Ecological Textiles is a Dutch company, started by Marita Bartelet in 2005. Marita graduated as a product developer in 1985 and has since been active in the environmental movement, as well as in the world of textiles. After a career in teaching and product development in a weaving mill, she worked as a councelor for the industry and for Rubia Natural Colours, an innovative company specialised in extracting natural dyes from plants. For over nineteen years the focus of Ecological Textiles is to bring together the best sustainable fabrics for fashion and interior.
Ecological Textiles offers fabrics, yarns and dyes that are manufactured and processed in a sustainable way. We almost exclusively work with natural materials such as cotton, wool, hemp, linen and silk, the only exception being tencel, a sustainably manufactured viscose.
GOTS
Ecological Textiles stands for sustainable production and only uses organic, GOTS certified cotton. We consider the GOTS certificate to be the best guarantee that the cotton not only comes from organic agriculture but also that the complete production chain (agriculture, ginning, spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing, finishing) is environmentally safe and that social standards for the workers have been respected: fair wages, good working conditions, certainly no forced or child labour.
Ecological Textiles itself is a GOTS-certified company since 2013.
All of our cotton- and most of our linen fabrics are organic and GOTS-certified. An increasing quantity of our organic woolen fabrics is GOTS certified as well. Hemp fabrics or fabrics containing hemp are sustainably produced but GOTS certified hemp fabrics simply aren’t available on the market.
One of the materials that some consider to be sustainable and eco friendly but that you won’t find in our webshop is recycled polyester. It’s becoming ever more clear that the nano particles coming from polyester clothing have desastrous effects on biodiversity. Even though from an eco friendly point of view, recycled polyesters seem much to be prefered to ‘virgin’ polyesters they continue to be a source of pollution.