Sustainability targets are being developed by agricultural industries to help improve and report on environmental performance. In the Australian cotton industry, pesticides pose a potential risk to environmental health and the sustainable use of pesticides is therefore of interest to consumers, cotton growers and local communities. A key issue in setting targets is the identification of a measurable indicator that adequately represents the ecological risk of cotton pesticide use without relying on overly complex, time-consuming and costly input data. A number of different indicators have been proposed, but here we report on an indicator developed specifically for assessing insecticide use in the cotton industry (for the period 1995-2007), the Environmental Toxic Load (ETL). This report briefly outlines the ETL framework, before updating and expanding the assessment to include herbicides, defoliants, and where possible, fungicides, for more recent cotton-growing seasons (2000-2018). The aim of this update is to identify recent trends in the overall ETL for the Australian cotton industry and also to identify pesticides with higher hazard profiles that can be considered for targeted reduction to improve the industry’s ecological sustainability.