This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy (see proformagreen.com). John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.
As you know we really like the organic cotton totes from Gemline.
Well we often get questions about the source of this cotton and other organic cotton used in our industry so we decided to ask Gemline for some answers. Clif Jordan the Regional Manager (South West) for Gemline was nice enough to send some answers.
According to Clif the organic cotton for Gemline bags comes mostly from Pakistan and sometimes India. All cotton used by Gemline is fair trade product and is Certified Organic Cotton, which means a licensed third party international agency (in this case the Control Union headquartered in the Netherlands) certifies the cotton’s origin and its authenticity. Gemline also offers eco-friendly inks and provides more information on their inks on their website.
Although most bag construction is done overseas the imprinting is done in the United States, unless the order is large enough for a full overseas production, say 10,000+ units. Most orders are under 100 units.
If you want to contact Clif directly with questions on Gemline’s items his email is cjordan@gemline.com. The Gemline website also has details on many of their products, www.gemline.com. You can of course also contact me at info@proformagreen.com.
So the bottom line for Ecopreneurists is, if you have questions about your vendor’s sources ask them. If vendors can’t answer your questions, I suggest you move along to someone that can.
We have asked the same questions about organic cotton supplies to Norwood, Leeds and Debco Bag. We will post their responses – when we get them – as well.
Adventures in Green Marketing 
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