When "eco-friendly" and "organic" aren't (read labels carefully!)

I was at my local store with my kids after school. They hard "organic cotton" shirts on sale. I thought, "Oh good! I want my child to not have plastic/phthalates against her skin, and I don't wan to add more plastic to the landfill at the end of it's lifespan."

I checked the neck label, and it did say "organic cotton." I should have known by the velcroy feeling on my hands. I should have known by their "heathered" look (it seems heathered stuff is almost always a polyster mix--I think it's because the polyester and cotton take up the color differently). I should have taken the further step of checking the side tag, but my kids were fussy, and I was tired, so I put them in my basket and bought them. I got home and started taking off labels to wash them...and lo-and-behold, the shirts are 40% plastic. AHHHHHHH!

Yes, it's recycled plastic, so it's more eco-friendly than normal plastic. But, it's still plastic. It's still in my cloth meaning I can't decompose the scraps of cloth once they've lived their life. It means they'll just be more plastic in the landfill, more microplastics in my laundry, making microplastic lint when I dry it, and a lot of that microplastic lint will end up in my garden.

Thankfully, my daughter wasn't too attached to them--she mostly wanted them as undershirts to go under her "princess dresses" to keep her cozy in cold weather. We'll be returning these, and reading labels even more carefully.

yea for me the part that gave it away was the shininess of the shirt. Maybe this is because I get all my cotton shirts second hand....

Its that shine that gives it away for me though.

It somewhat blows my mind. The thought of organic materials being mixed with plastics. Ok now how do we remove the cotton from the material now please? I can only imagine once mixed it will be mixed forever.....


hmm hmhm hmmm i am going to go think about my solar panels, masonry heater, firewood, COUGH( anything else now!)

jordan barton wrote:
It somewhat blows my mind. The thought of organic materials being mixed with plastics. Ok now how do we remove the cotton from the material now please? I can only imagine once mixed it will be mixed forever.....

Yep! And it also makes it so the shirt cannot be recycled in any way. A 100% polyester shirt can be turned into other plastic. But, once it's mixed with cotton, you can't do anything else with it. And, considering it's thin fabric and children's clothing, it'll quickly stain or rip and quickly end up in a trash heap somewhere.

I makes me very sad, too.

The same company sometimes makes 100% organic cotton clothes. I bought some 100% organic cotton pajama pants for my husband. They are have thin, loosely spun fabric that they were already generating holes just a month after he started wearing them. If people are going to go to all the expense of time, energy, resources, human labor, etc to make organic cloth, at least make it durable, 100% cotton clothing that will last a long time. It's sad to see "eco-friendly" fast fashion. It doesn't seem eco friendly if the cloth is thin and prone to ripping/coming un-stitched, or if it's mixed with plastic!