Hello and welcome to wellness with Liz Earl where today we are slipping between the sheets to learn all about the importance of organic cotton, both for

ourselves and for the farmers who produce it and the wider impact that this all has on our

environment at large.

And I'm very delighted to be joined here

by Rebecca Winkworth, a founder of the Irish organic cotton

brand, white and green.

And Rebecca, you're so welcome here in my little studios. and I guess my first question to you has to be why organic cotton and you are a young slip of a thing what set you off on this journey to source it.

Okay, so it started several years ago. My first profession is as a singer and I was traveling all over the world, primarily through Asia, so China, Japan, and I started to question

why some countries had developed so much quicker than others and especially you

know the resource-rich countries were economically poor than and vice versa and

I realized that the international trading system is quite unequal between developed and developing worlds.

And then I said, I'm going to park the singing career for a while and go and study development.

And through my academic studies I became very passionate about the

textiles industry in particular cotton.

As you know cotton is the world's most important non-food crop.

We consume over 24 million tons annually,

but it's also a highly polluting crop.

It uses over 25% of the world pesticides.

So this, as I learned more and more about cotton,

I became a little bit worried about how

myself as a consumer about how I was contributing to this really

environmentally damaging industry and then on the other side, we also have cotton being known as white gold and industry renowned for slavery,

...