put secondary content here if visible
put news column content here if visible
Cotton
Cotton is the world’s staple fibre. The cotton industry is worth over $30 billion annually, and two thirds of cotton production is in developing countries. We are all so familiar with cotton that for many of us it has a nice fuzzy ‘natural’ image, carefully cultivated by cotton bodies such as Cotton USA. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be more wrong.
Cotton is a phenomenally thirsty plant. It takes between ten and twenty thousand litres of water to produce enough cotton for just one pair of jeans and a T shirt. Inefficient irrigation has caused devastating water shortages in some areas of the world, the most dramatic of which is the drying up of the Aral Sea.
As well as water, cotton uses a lot of chemicals. Despite covering only 2.4% of the world’s arable land it manages to use 24% of the world’s insecticides, and 11% of global sales of all pesticides. Pesticide poisoning is endemic in some cotton growing areas where workers including young children are out in the fields while they are being sprayed. Many of these chemicals are classified as “hazardous” by the World Health Organisation. Research has shown that traces of these chemicals are still on the garment by the time it reaches us in the shops. By that time it has also gone through many more chemical intensive processes in processing, dyeing and finishing.
In India there has been a recent spate of suicides by small scale cotton farmers who were in debt due to the high price of pesticides, the same pesticides that are known to cause birth defects in their children. Small-scale farmers are at the mercy of fluctuations in the global cotton market and of heavily subsidised producers in countries like the USA.
Fairtrade was set up in order to alleviate this market uncertainty and to guarantee a fair price to farmers. Organic cotton is slowly growing in popularity, and enables farmers not only to avoid pesticides but also to gain a premium for their crops. It is increasingly possible to buy products that are made from both Fairtrade and organic cotton.
Bamboo
Bamboo is gaining prominence with some outdoor brands as the eco fibre de jour. It certainly has some plus points – it requires no extra water, no pesticides, and grows fantastically quickly, so it can be harvested more often. Carbonised bamboo can be mixed into fibres to create an anti-bacterial effect.
However, there is currently very little information about how bamboo is being processed. To make fabrics that are very soft and silky requires a lot of chemical processing to break down the fibre, as happens in making viscose. It is easy to stick an ‘eco’ label on something, but at the moment there’s not really enough evidence to back this up.
