I recently visited the exhibition: Cotton; Labour, Land and Body at the Crafts Council in London, which focuses on the intricate social history and dark legacy of one of the most profitable crops in the world today: Cotton.
Traditional Cotton Production
Conventional cotton is made from natural fibres and is a fabric found in many wardrobe staples such as jeans and t-shirts. Compared to other common clothing fibres such as synthetic polyester, semi-synthetic rayon and bamboo, cotton has the advantage of being a completely natural product, which means it’s biodegradable. Although cotton itself is a natural and biodegradable fibre, growing cotton requires the use of acutely toxic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. The cultivation and production of this textile is haunted by environmental issues and claims of pollution, exploitation, and slavery.
The Exhibition
Linking South Asia with migration, labour, technology and the industrial links to the North of England, the exhibition also explores the work of several artists including Bharti Parmar, a visual artist and academic with a particular interest in vernacular crafts and systems, which she often subverts to make political statements; Raisa Kabir, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and weaver who’s work explores open colonial legacies and the heritage of Bangladeshi weaving, shining a light on labour, migration and the fragmentation of place; Reetu Sattar, an artist working across performance, video, text, objects and photography exploring the impact of colonialism on muslin, a rare cotton fabric that has longstanding historical and indigenous links to undivided Bengal – her film Shabnam explores the historic and continuing relationship between East Lancashire and Bangladesh in the continuous cycle for the supply and demand of textiles and Brigid McLeer, who’s work Collateral memorialises the deaths of garment factory workers, highlighting the cost of human life and the true meaning of value in the globalised fashion system.
Brigid McLeer is an Irish artist and educator based in London. Her work explores how our lives intersect with historic events, and the capacity of images to ‘act’ within politicised art practices. She works across various media including video, performance, photography, drawing and writing. Her site-based installation, Collateral, was originally commissioned for Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Lancashire.
Fashion Revolution was founded by Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, also depicted in McLeer’s work Collateral. Fashion Revolution week happens every year in the week coinciding with 24th April, the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh.
The Rana Plaza building housed a number of garment factories, employing around 5,000 people. The people in this building were manufacturing clothing for many of the biggest global fashion brands. The building collapsed and killed 1,134 people and injured more than 2,500 others, making it the fourth largest industrial disaster in history. The victims were mostly young women.
During Fashion Revolution Week, we remember the lives lost and demand that no one should die for fashion. Fashion Revolution has grown to become the world’s largest fashion activism movement, mobilising citizens, brands and policymakers through research, education and advocacy.
” WE ARE A GLOBAL MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE WHO MAKE THE FASHION INDUSTRY WORK. WE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO WEAR CLOTHES. AND WE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THEM”.
FASHION REVOLUTION
I wanted to investigate this further and look not only at the history of conventional cotton, but also at sustainable alternatives and some of the ethical brands that are reclaiming cotton and helping to change the narrative.
The history of cotton
During the pre-industrial era, Indian cotton was sold globally, but industrialisation and colonisation changed how it was produced and manufactured. Britain started their own production of cotton cloth from 1750 onwards, disabling the development of India’s handloom industry. The cotton crops used to weave this textile in Manchester were mostly imported from slave plantations. In fact, slavery provided the raw material for industrial change and growth.
Today, Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of garments globally and the fashion industry has an estimated value of £1.4 trillion. The legacy of Britain’s relationship to cotton lives on in South Asia’s textile industry today, defined by low wages, precarious working conditions and detrimental environmental consequences.
From being the crop that launched 1.8 million slaves, cotton has done a lot of cleaning up its image since colonial days, but how much has it really changed? We all use cotton daily and we see it advertised as the sustainable and ethical material to look for. But is it really?
According to DNFI (Discover Natural Fibres Initiative), 25 million tons of cotton is produced every year. It’s crucial to take a closer look at some of the issues, concerns and solutions to the production of this material.
The use of pesticides & insecticides
While growing cotton accounts for only 3% of all cultivated land, it also accounts for 20% of all chemical pesticides used in agriculture and uses eight times more chemicals than an average food crop; according to the Environmental Justice Foundation, an organisation that works internationally to inform policy and drive systemic, durable reforms to protect our environment and defend human rights, the cultivation of conventional cotton uses 22.5% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides. Between the chemicals used to grow enough cotton to make one t-shirt and the ones used in the various stages of production and dyeing, cotton is the second most pesticide and chemical-laden crop in the world.
