Name: What no one tells you about the toxic dye in blue jeans
Uploaded: 2022-07-07T17:45:29.000Z
Duration: 8 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Matt] Most of us can't imagine looking

into our closet and not seeing a pair of these, blue jeans.

You've got the skinny hipster kind, boot cuts,

One thing that just about all of our jeans have

in common is that blue part, the indigo dye.

Unfortunately, the dye we use today is pretty dirty.

seriously a lot of jeans, that one process has an impact,

but some people are reinventing the way we make indigo dye.

our jeans might just be a little cleaner.

- Jeans are iconic, just so that everybody has them

So, I think that is why they're a great case study.

- [Matt] Every year, it's estimated that billions of pairs

of jeans are made, and to give them that iconic blue hue,

over 70,000 tons of indigo are produced as well,

and that indigo is actually key to that classic faded look.

- That's what makes jeans so great because like

- [Matt] There are actually two kinds of indigo dye

that can produce that fade, natural and synthetic.

Humans have been using the natural stuff that comes

from Indigofera plants for 1,000s of years.

But in 1897, German chemists invented synthetic indigo dye

Chemically, it's identical to plant-based indigo dye.

but the production process requires a nasty mix

like formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, aniline,

The problem is what happens when you use synthetic

indigo dye to dye billions and billions of jeans?

So, the dying process uses a lot of different chemicals.

and that's what allows the indigo to dissolve in water.

In our case, we're using soda ash and sodium hydrosulfite,

which our dying kit just says, may be harmful if misused.

So on an industrial scale, these additives can be harmful

especially if the factory isn't up to spec,

Chemical exposure has been linked to respiratory issues,

skin problems, and even some cancers in textile workers.

So, I'm not in a textile factory, but it is windy,

After a few dips, we need to rinse off all of the chemicals

some finished products can contain contaminants

All we have to do is safely dispose of all this by flushing

but as much as 280,000 tons of textile dyes end

and not all of it is disposed of properly,

especially in places where there aren't good

environmental protections, or the industry is unregulated.

to any factory cities producing these textile products,

the rivers are black from the effluence coming out

- [Matt] That wastewater can foul up aquatic ecosystems,

- And I know that a lot of denim laundries,

denim brands they're hoping for some sort

there are lots of efforts to improve this process end to end

from water reduction to safer finishing techniques,

and one company is targeting that blue color

This is where we do a lot of our kind of cutting and pasting

of DNA to put it into our microbial host.

- [Matt] Huue is a company that makes indigo dye

They start with an indigo plant and sequence the DNA

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What no one tells you about the toxic dye in blue jeans

stuff

massive

process

material