Get Your Petroleum Off My Body

Fashion's impact on the environment—and our well-being—has as much to do with the fossil fuels used in the making of synthetic fabrics as it does factory emissions.

When you look at a piece of fashion—a swishy long dress, a pair of yoga leggings, a bright turquoise T-shirt—what do you see? I see petroleum.

That’s right: When oil is pulled out of the Earth, it’s not just going to power cars and heat homes. It’s also going into the making of and materials used in clothing, shoes, and accessories. The $2.5 trillion global fashion industry is estimated to be responsible for somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which are the main driver of global warming. That’s more than the emissions from the aviation sector or deforestation.

A quarter of fashion’s emissions come from the cultivation and extraction of raw materials, from cotton and silk to viscose and acrylic. But out of all fabrics, in 2019, the production of polyester—a petroleum-based fabric known for its durability, breathability, and stain-resistance—produced the most emissions, at 98 million metric tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gasses), which is three times more than cotton.

Manufacturing high-performance polyester (and other synthetic textiles made from fossil fuels) involves extracting and refining crude oil, using a high-temperature chemical reaction to turn that oil into petrochemicals and then plastic polymers, turning that plastic into fabric, and then dyeing and finishing the textile with additional petrochemicals, again at high temperatures. Every step requires petroleum and produces waste and emissions that, if not properly handled, can pollute the local environment and contribute to global warming.

And it’s not just a polyester problem. The versatile fabric is just the biggest offender; it’s so cheap to make that production has skyrocketed to nine times what it was 50 years ago. In fact, according to the World Resources Institute, half of all fiber used in fashion today is polyester, while another 5 percent is nylon—which brings with it similar environmental detriments.

Petrochemicals used to make fashion finishes and dyes worsen the climate impact of petroleum-based clothing

In addition to the petroleum used to make the synthetic fabrics themselves, more petroleum is often added in the form of finishes and dyes composed of petrochemicals. And there’s a good chance you wouldn’t ever know it.

The United States government doesn’t require fashion brands to list all chemicals present on and in a garment. As I found during my research for my forthcoming book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick—And How We Can Fight Back, if fashion brands did provide a complete list, it often wouldn’t fit on the label. For example, when the University of Washington tested Alaska Airlines attendant uniforms in 2012, the lab found a whopping 42 different chemicals—many of them later connected to health problems among attendants—in one piece of fabric.

While we don’t have data on the extent of the fashion industry’s use of petrochemicals for finishes and dyes, specifically, we know that it’s certainly not negligible. According to a report from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, “the residues of finishing agents in garment textiles may account for up to 8 percent of the textile product weight.” And in the 2010s (the last time anyone measured and published these figures), the fashion industry was the second largest consumer of chemicals in China.

Even a clothing item made of natural fibers—like a cotton T-shirt—can have a panoply of petrochemicals applied to it as it’s spun, woven, and sewn: sizing chemicals for strengthening the threads for weaving, lubricants, solvents, and binders. Then, chemicals are used to strip these off, so more chemicals can be applied, such as bases for cleaning the fabric, bleach to make it bright white, and formaldehyde to make it anti-wrinkle. If a T-shirt is going to be dyed, it will also have surfactants applied to prepare it to receive the color, and finally, will be coated with fabric softener to make it feel nice. (That will wash off quickly once it’s in your hands, but if it helps make the sale at the store, it’s worth it for brands to add it.)

All these chemicals require a significant amount of oil and gas to produce, adding to the fashion industry’s contribution to greenhouse gasses and negative planet impact. They also have to be shipped, and it’s hard to do that safely.

For example, the main chemical in the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment earlier this year was vinyl chloride, used to manufacture PVC, a type of plastic used in vegan "leather" fashion and clear plastic shoes and raincoats. While some chemicals are safely locked inside products by the time they’re in their final form, PVC products can off-gas (aka release into the air) vinyl chloride, especially when they’re new. (New pleather smell, anyone?) As a result, vinyl chloride pollution is now widespread, present in one-third of the federally designated toxic waste sites in the U.S.