” A STUDY OF RAIN WATER IN A BRAZILIAN COTTON REGION FOUND THAT RAIN WATER CONTAINED 19 DIFFERENT PESTICIDES – 12 OF WHICH WERE USED IN COTTON PRODUCTION”.
THE WORLD COUNTS
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are known to be harmful to the environment, animals and the people who interact with them. According to the World Health Organization, 20,000 deaths result from pesticide poisoning in third-world countries each year. Medical research has shown that some pesticides have the potential to affect nervous, hormonal or immune systems. According to Pan UK, there are many studies showing that chronic exposure to pesticides may increase the risk of a wide range of serious health problems, including certain cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma and brain cancer, neurological problems such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, respiratory diseases, some birth defects, spontaneous abortions and reproductive problems such as reduced sperm count and sterility, decreased intelligence, behavioural abnormalities and a weakened immune system.
Some of the common pesticides used in conventional cotton cultivation are:
Aldicarb: A powerful nerve agent and one of the most toxic pesticides applied to cotton worldwide and the 2nd most used pesticide in global cotton production.
Aldrin: A pesticide applied to soils to kill termites, grasshoppers and other insect pests.
Chlordane: Used extensively to control termites and as a broad-spectrum insecticide on a range of agricultural crops including cotton.
Deltamethrin: A nerve agent that is applied in over half of the cotton-producing countries.
Dieldrin: Used to control termites and textile pests, dieldrin has also been used to control insect-borne diseases and insects living in agricultural soils.
Endosulfan: Widely used in cotton production and is the dominant pesticide in the cotton sector in 19 countries worldwide.
Endrin: This insecticide is sprayed on the leaves of crops such as cotton and is also used to control mice, voles and other rodents.
Heptachlor: Primarily employed to kill soil insects and termites, heptachlor has also been used more widely to kill cotton insects, grasshoppers, other crop pests, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Monocrotophos: Despite being withdrawn from the US market in 1989, it is widely used in developing world countries.
Toxaphene: This insecticide, also called camphechlor, is applied to cotton, and has also been used to control ticks and mites in livestock.
The onslaught of chemical use continues well past the cultivation process, as a wide variety of hazardous chemicals are also used in conventional cotton processing. According to The World Counts, an organisation created to raise awareness of important global challenges, and to be an inspiration for taking action, up to 8,000 chemicals can be used in the production and processing of textiles for dyeing, treating and finishing, for example – printing inks used for clothing are typically made from PVC, phthalates and other harmful chemicals.
DYES AND CHEMICAL FINISHES
Dyes and chemical finishes are often applied to garments to greatly improve their wearability and functionality and give them various properties, such as shrink resistance, crease resistance, odour resistance, water-repellency; treatments such as anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-static, permanent-press, flame and soil retardants and easy care or or to improve their appearance, such as sandblasting, and fading (in denim particularly), and colour, adding a further mixture of potentially harmful chemicals to the cocktail.
Dyes and garment finishes are known to result in an array of health problems such as skin rashes, headache, trouble concentrating, nausea, diarrhoea, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, dizziness, difficulty breathing, irregular heart beat and even seizures.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, many of the hazardous chemicals once used by the textile and clothing industry have been banned, in particular chemicals found as residues in clothes that have been proven to cause cancer, such as benzidine, linked to “exceptionally elevated risks” of bladder cancer, but other hazardous chemicals used commonly in the textile industry such as lead, nickel, chromium IV, aryl amines, phthalates, ammonia, azo and heavy metal-based dyes, formaldehyde, petroleum scours, chlorine, potassium permanganate (PP), Sodium hypochlorite and softeners continue to be used.
The water usage
As cotton is primarily grown in countries with arid conditions, it requires a lot of water to grow it. This means that not only are vast amounts of water used to grow cotton for clothes every year, but the production is also contributing to water pollution. It can take thousands of litres of water to produce enough cotton for just one t-shirt and even then, water gets polluted by the use of chemicals in the production and dyeing processes as river systems are often where this wastewater gets disposed in.
