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Introduction
Organic production has become the gold standard of the sustainability movement and fashion products have not been an exception to this rule. However, there are situations when the organic standards are not a good fit for textile and apparel. The first issue is that organic standards can apply only to natural fibers and products made from natural fibers. Another issue is that the organic standards and certification process administered by the National Organic Program (NOP) under the United State Department of Agriculture (USDA) were designed to cover the production of food and food processing. This means that natural fibers must find a fit within the standards in as much as their production can be related to the production of food. Finally, while the NOP can certify natural fibers as organic, the certification of textile processing falls under a different, much less familiar organic standard, the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS). This means that while apparel and textile products can be labeled as "made from organic fibers," they can only be labeled as "organic" if they meet the additional requirements of [10] Global Organic Textile Standard (2011). Another certification system, the OEKO-TEX system, focusses on testing for the presence of harmful substances within textiles with separate certification level, OEKO-TEX Standard 100 plus, that includes certification that the textile was "produced at environmentally friendly production sites" according to their standard ([30] OEKO-TEX® Association, 2013).
Animal fiber producers especially face difficulties with the organic certification system. Their situation is much different from that of cotton, which is also a food product and has been a natural fit for the NOP crop standards. The certification and production of organic cotton has expanded rapidly since the NOP began certifying organic on a national scale in the USA in 2002 ([32] Organic Trade Association (OTA), 2011). In contrast, wool and specialty hair fibers fall under the livestock standards of the NOP, which administer requirements for the production of organic meat and dairy products. US wool producers report great difficulty in meeting the requirements to certify their herds, and hence their wool, as organic. The main issue is that many sheep ranchers cannot find a method of reliably preventing internal parasites without treatments banned for meat production under the NOP...