By Jill Erzen

Sally Fox, a pioneer in growing organic cotton, built a career on proving people wrong.

Early on, she was told cotton couldn’t be grown without pesticides — and that even if it could, no one would buy it. Instead of backing down, she treated those claims as problems to solve.

“Everybody had been saying, ‘Oh, you can’t grow cotton organically. Oh, there’s no market for it.’ … You heard this your whole life … the more I heard it, the angrier I’d get,” she said on the “Real Organic Podcast,” part of the Real Organic Project.

Her story is gaining renewed relevance as brands increasingly market products as “organic” or “regenerative,” even as most textiles still rely on chemical-intensive dyeing and processing.

The disconnect has fueled confusion over what those labels actually mean — and whether they address the biggest sources of chemical exposure in clothing.

Rather than accept industry limits, Fox spent more than 40 years rethinking how textiles are made — from farm to finished fabric — aiming to eliminate toxic chemicals at every step.

Dyes are ‘just as toxic as pesticides’

That broader approach grew out of her deep roots in textile work. “I had been a hand spinner and a hand weaver and a hand knitter. So, my passion were textiles,” she said.

At first, her focus was on farming. She studied entomology and worked with insect-based pest control, looking for ways to reduce reliance on pesticides.

But a single conversation shifted her thinking beyond the field and into the full lifecycle of fabric.

A woman told Fox about her daughter, an art teacher who worked extensively with tie-dye chemicals but didn’t wear gloves.

“She shared this terrible story of her daughter … and the dyes got into her skin and migrated to her brain and made her a literal vegetable,” Fox said.

After that, Fox stopped using dyes in her own work. “Dyes are, in my mind now, they’re just as toxic as pesticides, if not more,” she said.

Instead of trying to make dyes safer, she aimed to eliminate them. In the 1980s, Fox began breeding cotton that grows in its own natural colors.

She started with a brown cotton variety she found tucked away in a drawer. It had useful traits, including resistance to insects and disease, but there was little demand for it. As she was told, “There’s no market for colored cotton.”

Fox decided to create the market.

Breeding cotton to grow without ‘horrific’ chemicals

At the time, white cotton dominated the industry — and required heavy chemical use. It was highly vulnerable to pests and widely treated with pesticides. Because it’s such a large global commodity, “every chemical company … found it worthwhile to register their chemicals on cotton,” Fox said.

Herbicides were “everywhere,” she said. Farmers also relied on chemical defoliants to prepare fields for machine harvesting. “You had to get the leaves to fall off before you could put the machine in the field,” she said, describing how chemicals were used to dry out plants ahead of picking.

“Defoliation was horrific, and a lot of people suffered, got asthma from it,” she said.

Exposure to these chemicals has been linked to respiratory problems and other health risks for farmworkers and nearby communities.

Fox saw an opportunity to solve multiple problems at once: develop cotton that didn’t require pesticides, defoliants or dyes.

But the raw material wasn’t ready. Early versions of naturally colored cotton had short, weak fibers that couldn’t meet industry demands.

Fox spent years using traditional plant breeding to improve cotton quality so it could be spun and woven on modern equipment.

“It had a lot of things it needed to be in order to be commercially produced and used, and that’s what I focused on,” she said.

Dyeless cotton creates ‘big chance’ to ditch pesticides

As the fiber improved, textile mills saw the financial benefits and began to take an interest. Dyeing fabric generates significant waste, and new environmental regulations, like the Clean Water Act, made disposal increasingly expensive.

“All dyeing requires first bleaching, then dyeing,” Fox said, noting that both steps create toxic waste that must be treated.

“The cost of the cleanup ended up being two to three times the cost of the dyeing,” she said.

Naturally colored cotton removed that burden — and that got the industry’s attention.

Companies, including Levi Strauss & Co., came on board. They were drawn less by environmental concerns than by savings. They didn’t care that it was pesticide-free; they wanted the natural color.

“No one knew they were buying organic,” she said. “I’m the one that wanted organic, so I took this as my big chance.”

Fox used that momentum to push her priorities. As production expanded to thousands of acres, she worked directly with farmers to reduce chemical use. “If you want to grow for me, this is what I want from you … I want you to help me figure out how to do this organically,” she said.