According to The World Counts:
“IT TAKES 10,000 LITRES OF WATER TO PRODUCE 1 KILO OF COTTON, MEANING IT TAKES ABOUT 2,700 LITRES TO MAKE 1 COTTON T-SHIRT. WHEN YOU BUY COTTON CLOTHING YOU THEREFORE “USE” WATEWR FROMWHEREVER THE COTTON WAS GROWN AND PRODUCED.”
Conventional textile dyeing and finishing of raw cotton fibre is both a thirsty and polluting business. It’s estimated that processing (including spinning, dyeing, finishing) a kilogram of fibre requires 100 to 150 litres of water.
According to Denim Dudes, a creative design consultancy and commentator about denim and culture, after-treatments are nearly always applied to denim in order to give jeans a worn or vintage look. Traditional stone washed denim requires more than 70 litres of water simply to eliminate sand residues, and to achieve an acid wash with a light base colour, it requires 2/3 baths as the bleaching agent needs rotation to work effectively.
Once the 4th largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea in Central Asia, has shrunk to just ten percent of its former volume – mainly because of irrigation for cotton cultivation. It has been called one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters by the UN.
According to World Wildlife Fund (WWF), runoff of pesticides, fertilizers, and minerals from cotton fields contaminates rivers, lakes, wetlands, and underground aquifers. These pollutants affect biodiversity directly by immediate toxicity or indirectly through long-term accumulation. In China, it is estimated that 70% of the rivers and lakes are contaminated by the 2.5 billion gallons of wastewater produced by the fashion industry.
The human cost
With its roots in the slave trade, the cotton industry certainly has a dubious past and although most forced labour has been eliminated from Uzbekistan’s cotton fields, there are issues in places such as West and Central Africa and Brazil.
Here, farmers cannot compete with the cost of US-subsidised cotton and consequently, child labour is often used at various stages of the cotton production process and even after the plants have been harvested. The cotton industry is notorious for the use of sweatshops and child labour and the conditions under which workers refine and process the raw cotton can amount to bonded labour. According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, 175 million children around the globe are employed in agriculture, in a variety of tasks including cottonseed production, harvesting the cotton and pesticide spraying.
Children are particularly vulnerable to poisoning, and are often the first victims of pesticide poisoning, even if they do not participate in crop spraying, due to the proximity of their homes to cotton fields or because of the re-use of empty pesticide containers. Children are also at risk of injury from machinery and arduous labour.
Although we might think this is an issue so far away from us, it is still happening.
GMO Cotton
There are some scary statistics surrounding cotton farming in the 21st century. Genetically modified (GMO) cotton is resistant against different insects, diseases and lack of water, leading farmers to expect bigger harvests, and now accounts for 89% of the cotton planted in India, and globally 75% of all cotton is genetically modified.
There are two main types of GMOs:
The first type is ‘Bt-cotton’, which is modified so that it will produce a poison that kills insects. The substance produced by Bt cotton is toxic for the larvae of moths, cotton bollworms and beetles, to prevent these animals from damaging the plant.
The second type is made resistant to herbicides, such Monsanto’s Roundup. This herbicide is designed to kill all the weeds and plants surrounding the genetically modified cotton so that there will no longer be competition with other plants for nutrients or water.
It would therefore seem that GMO has many benefits, however sadly GMO cotton also has a very dark side – it has even been suggested that the introduction of GMO cotton has tangibly worsened the lives of Indian farmers.
GMO cotton seeds have also been modified so they can’t reproduce, meaning that farmers can’t retain seeds for the following crop but must buy new seeds each year. On top of this, due to the high demand for cotton seeds and government-regulated prices, many farmers must buy their GMO cotton seeds on the black market for prices much higher than the market value, contributing to their web of debt and the poor quality of their lives. Another issue is that although GMO cotton is supposed to be a pest repellent, this is not always working, so farmers are having to purchase pesticides as well as pay more for their seeds.
