Fashion Giant's clothing waste turns toxic.

Hello, you're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report.

Live from the BBC World Service, I'm Leanna Byrne.

A very good morning to you.

A human rights group in Cambodia says that clothing waste from big brands like Adidas, Walmart and others are being burnt as cheap fuel in factories making bricks.

And according to the Cambodian League for the promotion and

defense of human rights, some workers are getting sick from the fumes. The BBC

Celia Hatton has all the details. Cambodia has a huge garment industry 700,000 people making, stitching, clothing, shoes,

bags, all sorts of things for big name brands. There's a lot of waste created, but it seems that some of this waste,

according to the report, is not being taken to the official waste disposal

facilities, it's being diverted and sold off to brick factories.

They took photos of what they discovered there.

You could see mountains, just huge piles of what looked like, just scraps of fabric and rubber and plastic but also a lot of

labels so many of these things were stamped with the labels of the companies

that they seem to have been made for. Lulu Lemon, Liddel, Disney, The Gap, Reebok, Adidas.

It was very clear where these things had come from.

The workers at the Kiln factories and people living around the factories are

reporting things like migraines, respiratory problems. The report even

mentioned one pregnant woman who said she'd been having problems during her pregnancy because she'd been living next to these brick factories.

And so some quite disturbing things.

I spoke to Adidas. They got back to me very, very quickly saying that they had launched their own investigation to try to figure out how their factory waste ended up beside these brick factories. They didn't discount the findings of this report and

they were quite clear that they had quite strict environmental policies.

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