Why Organic Cotton?
Photo: Claude Renault
Conventional cotton production vs ecological, sustainable alternatives
Cotton textiles are usually anything but ecological. Dyes, polyacrylics, urea-formaldehyde resin, softening agents and bleaches: all of this and more is the reason why only 75% of a finished cotton textile actually contains cotton fibres. Roughly 150 grams of pesticides and insecticides and 2000 litres of water go into making a normal cotton t-shirt. A pair of jeans needs 6000 litres of water just to be made. And the cotton going into those jeans may well have been hand picked by children. According to UNICEF estimates, there are over 90 million children employed worldwide in the cotton industry. And there is a 50% probability that the cotton was grown from genetically modified seeds. Unlike genetically modified food, there is no way to know whether the textiles you buy have been or not. It doesn't have to be declared. 50% of the 25.8 million tons of cotton produced worldwide have been genetically altered. Certified organic cotton accounts only for .1% of the total cotton grown worldwide.
In addition to all of this, cotton is one of the worst environmental crops worldwide. The soil is leached out by the monoculture and then pumped up again with fertilizers. The nitrous oxide released by mineral fertilizers is one of the top climate killers. A high performance cotton monoculture has to be sprayed up to 20 times with pesticides and fertilizers before the crop can be harvested. In many places these chemicals end up unfiltered in the ground water and become part of the food chain. The large multinational chemical corporations responsible for these products have little interest in changing anything. Bayer CropScience remains "committed to innovative products".
With this background, it is no surprise that organic textiles are becoming increasingly popular. Even large clothing chains now advertise “organic cotton”. But not everywhere where “organic” is written on the label is there actually any organically grown cotton in the product. There still are no government regulated terms for organic cotton,. Even if a product does contain organic cotton, there are no guarantees that the finished product was sustainably manufactured. So a pair of jeans with the label “100% organic” may well have been bleached, criticizes Greenpeace.
To be sure, look for textiles certified by the Control Union, IVN or the Soil Association. They all follow the “Global Organic Textile Standard”, (GOTS). This standard is worldwide the guarantee that the textile fibres are actually grown from organic cotton and that ecological and social production standards are maintained throughout the entire manufacturing process. This standard can be identified by the EKO Sustainable Textile label.