Of all commercial seeds more than half of them are in hands of only 3 firms: Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. These big multinationals force farmers to be dependent on expensive seeds and matching pesticides. Who does not or cannot join, is excluded and has to sell his land or becomes a slave of the system. This has a big impact on the mental wellbeing of cotton farmers and has led to thousands of suicides of cotton farmers in certain countries; by 2015, more than 12,500 Indian cotton farmers had died by suicide.
CONVENTIONAL COTTON ALTERNATIVES
Although the consequences of conventional cotton production bring us to say that this material is not and cannot ever be sustainable and ethical, there are a lot of alternatives that reduce its traditional social and environmental impacts.
Sourcing cotton from certified sustainable farming via international standards and farming programmes for example, GOTS or Fairtrade certification, can make a major difference to cotton’s water footprint. A lifecycle assessment of organic cotton fibre by Textile Exchange, published in 2014, found that water consumption drops by 91 percent with organic cotton compared to conventional cotton. Research by the Soil Association also suggests that pesticide use would drop by 98 percent if all cotton farming was switched to organic.
Reducing or removing water from the dyeing process would also reduce or eliminate the levels of toxic effluents, which end up as pollutants in local water systems. That’s why industry interest is growing in new water-less technologies for dyeing and processing textiles for fashion and footwear.
Another cotton initiative is the use of certain enzymes traditionally used in the food and brewing industries which are increasingly being used in the processing of cotton for removing the sizing prior to dyeing and are best known for making denim production a cleaner and more environmentally friendly process.
These enzymes can fade indigo colour to a pre-determined degree and can also assist in cleaning the waste indigo dye water after dyeing. Experiments have been carried out to genetically engineer a blue colour into cotton by imparting a “blue” gene into the plant, with the aim of negating the necessity of using indigo dye in denim products. This research remains “ongoing”, but the aim is to address the polluting effects of the traditional indigo dyeing process.
Blockchain Bext 360
An increasing number of new tech solutions are seeing the light of day to help businesses trace their cotton: blockchain is one of these new technologies that can help the fashion industry become more ethical and sustainable. In fact, blockchain startup Bext360 has partnered with several fashion brands, such as C&A, PVH Corp and Kering, as well as organisations such as Fashion For Good and C&A Foundation.
The company aims to bring more transparency to cotton supply chains by enabling businesses to verify the origins and ethics of the raw materials, fabrics, and garments they purchase.
Naturally pigmented cotton
These naturally coloured agricultural cotton fibres are an alternative to conventional cotton. The fibre comes from the seed, usually grown organically, and requires less processing than traditional cotton because it does not require dyeing or bleaching, therefore avoiding the impacts associated with colouration.
Naturally coloured cotton totally eliminates the process of colouration as this cotton has a coloured gene present in the lumen of the fibre that imparts natural colour to cotton as it grows and matures.
Naturally coloured cotton can be found in a variety of colours ranging from beige, red, earth brown, chocolate brown, green, yellow, red, pink, and white.
There are a number of problems associated with these cotton varieties, such as short staple and fineness that has limited their appeal.
A strain of brown cotton grown in India has overcome this by being woven into distinctive waffle textures, exploiting the yarns naturally twisted structure which does not need mercerisation.
Cleaner Cotton™
The Cleaner Cotton Campaign is an effort led by the Sustainable Cotton Project in California to reduce the environmental impact of cotton cultivation and production.
The cotton is not organic, but it is a low-impact one. It can be found under the trademarked name, Cleaner Cotton™.
The Sustainable Cotton Project introduces conventional growers to biological systems, which they often use in managing their other crops, in addition to their cotton.
Cleaner Cotton™ has been a stepping-stone for farmers that would like to transition to more organic practices.
Supima Cotton™
Pima cotton, like all cotton, is an agricultural fibre that comes from its seed and is grown primarily in the southwest region of the United States, Peru, Australia, and a few other countries. It is named after the Pima Native Americans who first cultivated the plant in the US, but its origins date back to its cultivation in Peru.
Pima cotton is of particularly high quality and is considered to be one of the superior blends of cotton, although it is not necessarily organic. It is known for its lustre and silkiness, its extreme durability and absorbency as well as being fully biodegradable and recyclable. Supima™ is a trademarked name for Pima cotton grown in the US and guarantees the authenticity of its 100% pure, non-blended fibre. Supima™ enables complete transparency across the entire supply from the fibre and yarn to the fabric and finished product at retail.
