Organic cotton? What’s the point?

When I’m looking for ethical clothes online, I tend to find a lot of shops selling organic cotton. But why is organic cotton more ethical?

I found that non-organic cotton uses a quarter of the world’s pesticides while organic cotton only uses 16%. Pesticides contain toxins that contaminate air and water, putting the farmers who have to use them at high risk of falling ill or dying. That’s not all...

• The largest producer of cotton is India, and according to the Environmental Justice Foundation in Andhra Pradesh, India, over 100,000 children have been documented working for 13 hours a day on cotton farms for not much more than peanuts.

• 7 of the top 15 pesticides are more than likely to contain carcinogens, which are known to cause cancer.

• Have you noticed that sometimes a non organic cotton wearer’s skin can get irritated and cause eczema? One of the reasons is because the chemicals in the garment are reacting or chaffing against the skin. People with sensitive skin have to be especially careful. So if you have found your skin getting drier and itchy, the finger of blame could be pointed to your t-shirt.

So why IS organic better than non-organic cotton? Non-organic cotton is bad for our skin, our environment, our health and the health of the people involved in the process.

So then, why do we use it? The answer to this is simple and the same answer we give for everything else, it is cheaper and faster to grow. Clothes are now in higher demand than in the last few years, but we forget that cotton does not grow as fast as we consume the clothes.

Should we continue the way we have been going, or do you think slowing down fashion and letting nature catch up with our thirst for more is worth it?

Perhaps this will help answer the question...

Nike: Ticks the right box

Not only has England actually made it to the World Cup this year but a very important issue has become a part of the great sporting event. Nike has produced environmentally friendly uniforms for the upcoming 2010 football world cup.

The kits are going to be made from discarded plastic bottles collected from landfills in Japan and Taiwan.

When I first read on Ecouterre about this, I was a tad confused. “How on earth are they going to pull that off?” Well the plastic bottles get melted down into yarn first and are then spun into fabric.

Each shirt is made from 8 plastic bottles. Apart from just saving on raw materials, Nike managed to reduce 13 million plastic bottles from the landfill which is enough to cover a football pitch 29 times over!

Nike seems to have grown a corporate conscience since the late 1990’s. It feels like just yesterday that a photo of a Pakistani boy stitching Nike footballs started making its rounds...

Image Credit- James Temple on Flickr at Creative Commons 

Nike: Just sew it!

Nike has walked a rocky road between ‘leading sports retailer’ and ‘human rights violator’.

Let me take you back in time.....

When Nike started out they operated in Taiwan and South Korea because of the low wages and laws that restricted workers from forming unions. Over a period of 20 years workers from these countries lobbied to amend the law and managed to win the right to form unions and had a right to better wages.

People living in poverty could finally stand up for themselves and be treated like human beings. Well it turns out it doesn’t make much business sense to remain in a country as liberated as this. So Nike ran quicker than you can say “what about the developing nations needs?”

Nike thought it would make more ‘business sense’ to move their factories to China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Here Nike could maintain paying Michael Jordan millions and millions of dollars to stand and take pictures and keep paying the women and children less than how much the CEO of Nike makes in an hour!

Nike did some damage control after all this info became public knowledge, and in 1999 Nike increased the wages of all their workers from the Indonesian factories. Nike also agreed to allow random factory inspections from the Fair Labour Association, and to set up independent monitoring with both US and international organizations.


Nike can now pat itself on the back as they have added their own on-staff of one hundred workers who are responsible for performing inspections of the company's partner factories. Inspectors score the factory on factors ranging from employee safety to humane working conditions.

In 2002, Nike devised a Code of Conduct to all its factories, regulating the conditions and safety requirements that work should be conducted by. The company's 2004 Responsibility Report was considered a major victory for workers and many human right's groups, because Nike included a full list of its factories and their addresses throughout the world. This has allowed for independent monitoring and investigations. While this is a positive effort on Nike's part, the human rights campaign against the company has not ended.

Between 50 and 100 percent of Nike factories require more working hours than those permitted by the Code of Conduct. In 25 to 50 percent of factories, workers are required to work 7 days a week, and in the same percentage of factories, workers are still paid less than the local minimum wage.According to the Educating for Justice group

Corporations care what the public thinks about them. With more people like you and me making a stand against companies who are not practicing fair wage practices, one day the term ethical fashion won’t have to be an irony.

Image Credit- Labour behind the Label on Flickr at Creative Commons 

Who’s pleasure, whose pain?

Yo-Yo’s, Pokémon and Power Rangers was all I thought about when I was in school. Now we have iPhones, X-factor and Miley Cyrus!

Last year it was lunch boxes, shoes and clothes all branded with High School Musical. It seems every time a new craze surfaces it takes a hold of us and we have to own everything it has its name on. Every time we own something from the franchise we get a rush of joy. Taking into account the pleasure/pain theory that for all our pleasure someone is suffering we should ask ourselves who is suffering for it?

Could it be the parents who have to fund what becomes an expensive obsession? I think you’ll find that we need to go deeper to find where the pain is. You can start by asking yourself where your jeans come from? Do they say “made in India? China? Or Bangladesh?” Then ask yourself “How old was the person that made this?”

The average 12 year old here in the UK often has one of the things mentioned above on his or her mind but an average 12 year old in India will have other things on his or her mind. 11.2 million Young people aged between 5 and 14 are working in India. India has the largest number of child workers in the world. They are employed in many industries and trades, including garments, footwear, and textile shops.

In a report by The Sweat and Toil of Children (Volume I): The Use of Child Labor in U.S. Manufactured and Mined Imports they found that young people in India were more likely to work in small subcontracting shops or in homes. Young people were also found to be imprisoned in the shops with armed guards preventing entrance and exit during work hours. The report found it was the norm to have children working on tasks such as sewing buttons, cutting and trimming threads, folding, moving and packing garments. They work long hours six or seven days a week. Some were not paid for overtime work.

If we are given t-shirt’s to wear then they shouldn’t be given t-shirts to make!