Cotton has started wars. It has forced thousands of people into slavery and coerced labor throughout history. It is one of the most water-intensive crops to grow, and dying cotton fields leave behind arid wasteland that takes decades to recover. Cotton is one of the most controversial cash crops, yet we have grown up thinking it is “the fabric of our lives”.

Cotton is a natural, plant-based fiber that we use in many aspects of our daily lives. We wear clothing made of, or containing cotton, such as blue jeans; we use cotton balls and cotton swabs with our toiletries; we sit on furniture stuffed with cotton batting. Cotton is so commonplace in our lives that it becomes easy to forget to think about where it is coming from or how its manufacture could be impacting our environment. However, the farming and manufacture of cotton wastes immense amounts of water each year, and these processes have a historic and contemporary association with slave labor and coerced labor.

In some ways, cotton is a fairly sustainable product. Unlike synthetic fibers like polyester, cotton is biodegradable and can even be composted. Polyester is composed of polymers made in a lab, and is known to shed toxic micro-plastic particles into the environment when it is worn, as well as when it is left to rot in a landfill. While cotton is a natural product that can decompose somewhat easily, polyester may take centuries to fully decompose in a landfill. Cotton can be grown organically without pesticides, decreasing its impact on the planet.

However, since cotton is one of the most commonly used fibers and textiles around the world–cotton makes up a quarter of all fabric manufactured globally–it must have some kind of impact on the environment. Up to 20,000 liters of water are necessary to produce one kilogram of cotton, which is just enough to produce one t-shirt and one pair of jeans. With a global water crisis, we simply cannot afford to direct this much water use toward the manufacture of a fiber that will likely be discarded in the affluent United States as clothing waste after just a few wears. While organic cotton does not use potentially dangerous pesticides, it requires more land and thus more water to account for the decreased crop yield as a result of organic farming practices.

Much of the world’s cotton is grown using pesticides and insecticides, and is treated with cleaning and bleaching products in the manufacturing process. These toxic chemicals pollute water sources, and have drastic impacts on the health of the ecosystem surrounding processing factories, as well as the health of the workers from the poorest parts of the world who depend heavily on this industry. Drinking contaminated water is known to lead to birth defects, but is likely also to blame for a plethora of health concerns that have not yet necessarily been identified.

Beyond environmental concerns, cotton has some dangerous ties to slavery and coerced labor. In the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, the farming and production of cotton was one of the major driving forces of the large-scale slave industry. The fact that the U.S. economy depended so heavily on cotton and slavery by the mid-19th century was one of the major catalysts for the civil war.

Many modern Americans see this relationship between cotton and slavery as a thing of the past, but much of the world’s cotton today has been produced in near-slavery coerced labor conditions in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Millions of children and adults alike have been coerced by their governments into laboring in the hot, hazardous, and unsanitary cotton fields for painfully long shifts up to seven days a week. Beyond the farming of cotton, the manufacture of textiles and clothing in Southeast Asia often involves impossibly low-wage labor, indentured servitude, and conditions near those of slavery.

Cotton is not merely the fabric of our lives; it is a fiber that touches every single life on this planet. Every drop of water wasted on the production of cotton is a drop of water that could have been used to quench the thirst of a dehydrated and dying child somewhere else in the world; every drop of pesticide used to grow cotton is a drop of poison that could have serious repercussions on the health of poor laborers; every slave or coerced laborer is a life that deserves to be free. Think about this the next time you use a cotton ball or buy a clothing item made of cotton.

References:

https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-fashion/do-you-know-which-fabrics-are-most-sustainable.html

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/opinions/uzbekistan-turkmenistan-cotton/index.html

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/