Cotton Made in Africa
In many parts of the world, cotton is grown in large plantations, but in Africa it is almost exclusively grown by smallholder farmers, using crop rotation; in other words the cotton is grown alternately with other crops such as the basic food crops maize, soy or groundnuts, which reduces leaching of soils and the occurrence of pests. Cotton is often a complementary cash crop – it is grown for sale, alongside the foods grown in subsistence farming.
The growing methods which farmers are taught by Cotton made in Africa (CmiA) help smallholder farmers in Benin, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Malawi and Cote d’Ivoire and plays an important part in securing their food supplies. Cotton made in Africa is cultivated using sustainable methods which means that the cotton is grown in rain-fed cultivation with effective, responsible use of pesticides and fertilizer, and is harvested by hand. This can involve “threshold spraying”, i.e. not using preventive spraying, but spraying only if certain damage thresholds are exceeded, that is if the pest or pathogen attack is so serious that it is likely to cause economic damage. The damage threshold principle requires intensive training of farmers, but also permits reduction of pesticide use by up to 30%.
Cotton made in Africa has defined the requirements for growing in a Criteria Catalogue and checks compliance by regular verification.
Better Cotton™
The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) is a non-profit, multistakeholder governance group that aims to promote measurable improvements in the key environmental and social impacts of cotton cultivation worldwide to make it more economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable.
The BCI aims to facilitate a solution for the mainstream cotton sector by developing a market for a new mainstream commodity: “Better Cotton™”, which involves enabling farmers to grow and sell “Better Cotton” through minimising the harmful impact of crop protection practices, using water efficiently, caring for the health of the soil, conserving natural habitats, caring for and preserving the quality of the fibre, promoting “Decent Work”, and adopting better farm management practices, supported by activities that build effective producer organisations, improve access to finance and provide training which should also lead to improved productivity and an improved financial situation for farmers and cotton farm workers.
The BCI concept of “Decent Work” is that originated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to describe work that provides opportunities for women and men to work productively in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity.
As of 2017, Better Cotton accounts for 14% of global cotton production and today almost a quarter of the world’s cotton is produced under the Better Cotton Standard, with 2.4 million cotton farmers having been trained in sustainable farming practices and are licensed to grow Better Cotton.
Organic Cotton
For cotton to be considered organic, it must be farmed without the use of pesticides, synthetic chemical fertilizers, and genetically engineered seeds (GMO seeds). This leads to healthy soils and healthy harvests and biodiversity is boosted.
Organic cotton is typically more expensive than conventional cotton due to lower crop yields, however organic cotton farmers also receive a premium price for their quality cotton. Seeds are cheaper than Bt cotton, helping farmers escape the cycle of debt and poverty.
Organic farming works in harmony with nature and eliminates highly toxic substances from the environment and instead works holistically, for the long-term benefit of people and the planet. Farmers make the most of natural systems and techniques like crop rotation, green manures and composting to grow their crops and natural forms of pest control are used instead. This in turn means that the land can also be used to grow food alongside the cotton crops and eliminates the risk of harmful substances potentially entering the food chain through water supplies.
The cultivation of organic cotton also uses less water than conventional cotton as the richer soil retains more moisture, but irrigation is still often required. Irrigation is typically relied on for the water supply of most crops, but it can damage ecosystems and drain underground water supplies. To combat diminishing water supplies, wastewater recycling programs are often developed and implemented for irrigation and manufacturing purposes of organic cotton.
Organic Certification
Organic cotton must be third-party certified in order to meet rigorous production standards, which include manufacturing as well as agricultural methods. The UK-based Soil Association is one of over 100 such certification agencies worldwide, which are accredited and audited by various bodies such as the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movement or the US Department of Agriculture.
There are two independent organic certification standards in the UK:
In Europe, basic organic standards are set in a European Union Council’s Regulation from 1991. This regulation, ratified by EU member states, also regulates the word “organic” for agricultural products. In the USA, the basic standards for organic food products are set by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as part of the National Organic Programme (NOP), as these standards also apply to the cotton plant, because cotton, apart from the fibre, also produces food products in the form of vegetable oil and animal feed from cotton seed.
