The guilty secret of cotton no one wants you to know.

Thursday, March 9, 2017 0 Bamboo Monkey, Fighting Climate Change, Global Warming Permalink 0

Let me fill you in on the guilty secret of cotton.

Cotton is not all bad of course. It has great features. I used cotton for YEARS in my previous jobs as a buyer in fast fashion. From a manufacturing perspective it is relatively cheap, is available in knit and woven fabrics, so multiple uses, it dyes and prints very easily.

BUT…. it wasn’t till I thought about starting my own business and doing research that I learned about the devastating environmental cost of cotton.

The astonishing fact is, growing cotton causes some of the GREATEST environmental pollution of any crop grown.

Cotton is responsible for nearly 1/6 of the world’s pesticide and herbicide usage due to it’s high amount of predators. And due to the way cotton is harvested, ripping the whole plant and its root system, destabilising the soil, a lot of these chemicals find their way into the underground water tables.

But it gets WORSE….

Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops, requiring vast amounts of water.

To produce 1 kg of cotton -the equivalent of a t-shirt & a pair of jeans – it takes on average the equivalent of 80,000 glasses of water! (this blew mw away)

Fresh water being one of the most valuable resources – easily accessible fresh water amounts to just 0.025% of the world’s water supply – that is a crazy waste of valuable resources.

In fact, the clothing industry is the 2nd biggest polluter after the oil industry!

I set about researching alternative fibres, focusing firstly on comfort – looking for something really soft.

And I stumbled across bamboo. And I was blown away.

In fibre form, bamboo is soft, often likened to silk.
As a natural fibre it “wicks”, a process which draws moisture away from the skin leaving the wearer cool and dry.
Best of all, bamboo has a naturally occurring antibacterial agent that suppresses foot odour.

BUT – most intriguing and surprising of all, was bamboo’s environmental credentials when compared to cotton:

Bamboo grows fast organically – 10x faster than trees – and requires typically only rainfall. No chemicals are needed as it naturally deters insects & pests. AND it absorbs 5x the amount of greenhouse gases – than other crops, including trees.

When the plant is harvested, the root system is left intact – keeping rich nutrients in the soil, unlike cotton where the soil is left fragile and barren.