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"I have difficulty breathing... When I return from work I feel so tired. My eyes are in pain from all the dust," says an 18-year-old worker at a garment factory in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is home to more than 4,000 clothes-making factories and many of the world's leading jeans companies use factories based there. The worker, who agreed to speak anonymously to the BBC World Service, says he works 11 hours a day in the choking atmosphere, to earn a salary of $70 a month.
"I know the effects this is having on my health, but I continue to do it because I need to feed myself and my family," he says. "I am a poor man, so I do this to survive."
Jeans with a distressed, already-worn look have been popular since the 1990s, but one way the effect is achieved is by blasting them with sand - and this can give factory workers an incurable lung disease. Silicosis is caused when small particles of silica dust from the sand embed themselves within the lungs. It causes shortness of breath, coughing, weakness and weight loss. It's incurable - and in its acute form, fatal.
After lobbying from campaign groups, many other companies have followed suit, saying they have either banned sandblasting from their supply chains, or are in the process of doing so.
But this is not always easily done.
Companies in the garment industry tend not to own the factories that make their clothes, and work is often sub-contracted out from big factories to smaller, less well-regulated ones.
"We are still in the very early stages of the ban," says Sam Maher, co-author of a report on sandblasting by the international pressure group, the Clean Clothes Campaign.
Source: BBC
Read more.
Levis Strauss's press release on sandblasting:
http://www.levistrauss.com/blogs/its...n-sandblasting
Downloadable report on sandblasting in the garments industry:
http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/...m/download/128
Clean Clothes campaign with a list of jeans manufacturers who are now 'clean':
http://www.cleanclothes.org/urgent-actions/sandblasting
Bangladesh is home to more than 4,000 clothes-making factories and many of the world's leading jeans companies use factories based there. The worker, who agreed to speak anonymously to the BBC World Service, says he works 11 hours a day in the choking atmosphere, to earn a salary of $70 a month.
"I know the effects this is having on my health, but I continue to do it because I need to feed myself and my family," he says. "I am a poor man, so I do this to survive."
Jeans with a distressed, already-worn look have been popular since the 1990s, but one way the effect is achieved is by blasting them with sand - and this can give factory workers an incurable lung disease. Silicosis is caused when small particles of silica dust from the sand embed themselves within the lungs. It causes shortness of breath, coughing, weakness and weight loss. It's incurable - and in its acute form, fatal.
After lobbying from campaign groups, many other companies have followed suit, saying they have either banned sandblasting from their supply chains, or are in the process of doing so.
But this is not always easily done.
Companies in the garment industry tend not to own the factories that make their clothes, and work is often sub-contracted out from big factories to smaller, less well-regulated ones.
"We are still in the very early stages of the ban," says Sam Maher, co-author of a report on sandblasting by the international pressure group, the Clean Clothes Campaign.
Source: BBC
Read more.
Levis Strauss's press release on sandblasting:
http://www.levistrauss.com/blogs/its...n-sandblasting
Downloadable report on sandblasting in the garments industry:
http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/...m/download/128
Clean Clothes campaign with a list of jeans manufacturers who are now 'clean':
http://www.cleanclothes.org/urgent-actions/sandblasting
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