The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) is the worldwide leading textile processing standard for organic fibres, including ecological and social criteria, backed up by independent certification of the entire textile supply chain.
GOTS has a clearly defined set of criteria and is transparent and certifies final products that may include fibre products, yarns, fabrics, clothes, home textiles, mattresses, personal hygiene products, as well as food contact textiles.
There is still the issue of how organic cotton is processed and turned into clothing however, as unfortunately the EU Organic standards and USDA’s NOP do not address any of the many processes required to transform the fibre into fabric and therefore a garment could be made with organic cotton, but still be processed in mills with poor environmental practices that pollute waste waters with heavy metals, and could ultimately contain a high level of toxic chemical residues, so it’s important to make sure that companies using organic cotton also have robust labour policies in place.
Transitional Organic Cotton
In order for conventional cotton farms to become organically certified, they must go through a three-year cleansing process in order to rid the soil of harsh chemical fertilizers. Cotton that is within this stage of obtaining certification is classified as “Transitional Organic Cotton” or “Transitional Cotton”.
Recycled Cotton
Recycled cotton refers to the fabric or product that has been regenerated for a second life cycle. The source of this cotton can be cast-off material salvaged from the weaving and spinning process, scrap from clothing production, or post-consumer discarded material such as garments, upholstery, towels, and household items that can be repurposed. Recycling traditional cotton is still a more ethical practice than producing a new one because by recycling it, you are making the most of all the water wastage and environmental damage that has already been made.
Ethical Cotton Fashion Brands
The Classic T-Shirt Company
The Classic T-Shirt Company is a US brand that creates premium tees and ethical t-shirts with luxury and integrity. All of its products are GOTS-certified organic cotton, which means the cotton is not genetically modified, no toxic pesticides or fertilizers are used, a responsible amount of water is used, and the same land and soil can be reused harvest after harvest.
The Classic T-shirt Company have pledged 1% of their profits to charities that are making a difference, including Water for People, Armenia Tree Project, and The Ocean Cleanup.
No Nasties
No Nasties makes simple and stylish clothing from Fairtrade organic cotton in India where it is actively working to grow the ethical consumer market. They use GOTS Certified Organic Cotton, linen and hemp to make sustainable clothes and accessories as well as promote their circular system where all their customer’s old clothes don’t end up in landfill but are resold and / or upcycled into a new product.
Lanius
Lanius is a German brand that uses eco-friendly materials, like GOTS-certified cotton. All LANIUS facilities are SA8000 certified, based on internationally recognized standards of decent work, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ILO conventions, and national laws. LANIUS is also a member of the Fair Wear Foundation, a movement toward a world where garment workers see their human rights realised, where change is driven through freedom of association, and the global value chain a source of safe, dignified and properly paid employment; they also have a ‘care, repair and resell’ programme in place.
LANIUS believe that piece you buy is valuable and support customers in extending a garments lifespan as a way to reduce clothing waste and use resources more sparingly together. They provide videos of how to easily sew on buttons, darn holes and repair hems and also offer an EU-wide professional repair service.
You can re-sell your high quality branded fashion through their partner Buddy&Selly, or rent out your LANIUS favourites in their online shop at UNOWN.
You can also get a 20% discount on the rental price for your single leases by using the voucher code LANIUS20 in the checkout of the leasing process.
Little Emperor
Little Emperor creates unique, functional, and hard-wearing clothing for children. Its affordable clothing is made from environmentally friendly organic cotton.
Little Emperor garments are made in a factory regularly audited by Sedex, as well as OCC Apparel, Australia to ensure an above living wage, safe working conditions, and no forced overtime or workplace discrimination.
Products are shipped using a Hero Packaging 100% biodegradable, compostable mailing satchel – so from the materials and packaging, right down to the energy supplier and banking, Little Emperor is dedicated to environmentally friendly practices and is a member of 1% for the Planet, meaning 1% of sales are donated to environmental non-profits, helping protect the penguins’ home.
Hemlata answers the question: “Who Made My Clothes?” for Fashion Revolution Week 2019
