O Ecotextiles honored as a leading green supplier

Company among first to offer Global Organic Textile Standard fabrics

Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, November 25, 2008

Patty Grossman and Leigh Anne Grossman, founders of O Ecotextiles.

BOSTON — Seattle-based green fabrics supplier O Ecotextiles has been named one of BuildingGreen's 2008 Top 10 Green Building Products by the editors of Environmental Building News and GreenSpec.

This seventh annual award recognizes innovative green building products that have been added to the GreenSpec Directory during the past year or covered in Environmental Building News.
"We are thrilled and gratified that the oracle of green product evaluation has spoken with us at length and determined that we are both authentic in our eco- friendly claims and worthy of support," said CEO Patty Grossman. "The issues regarding fabric are so dramatic that we continue to believe that green fabric will be a real centerpiece of study and concern by green consumers."
Grossman leads a textiles group that is developing green standards for the Sustainable Furnishings Council. She and her sister Leigh Anne founded O Ecotextiles in 2004 and began looking for companies interested in sourcing cradle-to-cradle, no-impact, safe and luxurious fabrics.
BuildingGreen's Top 10 product selections are drawn primarily from new additions to the company's GreenSpec Product Directory, a national directory of green building products.

The GreenSpec database includes more than 2,000 product listings. Products are selected based on criteria developed over the past 15 years.

Manufacturers do not pay to be listed in GreenSpec, and neither GreenSpec nor Environmental Building News run advertising. O Ecotextiles was added to the GreenSpec database in September.

O Ecotextiles is offering some of the very first Global Organic Textile Standard fabrics, or GOTS, as well as Oeko Tex Standard 100-certified yarns and fabrics.

The company's fabrics also have been tested by an Indoor Air Quality testing lab to measure chemical emissions Results demonstrate that the fabrics can be used to accrue LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, points for Indoor Air Quality.