| 'Blue river' |
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| taxonomy+anatomy+future |
| impacts of the denim textile industry in Xintang, Pearl River Delta Region, China |
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| Nancy Diniz |
| China/USA |
2014-0n-going |
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| references |
| Diniz, N., (2015) 'Not all prototypes are equal before God', in Proceedings for ACADIA 2015 Computational Ecologies, 22-24 Oct 2015, Cincinnati, Ohio USA |
| 'Intimate Pollution ' Greenpeace East Asia 2010 |
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| {seeking research partners in China} |
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context:
The Pearl river is the lifeblood of the 'world's factory', thousands of factories that produce the world's toys, mobile phones, computers, textiles and more. It is also the 'blue jeans' capital of the world. The township of Xintang, nestled in the northeastern part of the river delta, is an amalgamation of textile, denim and dyeing facilities. The Chinese government estimates Xintang produces over 260 million pairs of jeans a year, equivalent to 60% of China's total jeans production, and 50% of the jeans sold in the US each year. Xintang's economy revolves around the complete production chain of jeans: from spinning, dyeing and weaving, to cutting, printing, washing, sewing and bleaching. Like most textiles, denim-making starts with plain white cotton, bales of it are piled up, then lowered into boiling vats of dye. The cotton emerges steaming, doused in the deep indigo blue color. But the process releases tons of wastewater, a mix of dye, bleach and detergent that in most factories the foamy blue waste water lead directly into the Pearl River.
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proposal:
(i) Taxonomy of the Denim
Document and exhibit the environmental, social and health impact of the pollutant consequence of the Denim industry in the Pearl River’s water ecosystem.
(ii) Anatomy of the Denim
This process is materialized into artefacts with the generative role to embody the documentation stage of the destructive impact of the denim industry in the Pearl River Delta region.
(iii) Future Denim
In the last materialization, a framework for investigating relationships between architecture, fashion and food is presented. The project translates this idea into a modular system with 3 multiple functions: a garment, a blanket and an edible material in order to provide a 100% organic, portable and recyclable temporary shelter plus food for one person in the event of environmental catastrophres.
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contribution to Design & Pearl River Delta Region:
By using bio-design ad food engineering, we propose a 100% organic material cycle system as opposed to the textiile industry workflows. We take this approach with the aspiration that this proposal will lead to more visibility and discussion of the environmental impact of textile industries in China and around the world. Specifically, our methodology (Diniz 2015) compares different roles and effects of prototypes in design, perhaps by adapting new and unconventional ways of constructing and most of all exhibiting prototypes as ‘design environmental activism'.
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