How your cashmere pollutes the air

ON THE ALASHAN PLATEAU, CHINA — Shatar the herdsman squinted into the twilight on the ruined grasslands where Genghis Khan once galloped.

He frowned and called his goats. The wind tasted like dust.

On the other side of the world, another morning dawned in the historic embrace between the world's low-cost factory and its best customer. Every minute of every day last year, America gobbled up $463,200 worth of Chinese goods -- including millions of cashmere sweaters made from the hair of goats like Shatar's.

In less than a decade, a deluge of cheap cashmere from China has transformed a centuries-old industry, stripping the plush fabric of its pricey pedigree and making it available in big-box America. Chinese-made cashmere sweaters go for as little as $19.99.

But behind the Made in China tag is something Americans rarely see: the consequences when the might of Chinese production and U.S. consumption converge on a scarce natural resource.

The improbable connection between cheap sweaters, Asia's prairies and America's air captures how ordinary shifts in the global economy are triggering extraordinary change.

This is the story of how your sweater pollutes the air you breathe -- and how the rise of China shapes the world.

The country's enormous herds of cashmere-producing goats have slashed the price of sweaters. But they also have helped graze Chinese grasslands down to a moonscape, unleashing some of the worst dust storms on record. This in turn fuels a plume of pollution heavy enough to reach North America.

China's breakneck consumption of raw materials is part of an economic revolution that has lifted 400 million Chinese out of poverty, but at a growing environmental cost. Not only has China's demand for resources proved strong enough to turn its grasslands into a dust bowl, it has driven illegal logging into prized tropical forests and restaged a risky Great Game for control of vital oil supplies.

Every product has a global footprint defined by the resources and energy used to make it. In the case of cashmere, America snapped up a record 10.5 million Chinese sweaters last year, 15 times as many as a decade ago, and far more than every cashmere sweater imported last year from Italy and the United Kingdom combined.

The spike in demand for cashmere is taking a toll on the soil, air and water in China as well as the U.S. And many consumers are unaware of the link.