Not Your Typical Book About the Environment

Not Your Typical Book About the Environment — page 7
M CT Is that the time You're going to be late You drag yourself from the warmth of your bed and yank open your drawers Hey What happened here Inside you find tufts of silky white fibers as soft as bunny tails hanging from stalks where your jeans and shirts should be And what s this Thick slippery oil pools in the bottom of your sock drawer and drips from the hangers in your closet Where are your clothes You don t usually see it so dramatically but your clothing comes from things that were once alive T shirts and jeans begin their lives as cotton growing in places like India or the southern United States Socks bathing suits shirts fuzzy pajamas and jackets contain atoms from tiny aquatic organisms that swam in a prehistoric sea Between their birth and the shopping mall those microscopic life forms died were buried by mud and eventually got squeezed and cooked into petroleum deep within the Earth Hundreds of millions of years later we humans pump this black gold up to the surface and deliver it to refineries where it is processed into synthetic fabrics like acrylic and polyester Half the fabric on Earth today is made from petroleum based