Organic cotton fabrics, dyed or raw? (part 1)
May 19th 2008adminOrganic Cotton Yarn & Fabric
Well it had been 10 days since my latest post on this blog. I visited the Istanbul Yarn Fair in Turkey met new spinners that had just started organic cotton yarn production.
Anyway, today I will try to explain the difference between dyed organic cotton fabric and raw organic cotton fabric.
In the first years of organic cotton fabric production, everybody was only thinking about the raw cotton and the ecru colour. All the organic garments were ecru and simple designs. However, it is now possible to make any colour within organic standards. The only exception is the optical/snowy white colour. You can not achive that much white colour without using heavy chemicals which are causing cancer and obviously non-organic!
So here is a tip for you:
If you are willing to buy an organic apparel and the salesman offers you an optical white colour, you can be sure that he/she is lying!
This subject is very critical and I will continue on this at my next post shortly.
First off all, the fields or the seeds are not different for organic cotton than the conventional cotton. The main difference is the used & non-used chemicals. While farming cotton seed, you have to use a lot of water (which is very bad considering the global warming issues) and you have to use several pesticides. Those pesticides are used mostly for keeping the bugs away from the cotton and crop. And pesticides are accepted worldwide to be highly carcinogenic (canser-causing).