Using Customers as Billboards
Shaun Russell, the founder of Skandinavisk, a Swedish skin care brand that is a registered B Corp “to use your customers as mobile billboards.” It’s free advertising. Any brand that claims otherwise would be lying”. Cotton bags have long existed in luxury; shoes and handbags come in protective dust wrappings. But the supposed sustainability of totes means more brands than ever are packaging wares in ever more layers. Items that don’t even need protection from dust, like hair scrunchies, organic tampons and facial cleansers, now arrive swaddled in a sleeping bag. While cotton can use pesticides (if it’s not organically grown) and has dried up rivers from water consumption, lightweight plastic bags use greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels, never biodegrade and clog up the oceans.
Cotton Growth and Production
An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production, according to a 2018 study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That equates to daily use for 54 years — for just one bag. According to that metric, if all 25 of her totes were organic, Ms. Berry would have to live for more than a thousand years to offset her current arsenal. “Cotton is so water intensive,” said Travis Wagner, an environmental science professor at the University of Maine. It’s also associated with forced labor, thanks to revelations about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, which produces 20 percent of the world’s cotton and supplies most Western fashion brands. And figuring out how to dispose of a tote in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think. You can’t, for example, just put a tote in a compost bin: Maxine Bédat, a director at the New Standard Institute, a nonprofit focused on fashion and sustainability, said she has “yet to find a municipal compost that will accept textiles.” And only 15 percent of the 30 million tons of cotton produced every year actually makes its way to textile depositories. A really good example of unintended consequences of people trying to make positive choices, and not understanding the full landscape.”
Where Does Cotton Come From?
The majority of the cotton comes from India, the United States and China – the world’s top three cotton producers. Each year, India produces an average of 5,770 thousand metric tonnes of cotton making it the world’s highest producer. The United States is a key producer and exporter of cotton. It produces 3,999 thousand metric tons a year.
World Rankings of Cotton Growth
Tax On the Environment
Cotton first needs to be harvested, then cotton bolls go through the ginning process, which separates the cotton from stems and leaves. Only 33 percent of the harvested cotton is usable. The cotton is then baled and shipped to cotton mills to be fluffed up, cleaned, flattened and spun. The cotton threads are woven into fabric, which then undergoes a chemical washing process and bleaching, after which it can also be dyed and printed. Spinning, weaving and othermanufacturing processes are energy intensive. Washing, bleaching, dyeing,printing and other processes use large amounts of water and electricity.
Harvesting, processing, and transporting cotton to market all require large amounts of energy; and since cotton totes are heavy and bulky, they cost more to ship. In addition, they are difficult to recycle since textile recycling in the U.S. is limited—only 15.2 percent of all textiles were recycled in 2017. As a result, a cotton bag needs to be used 7,100 times to equal the environmental profile of a plastic bag.
Good, Bad or Neither?
While there may not be a clear cut solution to the problem of sustainable consumption, cotton tote bags are more reusable than their plastic counterpart and if you are using them wisely, it can be the better solution.
Do you believe cotton bags are better than plastic bags?
Carolyn Kerkowski 2021
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