The level of ignorance on the topic of "organic" cotton here hurts my head. I understand the concern, you don't want to inhale pesticides, but your concern is so misplaced it's not even on the same continent anymore.
My family farmed 2300 acres of Texas cotton when I was younger (and it wasn't long ago). The insecticides and herbicides applied to cotton are all, universally:
-Short half-life, easily broken down by water, light, oxygen, microbes or reaction.
-Applied while the cotton is still in the boll, except for the defoliant on about 10% of the bills which opened early. The use of arsenic acid to defoliate was replaced by perfectly safe and nontoxic herbicide in the 70's.
-Any residues are washed away during cleaning or destroyed in the dryer during ginning.
Nothing used in modern agriculture is acutely toxic, with very few exceptions. You could drink a steamy glass of modern Agent Orange and never miss a beat (although I wouldn't recommend it, it tastes just awful). A Vietnam-era sterile bandage would be more dangerous than bag of USA-grown dollar store cotton balls.
Another thing that irks my tater is the use of the term "detectable amounts" in news stories about
vaping and all the sciences. Our tools and methods for detecting composition and certain molecules are so sophisticated and accurate that the term itself is now worthless. It takes more than 1 tiny little molecule of anything to kill you. The average sized person is composed of 7 x 10^27 atoms. Let me type out 7 followed by 27 zeros.
7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
10 bad ones ain't gonna do you in. In fact you hurt yourself more worrying about it.
