Sattler Eco-Clothing offers eco-friendly style for the masses using only certified eco-friendly organic and sustainable fibers.

Conventional cotton farming uses some of the most harmful chemicals on the planet. Using these methods it takes approximately 1 pound of harmful synthetic fertilizer and pesticides to produce enough cotton for just one pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Turkey and the USA are the largest producers of eco-friendly organic cotton and yet only account for .03% of the total cotton production on the planet. Sattler clothing uses only sustainable eco-friendly organic cotton and manufacturing to eliminate the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and other harmful chemicals.

The folks out at the Sustainable Cotton Project have done some excellent research and are making great strides leading the effort to address both the need to reduce the chemical dump that takes place with conventional cotton growing methods and the growing demand for organic cotton. An excerpt from their website;

Poisonous Comfort
Conventional cotton farming involves use of synthetic chemicals that seriously harm the environment, farm communities and workers. Just take a look at your own T-shirt. As are millions of others around the state and country (and world) you’re probably wearing one, and it’s proably soft and comfortable to wear. However, it takes about nine ounces of cotton to make one T-shirt, and to make these nine ounces, an average of 17 teaspoons of synthetic fertilizers are used, plus three-fourths of a teaspoon of active ingredients like pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and defoliants. These pesticides are classified among the most toxic by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Only 40 percent of the cotton plant is comprised of fiber. The rest is seed, which is used to feed dairy and beef cattle, and is an ingredient in cookies, potato chips and prepared foods. Often up to 10 percent of a cow’s diet is untreated cottonseed and gin trash (separated from the fiber and seed at the gin), which is often defoliated with organophosphate nerve poisons like DEF, Folex, paraquat and bomb-making materials like sodium chlorate.

“I get very ill in the spring. I experience respiratory problems, while many others around here get bad headaches. It’s especially bad for the allergics,” Sandy Sanders says. She has spent the last 26 years living and farming with her husband Roger on their farm on the outskirts of Bakersfield. “They couldn’t use the water at a school on the north side of Bakersfield not long ago, and the kids had to bring bottled water. The water was too contaminated.”

According to SNF, a Swedish environmental organization, the textile industry produces about 40 billion pounds of textiles annually, and cotton alone accounts for half of the world’s consumption of textile fibers. This means a lot of spraying, and with it both foreseen and unforeseen damages. “If cotton were a crop that we ate instead of one that we wore, the EPA and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) wouldn’t allow us to spray it with some of the things we use,” said Jerry Williams, a government agriculture expert in Arkansas, in a 1991 New Yorker article. What sane consumers probably would like to know is that approximately two-thirds of a cotton crop winds up in the food we eat, even though cotton uses chemicals that have been banned for food crops.

California has over a million acres of irrigated cotton cropland, and pesticide use in the state has increased over the past 10 years. The Sustainable Cotton Project, started and led by Will Allen, is located in Oroville on the northern end of California’s Central Valley, and is trying to make consumers, farmers and clothing companies aware of an eco-friendly alternative to conventional cotton farming: organically grown cotton, which is grown without the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides or defoliants. Alook at the facts SCP has gathered on conventional cotton is staggering, prompting the question: Why is cotton forgotten when public awareness of the advantages of organic food is growing?

In 1995, more than 14 pounds of pesticides were sprayed on every acre of cotton fields in California, according to SCP. Of the pesticides used, five of the top nine are cancer-causing chemicals (cyanazine, dicofol, naled, propargite, and trifluralin), and all the top nine pesticides used are labeled by EPA as Category I or II materials, which are the most toxic classifications. Forty-six percent of all U.S. counties contain groundwater susceptible to contamination from agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, and 68 pesticides have been found in drinking wells in California since 1982. This number becomes more worrisome when, according to a report from 1994 by Environmental Working Group/Physicians for Social Responsibility, 90 percent of municipal water treatment facilities lack equipment to remove carcinogenic herbicides.