Post-Organic Thrill: Cotton On, and Preserve the World By Steve Rudd

A great many people profess to preferring the idea of buying organic, but - I wonder - how many of those people actually do go out of their way to ensure that they do buy organic in order to make that difference to both the physical world's wealth and the people who live in the world's health.

The main organic issues might be food-related, but more and more people are familiarising themselves with the many benefits of ensuring that their clothing is 100% organic in nature too. So much so that there are a number of T-shirt companies being set up which pride themselves on being Eco-friendly and ethical.

The cotton that supports the expansive T-shirt industry has to come from somewhere, with the main suppliers of cotton on a global scale being America, China, India and Africa. However, cotton growing can have a truly disastrous effect on the landscape of a place, as can be seen in the former Soviet Union around the Aral Sea… which is now more of a dust bowl and desertified due to cotton's insatiable thirst for water: a thirst that has quite literally sucked the area dry of such an essential resource.

Obviously this affects the people living and farming in the area considerably. Problems have also occurred in some cotton-growing areas of Western Africa where the natives often use pesticides to help kill cotton-destroying bugs. Such pesticides, though, tend to have an adverse affect on both the land and the local people in the long run.

Thus, if cotton can be grown organically (and supported by an organic-rooted way of killing off the pests), so much the better. Organic farming avoids the use of pesticides and promotes better living and working conditions for the cotton-growers, often helped by Fair Trade schemes.

As a result of an increasing interest in organic T-shirt production, there is one particularly outstanding company in Sussex called Gossypium.

They work closely with both cotton growers and the various people who are involved further along the cotton-processing production line. The finished T-shirts are of brilliant quality and aren't overly expensive.

More importantly, their production will have done nowhere and nobody any harm as a result, thus being Eco-friendly products. The Gossypium company buys all their cotton from small-scale farmers in India, and their clothing range extends further than your average T-shirt.

They also produce hoodies and pajamas, and garments suitable for all the family. Jazz musician and singer Jamie Callum is just one of many people who has been thoroughly impressed by both the quality and the ethos behind Gossypium. Another English company that operates in a similar vein is THTC , or The Hemp Trading Company that admirably makes T-shirts from the stuff.

Successfully balancing costs against the ethical nature of their idealism, the two young men behind the company recently organised a business trip out to China where they were impressed by the conditions of some of the farms and factories enough to strike some deals with them.

Since then, though, the lads have discovered that Hemp is being farmed effectively in England - an exciting prospect for their company if that means having a quality source of the stuff almost literally on their doorstep.

Admit it, when you go clothes shopping you probably don't consider if the items you are buying are organic or not, primarily because we - as consumers - probably won't be directly affected either way, unlike when we are buying food. In future, though, spare a thought for the possible consequences that buying certain types of clothes could be having on the areas in which they are produced.

The world at large needs to try and veer away from relying on the widespread usage of fertilisers and pesticides because they are doing the natural world no good whatsoever. Sure, fertilisers and pesticides do make lives easier in some instances, but the rewards are only ever short-term ones. We owe it to both nature and mankind to remain as organic as we can in our collective sowing and growing of crops, whether such crops are destined for edible consumption or material adornment. Our hunger for fast food and fetching fashions needn't cost the earth, you know.

Check out www.gossypium.co.uk for more info on their stunning range of considerately priced clothes, and for more information about going organic, and staying organic. The Hemp Trading Company website is at www.thtc.co.uk

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