Organic, Fair Trade and Cotton

Even though more and more consumers and manufacturers are turning to organic supplies and fair trade practices for their products, there are still a vast majority of people who don’t know what organic and fair trade really is. Organic cotton is grown without the use of chemicals (pesticides and chemical fertilizers), employing innovative farming and weeding practices instead, and does not genetically alter the cottonseed. Fair-trade means that no child-labor was used and that the farmers who grew the cotton and the manufacturers who sewed the t-shirts were paid a living wage, not just the minimum wage the country it was produced in can get away with paying (some areas of the world pay their workers around a $1/day or less!).

Organic food is becoming more and more popular but organic clothing is still a mystery to some. Consider: if it takes about 1/3 pound of chemical fertilizer to produce one pound of non-organic cotton. And it takes about one pound of cotton to make one t-shirt. These toxic chemicals get into the ground water, air, and soil and so because of evaporation and rain (this planet really is a whole) get back into your soil, air, and ground water. Eventually, we do end up ingesting these chemicals. Of course for those people and animals living near cotton growing areas, the negative health impact is even more severe and immediate.

In U.S. commerce, the environmental impact of how we produce and sell our goods is usually never taken into account. With the invention of Walmart, Target, Costco and other superstores, this environmental impact is even further neglected as we are able to buy more things cheaply without seeing how what we are buying is hurting the earth and those who make it. Sadly, we will end up "paying" for the environmental cost sooner than we think and many people in the world are already paying the cost with the pollution and over farming of their land.

Though organic and fair trade goods do cost more, we seek to be competitive with other non-organic t-shirt printers even though that means our profit margins are lower because organic and fair-trade cotton does cost more. There are several factors for this but the two main reasons are because there is not yet an economy of scale for organic, fair-traded cotton - not enough people are demanding it over conventionally produced cotton. And with U.S. businesses sending factories to countries that do not have minimum wages, child working laws, or humane working standards, prices of conventional goods are artificially cheap - the workers who made them are not properly compensated. But as we demand fairly paid workers and chemical free cotton the prices for these things will go down.