Away from Cotton

All of us are certainly wearing cotton clothes. Cotton is by far the most important natural fibre used in textile industry. However, there are a couple of drawbacks in cotton production, which are so serious that it would be better if cotton could be replaced by other fibres. First, cotton uses up much of the agricultural land in densely populated areas. Cotton fields are mostly owned by foreign companies, which harvest and export the material. The profits go to the foreign companies. The local people get only the money they earn as wages in harvesting. In terms of the locals, the agricultural land used for growing cotton would be much better used, if cereals and vegetables were grown to improve the nutrition of the locals. Cotton is grown in relatively dry areas using irrigation. Because of the water use of growing cotton, subsistence farming gets too little water in the dry areas, leaving the local population with inadequate nutrition. Cotton farming also uses insecticides and other pesticides heavily, and as a result is a major contributor to the loss of not only insect diversity but bird diversity, because birds may get lethal – or at least reproduction-inhibiting - amount of the toxicant in their body from the poisoned insects they eat. Finally, it is often pointed out that cotton is often produced using genetically modified plants (personally, I don’t think that genetic modification is a reason to avoid using cotton; genetic modification achieves rapidly what traditional plant breeding achieves in hundreds of generations).

Because of the many negative sides of cotton growing, it would be much better, if alternative sources of textile fibres were used. There are, in fact, already possibilities for replacing cotton. Similarly soft fibres can nowadays be produced from wood. For countries like Finland, wood-based cotton substitutes would be very good, as they would increase the market value of a kilogram of wood pronouncedly. Thus, it is not surprising that there is already a stock-marked company specializing in wood-based textile fibre production. When it came to stock market, expectations were high. However, so far investments to the stocks of the company have yielded only losses. Another recent possibility for replacing cotton is making fibre from the aerial part of potato plants. The possibility is very exciting, as presently the green parts of potato plants are just waste. In future, the green parts would be harvested first for textile making, and then the potatoes for food. In this case the same plant would be the source of bot clothing and foodstuff. Wouldn’t that be a huge leap towards sustainability?