Green One

Organic cotton is grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides or other chemical fertilizers, and is simply better for your health and the environment. We consider what we put into our bodies, so why not what we put on our bodies?

Organic agriculture (food and fibre) protects the health of people and the planet by reducing the overall exposure to toxic chemicals from synthetic pesticides that can end up in the ground, air, water and food supply, and that are associated with health consequences, from asthma to cancer. Because organic agriculture doesn’t use toxic and persistent pesticides, choosing organic products is an easy way to help protect yourself. (Organic Trade Association-OTA).

At GreenOne, we create sustainable partnerships with suppliers who share our philosophy of a respect for:
*The people who make our products
*The materials used in our products and the impact on the environment
*The end-consumer’s health, well-being, and education

Our fabric suppliers source their mills based on their experience, their technology to produce beautiful fabric, and their stand for good business practices. They develop strong business relationships over time, test and monitor thier fabrics, and always check the working conditions of the people working to produce the fabrics.

Our fabrics are dyed with Reactive Dyes, commonly known as “Low Impact Dyes.” This is a class of dyes that are more efficiently absorbed into natural (cellulosic) fibres resulting in less polluting run-off. Reactive dyes are superior to conventional dyes and allow a good consistency in a myriad of colours, important for high-quality dyeing.

• Conventional cotton represents 10% of world agriculture and uses 25% of the world’s pesticides (OTA).
• It takes 1/3 of a pound of chemicals to make one conventional cotton t-shirt!
• An estimated 1 million to 5 million cases of pesticide poisoning occur every year, resulting in 20,000   reported deaths among agricultural workers and at least 1 million requiring hospitalization. (EJF)
• Aldicarb, a powerful nerve agent, is one of the most toxic pesticides applied to cotton, yet it is also the 2nd most used pesticide in global cotton production. A single teaspoonful of aldicarb on the skin would be sufficient to kill an adult.
• 7 of the top 15 chemicals used in conventionally grown cotton are classified as known or suspected carcinogens by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There are different organic trade associations that have global standards for organic sustainable textiles worldwide.  However for cotton to be classified as organic, it must be grown in soil that has been free of prohibited substances for at least the last three years prior to harvest (OTA).

Factory surplus is excess fabric remaining from another manufacturer’s production.  While still high-quality, this material is often too small an amount for companies to make use of.  Because our bags are limited edition productions, we can utilize fabric that would otherwise be discarded.  In this way, we consume less and save resources that would be used to produce new fabric.

For more information on organic products visit:
•       http://www.sustainablecotton.org (Sustainable Cotton Project)
•       http://www.ota.com/index.html (Organic Trade Association)
•       www.organicexchange.org (Organic Exchange)
•       http://www.panna.org/ (Pesticide Action Network)

Plastic was pretty cool in the 70’s and helped fulfill a useful need.  But in the 21st century, plastic just ain’t pretty.  It clutters our landscape (yes, we know that it’s irresponsible people who litter and not the bags themselves, but hey- we can be proactive).  Plastic debris has created a floating, polluted mass in the Pacific Ocean roughly the size of Texas known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (Natural History Magazine).  Nasty.
•Plastic bags litter our landscape and blow into trees, rivers, gutters and drains creating flooding and storm water challenges on a global scale
•Plastic bags and products are littered into our oceans and harm our critical ecosystems.  Fish, turtles, sharks, dolphins and whales become entangled in them or mistake them for food, ingest them and die.  In other cases organisms ingest the toxins, which are in turn eaten by fish then pass the poisons into the food chain that leads, in some cases, back to us humans.  Ew. (National Resource Defense Council- NRDC).

Processing both plastic and paper bags creates serious pollution and suck up our precious non-renewable resources: petroleum and lumber :
•500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide annually (that’s roughly one million every minute and about 150 bags a year for every person!)
•Plastic takes between 400 and 1000 years to decompose in landfills
•An average of 1-4% of all plastic bags are recycled leaving 96-99% going to waste
•It takes roughly 12 million barrels of oil a year to make a year’s worth of plastic bags in the U.S.
•Unlike glass bottles that can be made into new bottles, or aluminum cans that can be made into new cans, plastic bags are mostly down-cycled into products like plastic lumber, which at the end of its usefulness will end up in landfill
•14+ million trees are cut down for paper production (NRDC)