Cotton is ubiquitous. It’s in our closets, our first aid kits, our homes, our hospitals, and our supply chains. Breathable, soft, sturdy, and versatile, its fibers are used to make everything from bandages to T-shirts to bookbindings to mattresses.
We use cotton every day, but rarely do we know where our cotton comes from. From field to factory to final sale, the journey a bale of cotton takes is long and complex. The brand of your favorite pair of jeans is often obvious. But which farm grew the cotton to make it? Which mill turned that cotton from a cluster of fibers to a spool of thread? Which factory cut and sewed the denim fabric into the comfortable, sturdy article of clothing you wear today? Did the workers who made your jeans have safe working conditions and fair pay? At each step in your jeans’ journey, did their production harm the environment? If yes, how much, and in what way?
At Open Supply Hub (OS Hub), we set out to map the cotton supply chain, from start to finish, one production location at a time.
Our Map of the Cotton Supply Chain
Earlier this year, our team and community spent several weeks combing through publicly available government registries, trade association member lists, and facility websites for any facility touching the cotton supply chain – ultimately looking for a company/site name and address for each of them.
You might wonder: if Open Supply Hub’s ultimate goal is to have stakeholders share data themselves so that they can collaborate, why the focus on consolidating publicly available data from other sources?
Supply chain transparency requires a multitude of approaches, and different sectors are at different stages in their respective transparency journeys. Some groups want transparency but are still exploring how to implement it; some other groups are concerned that openly sharing will hurt their competitive advantage. By finding and centralizing publicly available data, we can both enhance the data our community has already provided and show a clear model of what transparency in supply chains can look like in practice across sectors. It’s how we started in apparel and grew to become the industry standard tool in that sector that we are today.
In the end, we found ~2300 cotton-related production locations through our search. ~400 already had OS IDs and were used to enrich our existing data, while ~1900 were completely new to our platform. Explore the ~2300 cotton locations we consolidated through this initiative.
Overall, including locations we could confirm were involved directly in the cotton supply chain, we found ~5600 locations involved in the production of textiles and apparel (~4900 new to OS Hub) ranging from spinning mills to textile machinery manufacturers, and ~11,000 additional locations related to agriculture and crop production, including farms and fertilizer manufacturers. These locations may or may not produce cotton directly, but they are key threads in the fabric of the larger cotton supply chain. Explore the full dataset we gathered as part of our effort.
From Farm to Final Sale: the Journey of a Cotton Boll
Most cotton goes through several types of production locations before it makes it to retail. We attempted to find cotton production locations at each stage of the cotton lifecycle.
Cotton supply chain, step 1: the farm
All cotton begins as a seed on a farm. This seed then grows into a plant with a fuzzy bundle of fibers called a boll. This boll is what is harvested to make the many cotton products we use.
While some farms are large industrial enterprises with fixed addresses, much of the world’s cotton is grown by smallholder farmers. Cotton may be only one of several crops they grow. In a given year, based on weather and prices, they may choose not to grow cotton in favor of other crops. These farmers may also live on the same land where they work, and we want to avoid sharing home locations to protect individual privacy and safety. In short, it’s not always possible or ethical to map individual or family-run cotton farms.
But this does not mean a comprehensive map of cotton farming is completely impossible. Many farms are members of regional agricultural cooperatives that work collaboratively to process and trade the cotton they grow. In the course of our cotton research, we mapped >300 cotton farms and cotton-related cooperatives worldwide. Examples include:
• Casa do Algodão’s list of cotton cooperatives in the state of Goiás, Brazil
• Cotton-related cooperatives in Kazakhstan from the Kazakhstan Bureau of National Statistics
Cotton supply chain, step 2: the gin
Ginning is the process of separating the cotton boll from the seed it surrounds. Some farms do their own ginning with their own machinery; however, it is more typical for one cotton-producing region to have a centralized gin where cotton from multiple farms is processed.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
We were able to find ~1000 ginning facilities around the world and add them to OS Hub. Examples include:
• Mexico National Service of Health, Safety, and Agri-food Quality (SENASICA) Certified Cotton Gins
• Pakistan Cotton Ginners’ Association List of Members
• Cotton ginning facilities in Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye
Cotton supply chain, step 3: the mill
While cotton tends to be grown and ginned in the same region, it may be shipped thousands of miles for the first stage in its processing. Mills are production locations where cotton fiber is spun into thread.
