What?

We surround ourselves with products based on cotton. Literally in the shape of clothes, but also our beds and furniture is often dressed in this strong material.

There is an increasing trend in organic cotton, and not without reason. Just like the non-organic method of growing food is contradicting itself, so does cotton. It is definately a good idea to buy your cotton organic next time.

Another good idea is to use other materials to replace cotton. Industrialisation has a tendency to make us standardise on one material, but nature offers many more plants that are full of fibres suitable for clothing and other purposes. Examples are flax, hemp, stinging nettles and bamboo.

Flax is used to make linen, a material that is still widely known. Hemp can be turned into a rugged textile, suitable for things like jeans. The race of hemp used for textile is not suitable for making drugs, by the way. Stinging nettle fibres create a silky-soft textile. Bamboo too is praised for its softness, as well as for its anti-bacterial properties and its ability to absorb more moist than cotton. These properties make it an eminently suitable material for towels and bath robes. Most of these fibrous plants are grown organically, and sometimes processed in combination with (organic) cotton. This leads to textile with far less environmental damaga than plain cotton.

Why?

The production of cotton suffers from the same problems as other massively grown plants: there are lots of them in a small space, so it tends to attract its natural enemies. In addion, such "monocultures" have the problem that all plants root at the same depth, where they look for the same food sources while excreting all the same leftovers.

Because fields filled with only cotton plants cannot live in symbiosis with other plants, it is necessary for the farmer to apply feed in the form of manure or artificial fertilisers. The artificial form quickly dissolves in water and leads to too much nitrogen in ground waters, resulting in all sorts of altered balances in nature.

The high concentration of one plant on a field attracts the bugs that feed on them. Cotton is definately not immune to such bugs, especially when the plants are weak, which is a common result of growing too fast after artificial fertilisers have been applied. This means that quite a lot of poisson is sprayed to keep cotton relatively free from attacks.

The massiveness of cotton fields is such that there will always be some bug somewhere that develops immunity to the poissons sprayed, en if it develops it will breed and in time find its way to other fields as well. So more poisson, or more agressive types of poisson are required. This process makes it increasingly less affordable for farmers to grow cotton, not to mention the deteriorating effect of the poisson on their health. After all, cotton is not a food source, so it can be sprayed much more agressively!

For these reasons it is much better to grow organically, so that nature can be contracted on her own terms. This style of growing plants takes a lot more skill from the farmer, but it leads to a situation where people work with nature, rather than against it.

How?

Use the following materials if possible, and actively inquire about them at clothing shops:

• organic cotton instead of the common, industrial variety
• linen
• stinging nettle
• bamboo

Many of these materials are sold through online shops. So if you cannot get it in your local shops, look for specialised online mail order companies.

Where?

• Brennels producees clothing from stinging nettle fibres -- although they do use artificial fertilisers in the process.
• Santens produces soft bamboo clothing; Mobboa sells these and other brands by the piece and ships them throughout Europe.