The Sustainability of Cotton

Cotton - It’s just a more sustainable fiber solution.

It’s well-known that cotton is the preferred choice for customers due to its perfect mix of softness, strength, and flexibility. But what also makes cotton popular is the fact that it’s a sustainable choice, too.

Cotton Processing - A time-tested method.

While synthetic fibers like rayon and polyester go through a long and complicated process before reaching the consumer, the cotton goes through a relatively simple one: after being plucked from the field, the gin separates the plant from the seed, and then the Barnhardt purification process cleans and whitens the cotton, ultimately making it absorbent. Then the cotton is ready for its wide array of uses.

Cotton’s unsophisticated and homegrown supply chain.

When it comes to the supply chain, cotton is born and raised (meaning harvested and converted) right here in the USA. Once again, rayon can’t say that, remotely. In fact, rayon basically travels around the world before it ever hits retail shelves.

Much of the feedstock to produce rayon is produced from trees grown and pulped in Africa or South America, then shipped to Asia or Europe for conversion to rayon. Only then does rayon find its way to North America. That long and winding path could hardly be considered a sustainable solution.

Annually renewable.

Of course, before the supply chain ever comes into play, cotton crushes its competitors in renewability. A cotton plant has an eight to nine-month renewable life cycle. Rayon, on the other hand, comes from mature trees. These trees take 15 to 20 years to grow.

The math’s pretty simple; while those trees targeted for rayon are growing, a decade and a half of cotton crops (at minimum) have been harvested.

Farming innovations reduce the use of resources.

Cotton has been around for centuries. While that’s proof enough of its popularity, it also translates into finely honed farming practices that have evolved to be more efficient over the last couple of decades. When considering water usage, soil loss and energy used for production, the numbers have steadily declined over the past 20 years.

Most of the U.S. cotton crop is now irrigated exclusively from rain, seeds now require less pesticides and tillage, and for every pound of cotton fiber, roughly 1.6 pounds of other useful products are being created, such as cottonseed oil, dairy feed, and mulch.

There’s a reason cotton is called “The Fabric of Our Lives.” By its very nature—along with some innovative growers and researchers—cotton represents the natural choice and plays an integral part in our daily lives.

The only thing more exciting than cotton production's advancements over the last 20 years is imagining what cutting-edge practices will be developed in the future.