Pick out any shirt from your closet and you’ll like find cotton listed as a material used in its production. While you generally find the words “organic” and “sustainable” littering the aisles of your local grocery store, those buzzwords are now finding their way to retailer shelves. [More]
cotton
Walmart Pulls Welspun Not-Egyptian Cotton Sheets From Stores, Offers Refunds
By 9.9.16
After Target pulled sheets that it says were mislabeled as Egyptian cotton from its shelves, dropped the supplier, and offered refunds to customers, other stores that carry products from the same supplier conducted their own reviews. Walmart announced today that it will no longer sell the company’s Egyptian cotton sheets and will give shoppers refunds, but won’t drop the company as a supplier like Target did. [More]
H&M Offering $1M Prize Every Year For Best Clothes-Recycling Idea
By 8.26.15
In a shopping culture where it’s easy to find something you like, when you want it, for a price that’s on the cheaper side, many of us end up simply chucking clothes we don’t want when we buy replacements. In an effort to combat that “disposable” clothing culture, H&M is offering up a $1 million prize every year for the best idea on how to recycle those unwanted garments, and keep them out of the trash. [More]
The Very Long Journey Of A Cotton T-Shirt Before The Fabric Is Even Woven
By 11.21.13
Over at NPR’s Planet Money, they’ve had a dream for a few years now. That dream: to make a t-shirt for their listeners, and sell it to them. Not just to design and make a t-shirt, but to follow the entire supply chain from the cotton farm to the final silk-screening. This year, they finally achieved that glorious and nerdy dream. [More]
Rising Cotton Costs Make Paper Money More Expensive To Print
By 3.8.11
Even though it’s referred to as “paper” money, most of the material used to produce U.S. banknotes is actually cotton. And with raw cotton costs at a 140-year high, it’s costing more money to print money. [More]
Analyst: Material, Labor Costs Increases Will Inflate Clothing Prices
By 2.15.11
Clothing prices have dropped for years thanks to cheap overseas labor, but increases in those labor costs as well as an increase in the cost of materials such as cotton could cause prices to rise. [More]
Buy Your Jeans Now Before Cotton Prices Go Up
By 11.4.10
It’s been a bad year for cotton-producing regions in India, China and Pakistan and the price of cotton has skyrocketed since the summer. So before retailers begin tacking this cost of materials increase onto the consumer, the forward-thinking people at SmartMoney.com have put together a list of what items you should stock up on. [More]
Evil Mutant Cotton Sneaks Into H&M "Organic" Clothing
By 1.27.10
Global fast fashion retailer H&M and European chains C&A and Tchibo have been caught selling misleading “organic cotton” products to consumers. Independent testing done by Germany’s Financial Times showed that 30% of the samples contained genetically modified strains of cotton. Oops. [More]
Putting Tampons Through Rigorous Comedy Testing
By 7.7.09
The last time Consumer Reports tested tampons was in 1995. Fortunately, Ball Saxbury is here. He bought a variety of tampons and tested them to see which is the least absorbent. Because, who better to test tampons than a man using next to no actual science? Exactly.
