Co-written with Debera Johnson on the Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator

When it comes to the complexities of deeming a product organic, most people don’t take into consideration what goes into making an organic apparel certification. Most people don’t even know that when something is certified organic, it doesn’t mean that the carbon footprint has been reduced or that workers were treated ethically. The point of origin for a finished product is what’s deemed the most important and does not include the processing, manufacturing and finishes.

In labeling a garment, more often than not, WHERE a product is manufactured and the NOT WHERE the fabric came from is what is taken into account and there’s no labeling of threads, dyes, zippers and buttons.

So how can we know how ethical, sustainable or environmentally “good” something is?

It’s not easy.

For all intensive purposes, let’s consider the traceability of something as commonplace as cotton. Start with something that most of us have at least a few of – the ubiquitous t-shirt or a pair of jeans. Let’s try to go backwards from the cotton field to your closet.

Textile Exchange reports that organic cotton is currently grown in 23 countries. Most production is taking place in India, Syria, China, Turkey, the United States, Tanzania, and Uganda, although countries in West Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are also well-established organic cotton producers. But most manufacturing happens elsewhere in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and the new manufacturing frontiers of Africa and Ethiopia.

So once the cotton leaves the mill, say in Tirupur, India and then enters the flurry of production in a place like Rana Plaza in Bangladesh it’s hard to know what fabric came from what country, let alone what farm. In a presentation about apparel production after the Rana Plaza building collapse, Sarah Leibowitz from NYU Stern’s Center for Business and Human Rights stated, that, “Indirect sourcing is the routine practice of subcontracting, often through purchasing agents and in a manner that is not transparent to buyer or regulators.