Eco Blog Number 1 - Organic or Recycled Cotton

We are officially inspired by all the eco-blogging going on.

Blogspot is celebrating these efforts on the blogspot home page ("action week"), and we have just read about a few cool not-too-smug environmentally friendly blogs in Intelligent life, Autumn 07. This includes one individual's efforts to add a new eco-rule to her daily life each day of the year for one year. We can't quite go the full 365 day distance, so we are going to start with one new eco rule a month, finishing our year with 12 new rules that we aim to keep for life. Will it work? Will we cave? We'll see...

Rule number 1: When buying cotton, we're going for only organic or recycled. Pretty easy for trendy yoga gear, but what about for towels, sheets and work shirts? Turns out it's all out there. If anything, it'll force us to use the cotton we've got until it wears thin thin thin.

Why organic cotton? Apparently most cotton items are only actually 73% cotton with the rest being chemicals and resins used to grow the cotton. Can't be good for the skin. It seems that out of the world's total insecticide usage, 25% is used to farm cotton. Yowza. Can't be good for the environment.

Why recycled cotton? We've read that many clothing factories leave heaps of cotton trimmings on the floor, and these go straight to landfill. Some companies are sweeping up these leftovers and are using them for recycled cotton products. Makes sense.

Ok - that's October's eco blog.