Asia to the American Southwest. By contrast, the researchers found that the use of agrichemicals differed widely among major supply regions, with China's own farmers dosing their fields with six times more fertilizer and pesticide than growers in sub-Saharan Africa. American farmers and others in Brazil fell somewhere in the middle.

Textile printing and dying did most of its damage on Chinese soil — more accurately, on Chinese watercourses. As China's textile industry blossomed in the wake of the country's entry into the WTO, doubling output in the decade after 1999, so has its production of hard-to-treat wastewater. Only about 10 percent of dye wastes are recycled, and about a third of the rest flows directly to the environment. In provinces like Xinjiang, this waste is a major contributor to industrial and municipal pollution so severe that nearly 1 in 4 of China's 1.3 billion people drink contaminated water every day.

In analyzing where along cotton's journey lay the power to influence change, Pan's team cited earlier research that identified the global cotton-textile value chain as "buyer-driven" — dominated by a relatively small number of increasingly global participants. In the key U.S. market, they noted, just two large discount chains — Wal-Mart and Kmart — account for one-quarter of all the clothing sold.

By contrast, the capacity of China's national government to influence the behavior of millions of mainly small cotton farmers and tens of thousands of textile enterprises in its own territory was limited. National leaders have articulated numerous laudable environmental policies and guidelines, but the local agencies charged with implementing those policies are staffed and managed by local governments whose incentives are dominated by economic development. Dai Yichun, coordinator of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, is an adviser to China's national leadership on the environment. Though not involved in the current project, she understands the localism problem, which she describes this way: "[Chinese Premier] Wen Jiabao is very aware of the importance of environmental protection, and he has his ideas. The trouble is, how far can the ideas carry? There is a disconnect between what the national government wants and what the local governments will do."

Even so, Pan's cotton research team identified several actions China's leaders could take to oblige an industry that has flourished by ignoring the environmental cost of its operations to account for those charges. "[I]f the true environmental costs can be included in the price of products and services," the researchers argued, "the pricing system can give market signals that ensure the efficient allocation of environmental resource use." It identified several tax and incentive measures that could help do the trick, including fees for wastewater discharge, a tax on cotton clothing to fund recycling and the redirection of existing tax incentives to motivate adoption of wastewater recycling.

Conclusion: [q url="http://miller-mccune.com/science_environment/can-china-turn-cotton-green-1638.print"] China's growing population, as well as its taste for the same wardrobe gear the rest of the developed and developing world desires, will make sustainability an elusive target for cotton. What China may have going for it, suggests project leader Halle, who worked previously for the World Wildlife Fund and International Union of Concerned Scientists, is its one-party government and authoritarian habits, which can support decisive action: "Once they figure out they have a problem, they move quickly and massively." If the policy response looks familiar, he says, "that's when you can say you've had an impact."