Misconceptions about purified cotton

Freshly picked cotton has roughly 650,000 colony-forming units (CFUs) within it, which means it is filled with moulds, fungi,  bacteri  etc., and has to be purified.

As the specialist in total chlorine free (TCF) bleaching, Barnhardt Cotton stresses that its process is actually ‘oxygen bleaching’, in which hydrogen peroxide is used to purify and whiten the raw cotton and as such completely safe for the environment.

Overall, bleached cotton has a variety of advantages including:

• It has lower microbiological counts.
• Compared to unbleached cotton, bleached cotton has a long history of safety in medical and feminine care applications.
• Bleached cotton meets USP, EP and JP criteria for purity, while unbleached does not.
• Facilities running unbleached cotton must meet the OSHA cotton dust standards, which are not applicable for bleached cotton.
• Bleached cotton is far more absorbent in fiber form, while unbleached cotton fiber is nonabsorbent.
• It’s also extremely white and clean, giving an immediate impression of purity.
• No genetically modified organism (GMO) DNA is present in bleached and purified cotton, unlike cotton in its unbleached state.

The many misconceptions about bleached cotton are mostly due to the word ‘bleached’, but Barnhardt believes that as consumers become increasingly aware that the process is carried out with a completely safe product found in the cabinets of most households, any negative connotations will slowly start to disappear.