How green is cotton fibre?

Cotton is one of the most widely used materials of the modern world. In the last 100 years or so there has been a huge growth in demand for cotton products.

What goes into cotton fibre

Many chemicals are used in the growing of cotton, from fertilisers through to pesticides.

Chemical contamination

A list as long as my arm could be written about the ill affects caused by cotton production. Fertilisers get washed into the water courses, pesticides routinely make workers ill, chemical dyes, defoalants, insectasides...I could go on. A very poor score considering cotton is suposed to be a natural material.

Lifetime embodied energy

After manufacture cotton is made into many different products, most of which need washing or laundering of some sort. This adds significantly to the co2 footprint of cotton fibre. Lets take a cotton t-shirt for example: Used and washed one a week, it takes about 1kwh of electricity to wash a dry one load of laundry, (10 t-shirts) that’s 0.1kwh X 52 weeks = 5.2kwh of energy per year to wash and dry one cotton t-shirt.

Factoids [2]

25% of textiles are currently recovered. Of these 43% become secondhand clothing, 12% wiping clothes, 22% filling materials, 7% fiber reclamation, 9% are shoes which are reused and 7% is rejected as waste.

According to the Organic Trade Association, the production of one pair of regular cotton jeans takes three-quarters of a pound of fertilizers and pesticides.

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