Neil Young asks fans to boycott non-organic cotton

Young has been giving away free organic cotton t-shirts on his recent tour. In a post on his official website, Young has stated that he’ll be boycotting non-organic cotton henceforth and would like it if fans joined him in his protest.

Here are the reasons Young gives for his boycott:

• Cotton is the most widely used textile crop on earth - covering almost 5% of Earth’s cultivated land
• Cotton is second for most pesticide use of all crops & it uses 25% of all of the petrochemical based pesticides, fungicides and herbicides globally
• In the US, it takes about 1/3 of a pound of pesticides and herbicides to grow enough conventional cotton for just one T-shirt.
• The Environmental Protection Agency considers seven of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton in the United States as “possible,” “likely,” “probable,” or “known” human carcinogens (acephate, dichloropropene, diuron, fluometuron, pendimethalin, tribufos, and trifluralin)
• These chemicals absorb into the soil which can affect nearby crops, get into water supplies and rivers and affect many lifeforms downstream
• Because cotton is grown primarily for its fiber, it is regulated as a non-food crop yet the majority of the cotton plant in the form of cottonseed, approximately 60% by weight, ends up in our food supply.
• Most cotton is heavily processed using additional resources for stripping, waxing, bleaching, dying and softening
• 2,700 liters of water is used to grow the cotton for just 1 t-shirt!!!( & that doesn’t even account for the processing dying etc….)
• That’s enough water for 1 person to drink for 900 days or enough water to flush your ( non low flow) toilet 270 times!
• All this & then there’s all the energy consumption as well in growing, manufacturing, processing, transportation etc….

You can find more info here.