Yet many in the clothing industry lumber blindly forward, hopelessly behind the times, using manufacturing practices and employing business ethics that make the environmentally conscious population wince. Cotton, we think, is the clothing industry's answer to the electric car or solar power. But cotton bears ugly, unspoken fruit. It will come as a shock to learn that the growing and processing of cotton over the last three hundred years has led to some of the greatest social and environment disasters in all of human history. Fortunately, an alternative is on the horizon.
Organic cotton is poised to revolutionize the way clothing is made and worn.
Evidence shows that people in India, Central and South America domesticated separate species of the plant thousands of years ago. Fragments of cotton cloth more than 4,000 years old have been found in coastal Peru and at Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley. By 1500 A.D. cotton had spread across the warmer regions of the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa. Cotton was always a fabric of the well to do. The removal of its seeds, nearly half the weight of cotton per boll, was a labor-intensive undertaking, making cotton an expensive, though highly desirable, fabric.