How our desire to be fashionable can turn a sacred river into a toxic environmental nightmare. Well, you can find the answer in the city of Tiruppur. If you’ve ever bought a GAP, or H&M, or maybe Victoria’s Secret with a ‘Made in India’ label, this is the city probably where it might have come from.
Tiruppur, a city in southern India, is located on the banks of the river Noyyal, and is the hub of India’s knitwear export, with over 90% of the country’s cotton textiles exports originating right here. The clothes sourced here are usually by large western corporations.
But Tiruppur is now also getting famous for the state of its river, or to be more precise, its drain. Noyyal, the once sacred river, is now frothing and smelling its foulest due to the content of waste and chemicals drained into it, thanks to the large textile industries releasing their used chemicals and waste right into the stream.
The 180 km river nourishes the region and sustains more or less two million people before draining into the river Kaveri. But as the river flows through the cities, it gets full of household and plastic waste. But industrial cluster is where the most harmful pollutants enter the river. According to a 2020 study, the levels of copper, lead, zinc, and other carcinogenic metals in the river are extremely high. This can leave a long-term effect on the land, local people, and their livestock.
The main impact of these kinds of pollutions is being faced directly by the farmers and agricultural communities. They lose the fertility of their soil, their cattle, and groundwater resources, and ultimately, the income goes down.
Downriver, which is near one of the two dams of the Noyyal, is the place with the most severe impacts. Orathuppalayam Dam is a place which has been for decades, and is still till this date, is getting constantly polluted. There was a report of over 800,000 fish dying here, in just one day! It was over 15 years ago when the floodgates were opened.
So do we want new clothes? Maybe yes, but seeing what our clothes are doing to this, and many more rivers and water bodies like this and all the systems that they support, it becomes a collective responsibility to make sure this doesn’t result in absolute destruction. Government interventions, together with environmentally conscious actions taken by individuals and industry runners, have the potential to paint a totally different picture of this habitat down the lane, but only if worked together and in a more grounded way.