Exploitation of the Fashion Industry

Following on from my previous blog post, reflecting from the same lecture, I would like to elucidate upon the aspect of Environment, Ethics and Exploitation.
I was aware before today that fashion is a harmful industry; it's no doubt producing clothes inevitably will result in huge amounts of waste. Furthermore, I was also aware of the child labour, the poor working conditions that many labourers have to suffer in third-world/developing countries and the disasters that have occurred in consequence of such offences, such as recently in Bangladesh.
However, I was not aware to what extent such exploitation and harm to our planet was actually occurring. For example, due to the perhaps high demand in cotton production, a sea in central Asia has actual begun to disappear due to constant irrigation of Uzbek cotton plantations. In order to actually produce one cotton shirt, it uses 2,700 litres of water! Hence the disappearance of the sea.
Moreover, the denim capital of the world, Xintang, China, uses toxic dyes in order to achieve the different shades of indigo for our jeans. These toxic dyes evidently pollute its surrounding waters, and for those habitants living nearby, research has proven that they are in fact more likely to die of cancer than anywhere else in the world.