“Saving the Earth.” Sounds like quite a grand claim, right? After all, how many times have you heard of public service announcements linking segregating your trash and collecting aluminum cans to ‘saving the environment’?
Interestingly enough, if you truly want to do your part in helping Mother Nature, you can start by being more picky with your children’s bedding. By simply choosing 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton, you can do your part in helping the earth repair and nourish itself back to health.
By choosing organic cotton kids’ bedding that have been certified by GOTS, you are actually putting market pressure on cotton growers all over the world use to use less environmentally-damaging farming methods. Indeed, GOTS-certified cotton producers farm plant fibers in some of the most environmentally-friendly ways. Here are just seven ways GOTS-certified cotton materials help preserve the environment and ensure ecological balance.
Reduced global warming potential
Fully GOTS-certified cotton farming practices ensure that a large chunk of the carbon that would have otherwise been released in the air gets locked in soil. The less carbon released into the environment, the lower the greenhouse gases in the air. This goes a long way in reducing global warming potential.
Lower soil acid buildup
Repeated use of harsh chemical fertilizers increase soil’s acidity. This decreases the soil’s organic carrying capacity. Acidification also reduces farm soil’s productivity. When farmers from developing countries abandon and move on from highly acidic soils, they leave a trail of used up soil that can’t support much needed food crops.
Less chemical water run off
One of the biggest threats to river systems posed by industrial farming center on the huge amount of nitrogen in farm water runoff. These nitrogen rich streams fertilize microflora and algae in rivers so well they create massive blooms. These plants strip the oxygen from river water leading to large scale fishkills and almost sterile water. For farmers and cotton producers to get certified by GOTS, they have to use organic fertilizers and manage their water run off well enough to reduce excessive nitrogen water runoff.
Longer soil life due to intercropping
GOTS certification rewards crop diversity. This is a massive help to soil productivity since one of the main causes of early soil depletion is the common practice of monoculture cropping. Year after year, decade after decade, monoculture planers would only plant cotton. Since cotton is one of the thirstiest and nutrient-greedy crops a farmer could plant, it’s no surprise that the heavy, intensive, single crop cotton planting puts very heavy pressure on soil productivity.
Less fossil fuel-dependent production
Since truly organic cotton production relies on composting for fertilization, this cuts down on the fossil fuel petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers like urea. Also, given the fair pricing of organic products, farmers could cost-efficiently adopt manually-heavier production methods. These are better for the environment since these either don’t use fossil fuels at all or use oil at greatly reduced levels.
Uses less water resources
Cotton is one of the thirstiest commercial crops. When farmed conventionally, cotton production drinks up a tremendous amount of water. In fact, commercial cotton growing puts such heavy stress on farms’ available water supply that they require large-scale irrigation inputs in the form of river diversion. This is bad news for the environment. Not only does diversion reduce river water levels, but it increases soil salt levels and water logs otherwise productive farmland. Water logged land leads to lower local crop production-including both cotton and food crops. By insisting on truly organic cotton, consumers do their part in putting market pressures on farmers who raise rain-fed cotton thereby diverting farmers away from river-based irrigation schemes.
Less GMO threat
Since it’s anyone’s guess what the long term effects of genetically modified organisms would be on the planet’s ecological health, it’s a good idea to reduce such direct or indirect consequences by buying cotton grown from non-GMO sources. GMO crops’ impact can be tricky to track since they interact with other plan and insect species in so many ways. These low-key effects may take place on an almost undetected level and ramp up exponentially after a tipping point is reached. Encouraging GMO-free cotton agriculture by buying organic goes a long way in helping the world sidestep the potentially destructive effects of large scale GMO-based agriculture.
Keep these benefits in mind when shopping for quilts, mattress covers, and sheets for your kids’ bedding materials. A little bit of proactive shopping can definitely add up to greater global ecological safety and health. Wriggly Toes is an Australian company that prides itself on ensuring that children are safe from harm and minimizing the ecological impact that cotton has on the environment and those working in the cotton industry. All Wriggly Toes has a selection of organic kids bedding that is GOTS and Oeko-Tex certified
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