Cotton LEADS Launched at Australian Fashion Week

Cotton Australia chose Australian Fashion Week as the venue to unveil Cotton LEADS to Australian designers, retailers and brand owners today.

As part of a seminar looking at current trends in international design and retailing strategy, Cotton Australia’s Brooke Summers spoke to around 100 industry insiders about the story of Cotton LEADS and what it hopes to achieve in lifting the standards of cotton production around the world.

“Cotton LEADS is about recognising that cotton growers in the US and Australia are the best in the world at producing responsible, high quality crops for the world’s texile market. Over the last 20 years our growers have been quietly working away at developing their sustainability credentials, to the point now where Australia’s cotton growers are recognised amongst the most sustainable in the world,” Ms Summers said.

“We are the most water efficient, we produce three times as much cotton for the same amount of land compared to the rest of the world, we’re using 95% less pesticides than we did 15 years ago, we look after our workers and we’re constantly looking for ways to reduce the resources that go into producing bales of cotton that eventually end up as yarn and finished products,” she said.

“We’ve recently seen a renewed emphasis placed on corporate social responsibility in the world of textiles and design and as it should be. Cotton Australia believes that responsibility belongs to everybody in the supply chain from the farmers that grow the crops right through to the finished products when they’re delivered to the marketplace.

“Cotton LEADS can offer some assurances to companies in the world that are interested in their corporate social responsibility and who want to be using responsibly produced inputs. We can’t control what happens at every step of the supply chain, but we can be responsible for what happens on our farms, in our gins and right up to the point when our bales are delivered to a spinning mill,” Ms Summers said.