How Environmentally Friendly is Cotton?

[EdS]

Re: Hemp

I've been involved in growing trial crops for fibers.

While normal "dope" hemp will have little THC & DHC if grown outside in Uk etc there will be some. However the strain used as a comercial fibers source is a GM crop developed to have negliable canabinoids. It will not produce enough THC/DHc to get high even is grow hydroponically (? spelling) or outside in warm dry areas.

 

[Toddy]

In most of Europe, where cotton will not grow anyway, hemp will do very well with far less feeding and pesticides. Hemp beats cotton hands down, but, the technology that processes hemp (or linen) has never caught up on the headstart that cotton had with Industrialisation.
Once cotton is ginned clean of debris it's ready to spin, hemp and linen need much more mechanical/chemical or biological work to free the fibres.
The balance has to be between the growing conditions, which hemp wins, or the fibre extraction and thread making processes which cotton wins.
In our climate hemp wins, in the near east, America and India I suspect that cotton wins. We have enough water to not only grow the crop but to flush away anaerobically compromised retting processes.

Think I've gone and confused myself somewhere, , interesting thread, I'm enjoying all of the info. that's coming out.

One of our farming friends grew hemp for fibre under Home Office licence (I think that's what he said it was) half of his crop disappeared out of the field despite notices clearly stating that this variety produced no 'high' only fibre
Hemp makes beautiful cloth and simply wonderful ropes and cordages.

If anyone wants to try hand spinning some, try
http://www.winghamwoolwork.co.uk
They sell hemp stricks.....this is a bundle of long, unspun but cleaned and combed, lengths.

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[bushtuckerman]

Are there not legal problems concerning the use of greenhouses in northern climes? Does this licence deny the use of greenhouses for hemp fibre production if the 'varieties' discussed are as said one and the same?

Yeah, Howies also say something along the lines of "100% cotton" being only 73% cotton, since the other 27% is made up by weight in pesticides...who knows how universally true this is, but it sounds plausible as a direct effect of the 7:1 pesticide to cotton ratio quoted, if such a figure is believable.

Organic Ventile, now there's an expensive thought...

 

[HuBBa]

hehehe.. to claim that 100% cotton contains 21% pestecides is pushing it a bit.

To get from the 4-5cm cotton fibres to a spun yarn, and then to a bleached, colored, treated fabric you add a lot of steps and chemicals.

The 100% Cotton mark on your clothes means that it's not dilluted with any other type of fabric. Very often you add say Polyester or polyacrylic or elastan or any other material to get different characteristics of the finished textile.

We can however probably all agree that the original question can be answered with "Not very."

There are however organic cotton which is supposed to be grown more enviromentally friendly. Problem that i see arises in the processing after it's been harvested.

 

[addyb]

Hmmm....I wonder if Ventile is organic cotton? The Talbot Weaving site says that it's made from the top 2% of the worlds crop, and that it is of very long staple. My father says that when he used it back in the 70's that Ventile was made of "Egyptian cotton."

Does anyone want to take a stab at this one? It would be interesting to know how environmentally friendly Ventile is.

Adam

 

[Graham O]

Since I started the thread, I will try to find out. I'll speak to Ventile tomorrow.

 

[bushtuckerman]

I would be very surprised if they used organic egyption cotton, i mean i know it's expensive but there are plenty of reaons for that already. a lot of cotton comes from egypt so it's reasonable to assume they both have the best long staple cotton for that 2% and also some organic cotton. a lot comes from india i think. I really have no idea though...we await the verdict...

 

[Graham O]

Straight from Ventile this morning. Ventile is not organic and they really don't have any information about the growing process, so assume the worst. They receive the cotton thread on large cones and all processes after that are "environmentally friendly" particularly the dyeing process. And of course it is biodegradeable.

I had thought this would be a short thread with one or two answers, but it has been quite wideranging. Thanks for all the input.

(That's not to say I'm now trying to kill the thread, just that my question has been answered)

 

[addyb]

Bah, that's not so bad. I mean honestly, is there anything today that's environmentally friendly? Forty years ago, they said that tobacco was bad for you. Now they say that using hair spray is bad for you, and just a while ago I read an article in a paper that reported that alcohol is now believed to be toxic and linked with cancer.

So if we can't drink and smoke, what can we do? Poor Oscar Wilde is probably rolling over in his grave in Pere LaChaise. Jim Morrison, too.

