Cotton ad rapped over "sustainable" claim

The US cotton industry has become the latest group to fall foul of the advertising watchdog over its environmental claims, after it was banned from using an ad campaign claiming cotton is "sustainable".

The magazine ad and poster from the Cotton Council International (CCI) featured a tag line that read: "Soft, sensual and sustainable, it's Cotton USA" .

The advert attracted three complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority challenging the use of the term "sustainable" and claiming that cotton is a pesticide- and insecticide-intensive crop that could also seriously deplete groundwater supplies in the High Plains region of the US where much of the country's cotton was grown. One of the complainants also argued that US cotton subsidies had a negative impact on cotton farmers in the developing world, particularly in West Africa.

The CCI challenged the complaints, arguing that whether produced organically or conventionally US cotton production met generally accepted definitions for the term "sustainable", including definitions from the UN, the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Congress.

It added that while definitions did vary the "basic principles" of economic viability, protection for the environment and social responsibility remained constant and were met by the US cotton industry.

The body cited research claiming that modern cotton production was neither pesticide nor water intensive and argued that the emergence of GM crops was further reducing the industry's environmental impact.

It also argued that "the alternative to efficient and sustainable global production of conventional cotton fibre was synthetic chemical fibre production ", that use petroleum as a base, while the "undeniable difficulties" of cotton farmers in West Africa were attributed to a wide range of factors, including " corporate monopolies in the region and the rejection of biotech (GM) cotton by farmers there".

However, while accepting that there were a wide range of definitions for the term sustainable the ASA upheld the complaints and banned the ads, noting that Defra's "Green Claims Code" clearly states that the term "sustainability" should be avoided.

It also noted that much of the research cited by the CCI detailing cotton's limited environmental impact was contradicted by alternative study's claiming it is pesticide intensive and contributing to ground water depletion.

The watchdog concluded that "because there was no universally agreed definition of the term "sustainable" and there appeared to be a significant division of informed opinion as to whether cotton production in the US could be described as "sustainable" or not… [the] ad was likely to be ambiguous and unclear to consumers".