Let’s also talk about dyes. One of chemistry’s first, most profitable inventions—before pharmaceuticals, before photography—was the dye color mauve, invented in 1845 by a chemist who was playing around with the noxious waste that came from burning coal during the Industrial Revolution. In fact, many pharmaceutical and chemical multinationals today—BASF, DuPont, Novartis—got their start as dye manufacturers.

As Alison Matthews-David writes in Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, within a few years of fossil fuel dyes being invented, some consumers were reporting nasty reactions to their colorful clothing, like striped rashes showing up on their ankles and feet from coral-colored striped socks. Because not everyone suffered the same effects, the dye and chemical industry deliberately downplayed these reports, according to Simon Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World.

The industry voluntarily phased out some of the most toxic dyes, but they were never internationally banned, leaving the door open for unscrupulous manufacturers in less regulated countries to cut corners and make a profit.

For the past century, all dyes for fashion (unless otherwise stated) have been made from petroleum or natural gas. For example, synthetic indigo made from volatile petrochemicals started to replace plant indigo at the beginning of the 20th century.

Petroleum-based azo dyes now make up 70 percent of the 9.9 million tons of industrial dye colorants used globally each year. Once released into the environment—usually by dye houses pouring them untreated into drains and rivers—they are extremely difficult to clean up. They don’t biodegrade, and instead, bioaccumulate in both wildlife and humans, blackening rivers and killing aquatic life in places like Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia.

Petroleum-based fashion has negative ripple effects for our health, too

It’s not just the planet that suffers when the fashion industry uses fossil fuels to manufacture the bulk of our clothing and the finishes and dyes that lay atop it; it’s likely that we do, too. The sad irony is that the more chemicals present on and in a garment, the harder it is to decipher which health effects come from which chemicals, and the easier it is for a brand or manufacturer to evade responsibility. There are hints that something is amiss, though.

The French Agency for Food, Environmental, and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) ran a 2018 study that connected skin reactions to certain chemicals found in clothing. As a result, it has called for azo benzene disperse dyes—the type used in polyester—to be banned.

Whatever is in or on the fashion you buy is also in the microfibers that break off from clothing and mix with your home’s dust, which you can then inhale. A 2021 study analyzed dust from 124 households with young children and found azo disperse dyes floating around in every single household. The research team also tested 13 polyester kids shirts from the local mall, and one contained more than 11,000 parts per million azo disperse dye, or 1.1 percent of the total weight of the shirt. For comparison, that’s three hundred times higher than the EU’s limit for certain azo dyes.

Then there is the ongoing saga of airline uniforms. Up to a quarter of airline attendants from four major airlines—Alaska, American, Delta, and Southwest—have fallen ill after receiving new, brightly colored, polyester-blend uniforms coated in performance chemicals that provided stain-, water-, mold-, and wrinkle-resistance. (All but Southwest Airlines have swapped out these uniforms, but none have admitted that they caused harm.)

When you move and sweat in skin-tight plastic fashion, your sweat can also draw chemical finishes and dyes out of the fibers, at which point they can soak into your skin. These chemicals include not only environmental pollutants, but potential human toxins, too: bisphenols (BPA), PFAS (or "forever" chemicals), and phthalates, all of which are known hormone disruptors. Current research doesn’t quantify how much of these chemicals can cross over from clothing into our bodies nor the effects of that potential transdermal absorption. That said, researchers have largely concluded that there is no absolutely safe dose of endocrine disruptors, the scientific term for the above hormone-disrupting chemicals.

When the Center for Environmental Health in California tested socks from large brands, including Adidas, Hanes, and Timberland, it found high amounts of BPA in over a hundred polyester and spandex pairs. The polyester part is important—CEH did not find BPA in socks that were mostly cotton, but did go on to find BPA in a half dozen polyester sports bras and athletic T-shirts from large brands, too.