Superbacteria could soon be eating China's factory waste

The clean-up goes to the heart of an industry that leveraged decades of cheap labour and capital

In a Hong Kong laboratory, researchers are working with one of the world’s biggest cloth makers to improve its production process using a special ingredient: bacteria. 

TAL Apparel, which has factories in mainland China and Southeast Asia, has teamed up with City University to identify bacteria that can clean up more efficiently the vast quantities of waste water the textile industry produces. It’s one of hundreds of efforts by China’s private and state-owned companies to fix a problem that could end up rewriting the playbook of the global fashion industry. After decades of almost unbridled industrial growth that left China with