I was eating lunch with my 11year-old son last month for his birthday. As we were eating, he said, “Mom, you work for cotton, right?” I nodded and he responded, “Then how come you’re wearing polyester?”
I looked down at my 100% polyester “athleisure” shirt and realized he was right. I didn’t even know I was wearing it. I hadn’t even thought about what I was putting on. I wasn’t going to the office or working a cotton event, so I guess I decided to relax when it came to what I was wearing.
I’m not going to sit here and talk about cotton blends or how cotton- rich you should strive to be when selecting your daily outfits, because I honestly don’t believe that any of us really need that instruction.
We just need to ask ourselves every day: “Am I walking the talk?”
You can choose to ignore this article. You can choose to throw intention out the window when dressing and shopping. But at the end of the day, if we really want to move mountains for cotton, then we have to remember it starts with us.
As PCCA President and CEO Kevin Brinkley has said repeatedly, “IT STARTS WITH US.”
The Action to Create a Demand for Cotton
If you’re reading this expecting a laundry list of activities that our organization has been involved in to help solve the cotton demand issue, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. This article isn’t about the organized effort to increase cotton consumption in the U.S.
It’s about you. It’s about me. And the individual efforts we’re making to create a momentum and awareness for cotton products.
While there is a ton of value in organizations and their commitment to improving the challenges that cotton producers and industry face, the human element to sharing what we love and why we love it can get diluted. An organization telling people to buy more cotton to reduce plastic pollution may persuade some. But a father telling their daughter to look for cotton when they shop because it’s a healthier alternative to polyester? That’s priceless. A friend telling a friend or a co-worker telling the new guy to buy cotton shirts for a cotton meeting is more effective than anything I will ever be able to do as a communicator in this industry.
But I’m going to be brutally honest here. I see a lot of farmer’s daughters wearing 100% polyester. I see a lot of cotton industry companies buying and wearing 100% polyester polos. And I’m not sitting here in my ivory tower — I’ve done it, too.
And we could go through all of the reasons why we’ve done it or what has motivated us or our families to buy a synthetic fiber, but to me that’s irrelevant.
I don’t care what we’ve done in the past because we can’t change it. I care about what we’re doing now. What are we doing as individuals in the cotton industry to promote our own fiber? It’s time to practice what we preach rather than going on social media and griping about the lack of demand or consumer awareness of cotton fiber while we sit surrounded by synthetics in our own homes.
It Just Takes One
Plains Cotton Growers participated in an article with the Texas Tribune recently over the hazards of fast fashion and microplastics. Jayme Lozano Carver and I have been running in the same circles for years. I’ve always appreciated her desire to write stories that help our cotton farmers, even if she wore a lot of polyester when I would see her at events. And while hindsight is 20/20, I realized I never spoke to her about wearing cotton. It never even occurred to me.
Until I got a text from her in July telling me that she is throwing out all of her synthetic clothes and buying natural fiber from now on. She had seen our social media posts for #plasticfreeJuly and realized the importance of fiber choice when it came to human and environmental health. And in the last two weeks alone, she’s been a huge advocate for cotton, telling friends and family what she learned while conducting research for her article.
I tell you that story for two reasons: 1) You never know who your biggest champions will be; and 2) It may be slow, but momentum is gained when one person shares with one more.
Jayme doesn’t have an agricultural background — she just covers it for the Texas Tribune. And that’s important, because the best way to gain momentum is get out of the echo chamber. I could give you the statistics behind all the momentum that her article generated for the cotton movement — the emails in my inbox came from across the nation from readers who had questions about microplastics.
And, yet the greatest achievement for me was the fact that my friend Jayme is wearing predominantly cotton outfits now.
I’ve said this many times in the last four years, but talking to people that already agree with you or are already aware of the importance of what you do accomplishes nothing. Talking to people who already wear cotton about the woes of cotton demand does nothing.
This can be difficult to do, but we now have an issue we can tackle head on and reach people who don’t think like we do. The microplastics issue gives us an outlet to both the outside world and our own homes. It’s time to start using it and get loud.
But, most of all, it’s time to start wearing cotton.
What does your closet look like?