We were able to find 200+ mills worldwide from a combination of certification bodies and other publicly available data. Examples include:
• Usterized Mills
• Spinning facilities certified by the Cotton Egypt Association
Cotton supply chain, step 4 through several before retail: sewing and cutting and other processing, assembly, and distribution
While some facilities process cotton from spinning all the way to the final product, milling and post-milling activities often happen at separate facilities, sometimes thousands of miles apart. Dyeing can happen before the mill, but it most commonly occurs after. We found ~300 locations involved with cotton in some way post-milling.
Examples in our dataset include:
• From Textination: apparel producers using cotton at facilities in central Europe, where cotton isn’t commonly grown
• Locations involved in post-milling activities from Supima Cotton
The Future of Cotton at Open Supply Hub
While much of the world’s cotton is harvested sustainably and ethically, cotton also has a long, unfortunate history of being harvested with unsustainable and unethical practices that continue to this day. Over the last century in central Asia, the Aral Sea was polluted and reduced to a fraction of its original size by fertilizer overuse and excessive irrigation of cotton. In the United States, cotton was harvested with chattel slavery for hundreds of years. Today, forced labor continues in places such as Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, China. Many entities using forced labor or ecologically harmful practices do not openly share where they operate. We have mapped some facilities where abuses are alleged to be taking place as well as facilities engaging in sustainable work so that our map is as reflective as possible of the current cotton ecosystem.
Of course, our map of cotton is far from exhaustive. The global cotton supply chain is too massive and complex to map in a matter of weeks. However, we hope that by increasing visibility into where cotton is produced and processed, we will provide a foundation on which to build improved transparency, traceability, and accountability.
While our sprint to gather cotton data is over, our mapping effort is not. We will continue to clearly mark cotton-related production locations we find in publicly available data that we share on OS Hub. Our community will be able to see these cotton-related production locations by searching for “Cotton” as a product type in our search interface. Before our 2025 efforts, the Open Supply Hub team and our broader contributor community had added ~4000 cotton-related locations to our platform. Our latest additions have grown that dataset to ~6000 locations, and we hope that number will continue to grow as our stakeholders and our team build toward a comprehensive supply chain map of the world.
As with all of our efforts at OS Hub, we are not working in a silo. We are actively engaging with our community to ensure we are checking our blindspots, not duplicating efforts, learning together, and collaborating where we can. One of the most pressing topics for our team and our community is how to ethically map supply chain entities related to vulnerable populations and individuals, such as smallholder cotton farmers, who often farm on the same land where they live and have more limited access to digital resources. While their existence and their contributions to the global supply chain should be somehow reflected on a global supply chain map like ours, a public and open platform should not include individuals’ homes or personal details without their consent, and we continue to assess all the data we encounter thoroughly for potential risks like these.
We will also continue to explore other opportunities our community has raised, such as:
• mapping farmland at the cooperative level
• building mobile-friendly OS Hub functionality and support
• partnering with existing agriculture supply chain mapping organizations and tools to protect smallholder farmer data, ensuring we’re making the most of our respective superpowers and not duplicating our efforts
• growing our multilingual resources and engagement opportunities to encourage community participation around the world
Transparency is key to identifying not only harmful practices, but sustainable and ethical practices as well. Our hope is that our growing cotton dataset will enable our community to study and work with all parts of the cotton industry to solve urgent problems and promote sustainable practices for a just future.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Tamar Hoek and Annemiek Smits at Solidaridad for their insights on cotton production and smallholder farming. We would also like to thank Thomas Jennings at Better Cotton for generously sharing his knowledge of the cotton landscape in central Africa.
OS Hub is a non-profit platform that relies on philanthropic support to sustain the world’s most complete, open and accessible supply chain map. Join us in powering the transition to safe and sustainable supply chains by making a donation today.
Learn more about Open Supply Hub or explore other stories on the Open Supply Hub blog.
