Fabric and impact

 

You can have a profound positive impact on the health of all living things through your fabric choices.

Profound? Really?

Yes. The textile industry is gigantic, and it is gigantically polluting. It uses vast amounts of three things: chemicals, water, and energy. It uses too many unsavory chemicals, many of which remain in the fabric; is one of the leading industrial polluters of water in the world; and also adds hugely more to carbon problems than necessary. We want to change that.

We produce our fabrics – from the field through the finished fabric - with careful attention to six critical categories with which we try to capture all issues of environmental and human safety:

  1. Toxicity to the environment
  2. Toxicity to people and other living things - including animal husbandry.
  3. Carbon Footprint
  4. Social Justice
  5. Water Treatment
  6. End of Life

To produce fabrics safe enough to use for your newborn, we have tried to both identify and address every harmful aspect of the textile industry. 

We have eliminated the use of chemicals of concern, which have proved to cause a myriad of human illnesses, to create fabric safe for all life.

With our fabrics, you will not be contributing to the microfiber shedding problem in our waters because we do not use fabrics made from synthetic fibers (oops - one exception - our blackout liner, which is GRS Global Recycling Standard Gold level before the certification  eliminated levels.) We write about this in our blog. It is an urgent concern for our oceans. 

Our fabrics are third-party certified to meet the ONLY exhaustive, reliable, fabric standard, the gold standard of fabric certifications: the Global Organic Textile Standard, or GOTS. The demand for GOTS in interiors has been extremely weak, so only half of our fabrics are GOTS certified.  But, when we cannot get GOTS, we get the second best third party certification:  Oeko-Tex  - either their standard 100 or, soon, Made In Green; and we follow all GOTS requirements.

Below are some of the questions we asked over the years and what we have found out. Two Sisters began as O Ecotextiles in 2002. We have been blogging about our findings since 2007, and you can find our blog here. 

Please note: We are not scientists, so sometimes we get it wrong. This is a conversation. Let us know if you have something else to offer. We believe in honesty. We hope you will reward us by supporting us through your purchases.