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Article
Clothes
You Can Really Cotton To
Organic Style Jan/Feb 2003 Brennan Kearney
When it comes to fabric, cotton is still king: U.S mills process
an average of 10.8 million bales of cotton fiber a year, and 1
bale can produce more than 1200 T-shirts. But along with those
clothes consumers are putting some risk on their backs. "Of the
top 15 chemicals used in California cotton farming, 7 of them
cause cancer and all but 1 cause birth defects," says Will Allen,
executive director and found of the Sustainable Cotton Project
(SCP).
To reverse these statistics, Allen's group works with apparel
and home-furnishing companies, helping them to convert from conventional
to organic cotton. The active-wear company Patagonia was one of
the first to make the switch. Since 1996, all of its cotton products
have been 100 percent organic. Nike also has seen the light.
Today, its cotton clothes for North America contain at least 5
percent organic cotton, and in 2003 the company plans to add 100%
organic-cotton clothing for men to its already popular organic-cotton
women's collection-big news when you consider that approximately
1/3 pound of synthetic fertilizers and farm chemicals go into
a single conventionally grown cotton T-shirt. Timberland and Hann
Andersson have also started organic programs after taking the
SCP's tour of organic farms.
But to the SCP, reducing agricultural chemicals means more than
cleaner fields. Cotton by-products, such as cottonseed and husks,
are consumed in large quantities by domestic dairy cattle and
thus find their way into our bodies on nearly a daily basis. (Not
considered a food crop, cotton is free of some of the regualtions
limiting pesticde use.) "We end up eating cotton more than we
sleep on it or wear it," says Allen - and he doesn't mean cotton
candy. You don't even want to know what goes into that. For more
information, visit www.sustainablecotton.org |
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