(That was a joke, hopefully someone laughs)

Adam

 

[bushtuckerman]

Most things in moderation are not harmful, but addictions can be harmful in their own right. getting smashed now and again is not so harmful, say, as regularly drinking a very small amount of alchohol, because when you drink a lot at once when you're not condiditioned to it and your body is not affected to such a great degree by drinking excess alchohol at one sitting (as it were...). The thing is, the same goes for tea and coffee, if you drink it regularly enough and to a high degree then you are not doung your body's health much good, but on the other hand, routines, as opposed to addictions, CAN be benifical to your overall health, and maybe having a cuppa when you finish work is your way of doing that....but i stray from the topic...

in terms of being environmentally friendly, yes, you're right, there is not much we can do that does not affect our environment, and that is because of the shear number of us. the relative balance with ventile though is that is does biodegrade. landfill is a growing problem for everyone. plastics can only be recycled a few times, and eventually find their way to a heap somewhere, and can take centuries, millenia even, to totally decompose.

the thing is, the days of Oscar Wilde are over.

 

[Tengu]

Just by accident I found this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fairtrade/story/0,,1670561,00.html

My answer is to cut down upon your consumption of cotton.

(all my clothes with a few exceptions are natural fibres, but I do not clothes shop -Im given them second hand by friends and family, and I wear them untill they wear out, upon which I give them to my garage to clean their hands upon)

 

[bushtuckerman]

It mentions cotton reaching land fill, another reason that is a problem is that organic material (in the chemical sense) decomposes badly in such anoxic environments, and produces greenhouse gases. for example all that compost that is put in the bin is not exposed to the air when it is tipped onto landfill sites and buried, and produces methane (20 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas per molecule).

Thanks for the article. Clothes in my family have always been passed down, and if they don't fit any of us are given to oxfam, or used as rags as you say. It's great to use second hand clothes in many ways. I haven't done much personally but searching charity shops often gleans well i hear.

If you consider the whole cycle of cotton growth and decomposition however, the net result is nil if you look at CO2 production. The only real impact is in clearing the area of land to grow the cotton in the first place, that, ultimately, is what releases locked up carbon.

But, of course, the main concern is the use of pesticides, which would not be flushed out of the water table for 1000s of years, even if we stopped using them now, so by buying organic cotton you are both paying the real price for clothing and not encouraging the use of pesticides.

 

[Graham O]

For those of us in the North West, by a strange coincidence, I've just heard that there is an exhibition on the history of cotton at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. Free to get in. Perhaps I'll have to pay a visit.

 

[Lurch]

Liverpool?
That's in the Midlands mate!
(all things being relative)

 

[Graham O]

How did I guess that someone would point out that I was being England centric.

 

[Lurch]

Well not really, I'm in England but I still need to travel more than 100 miles south before getting to Liverpool.
Normally I like to wind Mancs and scousers up by calling them southerners...

 

[Graham O]

That's okay then, as I'm a Southerner, born and bred!

 

[Moonraker]

My brother has recently started a company selling Fairtrade, organic cotton T-shirts (Fairtrade does not mean organic) One of the designs has "150 grams" on the front. Because:

It takes 150 Grams of pesticide* (a cup full) to grow the cotton used in making just one non-organic t-shirt. (*source: Soil Association).

That's not counting the artificial fertilisers, heavy metals and chemicals used in the normal dyeing & printing processes

 

[BorderReiver]

Re: Hemp

I've been involved in growing trial crops for fibers.

While normal "dope" hemp will have little THC & DHC if grown outside in Uk etc there will be some. However the strain used as a comercial fibers source is a GM crop developed to have negliable canabinoids. It will not produce enough THC/DHc to get high even is grow hydroponically (? spelling) or outside in warm dry areas.

No thank you.

 

[Minotaur]

One of our farming friends grew hemp for fibre under Home Office licence (I think that's what he said it was) half of his crop disappeared out of the field despite notices clearly stating that this variety produced no 'high' only fibre

I belive, he also would have grown one sex of the plant, because the other sex is the one heavy in THC. Weirdly, I also belive he would have grown actual hemp, the drug plants used in places like Holand are Hybrids.

In most of Europe, where cotton will not grow anyway, hemp will do very well with far less feeding and pesticides. Hemp beats cotton hands down, but, the technology that processes hemp (or linen) has never caught up on the headstart that cotton had with Industrialisation.
Once cotton is ginned clean of debris it's ready to spin, hemp and linen need much more mechanical/chemical or biological work to free the fibres.
The balance has to be between the growing conditions, which hemp wins, or the fibre extraction and thread making processes which cotton wins.
In our climate hemp wins, in the near east, America and India I suspect that cotton wins. We have enough water to not only grow the crop but to flush away anaerobically compromised retting processes.

Machinery is becoming available to be used on hemp.

Cotton is a ecological nightmare from start to finish.