guardian.co.uk, UK – May 14, 2014
Despite every retailer seemingly jumping on the organic cotton bandwagon (at least they’ll get a soft landing) it still accounts for less than 0.5% of total production. And of the mainstream stuff, while only 2.5% of all farmland worldwide is used to grow cotton, a huge 10% of all chemical pesticides and 22% of insecticides are sprayed onto it
Clearly less than an ideal picture. While organic cotton T-shirts are of course more expensive, they are not as dear as you might think. Brands like Gossypium, American Apparel and Marks & Spencer sell plain coloured organic cotton T-shirts for £10 or less – with the added bonus that they are also fairtrade.
Here are a selection of printed men’s T-shirts, all organic cotton (or with a mix of cotton and recycled polyester or even hemp). And next time you ponder a three pack of cheap cotton goods in a supermarket, consider that much of the cotton in Europe now comes from Uzbekistan, a country with a) an appalling human rights record, b) an appalling environmental record (including the draining of the Aral Sea) and c) the use of forced child labour to pick the cotton.
Kate Carter