Her focus remained clear: “What mattered to me was to not expose farmworkers and the people who lived in rural areas to all these pesticides,” she said.

‘High-quality, amazing industries … wiped out’

Just as Fox’s model was gaining traction with companies like Gap Inc., the broader industry shifted.

In the 1990s, major brands moved production overseas to cut costs, often to countries like China, India and Indonesia with weaker environmental enforcement. Fox said companies relocated to places where dye waste could be discharged into rivers and where “labor happened to be cheaper, too.”

Even where regulations existed, “no one was enforcing the rules,” she said.

The shift changed not just where textiles were made, but how they were marketed.

Fox had long been producing organic cotton, but brands had focused on its natural color and cost savings. Now, “organic” became the selling point — even as processing remained largely unchanged.

“What took over was this organic cotton that was white, dyed in every color possible,” she said. “All of a sudden, the sustainability story had to be that you were using organic cotton, and not a word about how is it processed.”

She added:

“The focus became, let’s pick on farming, and let’s leave our part of the story out. We’re not going to talk about how we are putting our color in. We’re not going to talk about that we are dumping dye waste. We’re not going to talk about exploiting workers. We’re not going to talk about any of that. We’re only going to talk about how we should be using cotton that doesn’t have pesticides.”

The consequences were swift. “In two or three years … every single mill I was selling to — I was selling to 38 mills around the world — every one of them went out of business. Every single one. Not one left,” she said.

Meanwhile, profits surged. Despite lower production costs, brand-name companies kept retail prices consistent. “Instead of making 20%, they’re starting to make 80% profits,” Fox said. Many smaller textile businesses disappeared.

“High-quality, amazing industries. … Just like that, wiped out,” she said.

New labels, same problems?

Fox sees a similar pattern today in the rise of new marketing terms.

“Everybody … jumped to the word ‘regenerative’ and dumped ‘organic,’” Fox said.

She suggested the shift occurred because brand-name companies that had moved their production to Southeast Asia realized the products they were getting weren’t actually organic, despite being certified as such.

To tamp down bad publicity, some companies moved production back to the U.S. while adopting new language, according to Fox.

“I don’t think there’s any advantage of putting anybody down … but here we had this chance to grow our market back for our organic growers and, boom, gone again because … all the big brands just went to ‘regenerative,’” she said.

Fox criticized the term as meaningless, saying it doesn’t mean no pesticides. “It’s such a good word, right? Just like ‘natural.’ ‘Regenerative,’ whatever. These words without a definition,” she said.

‘If the fiber in your clothing has toxins, you get them in your system’

For Fox, the stakes go beyond farming or manufacturing — they reach consumers directly.

“Your skin is your largest organ in your body. And it actually is absorbing things. … If the fiber in your clothing has toxins, you get them in your system. So, if you were wearing clothing that has toxic dyes on it, you are getting them,” she said.

Fox also raised concerns about synthetic fibers like polyester, which shed persistent microfibers into the environment and the body. “These microfibers are building up and gumming up the works. It’s actually highly toxic,” she said.

“And so people wearing those clothes, yes, they’re cheap, [but] they’re poisoning themselves,” she said.

Today, Fox continues to produce organic, naturally colored cotton, with a focus on durability and reducing chemical exposure across the product lifecycle.

“I design yarns and fabrics for products that are going to last 30 to 50 years,” she said.

She questioned the assumptions driving modern consumption. “This idea that you need all these clothes that you’re going to throw away — where does this idea come from?” she asked.

For Fox, the solution isn’t just better materials, but a different mindset.

“If we start talking about textiles as art and craft and something we treasure … then it changes the conversation,” she said.

Watch Fox on the ‘Real Organic Podcast’ here:

Related articles in The Defender

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• Over 300 Toxic Chemicals, Including Drugs and Pesticides, Found in Baby Clothes
• EPA Reapproves ‘Dangerous’ Pesticide That ‘Threatens Farmers’ Livelihoods’
• MAHA Movement Faces Uphill Battle as Trump Administration Wages War on Organic Agriculture

The post The Dirty Secret Behind ‘Clean’ Cotton: Why Organic Fiber Isn’t Enough appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.

 

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