cotton Archives

Tag: cotton

Gooddrop’s ‘Grow-To-Wear’ Apparel Business Looks to Mass Produce Cotton Using Vertical Farms

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on December 14, 2024. Posted in Blog.

Conventional cotton has been called “the world’s dirtiest crop” thanks to the heavy use of pesticides and other agrochemicals used in the growing process.

“Cotton is an aggressive and destructive crop on an ecological level,” Simon Wardle, CEO of UK startup Gooddrop, tells AgFunderNews. “It uses a great deal of land. It uses an enormous amount of water, and a lot of the chemicals that are used on the crops are pretty harmful — not only to the land and with the runoff into rivers and other water sources, but it can also be very damaging to the individuals that work in the field.”

Gooddrop’s solution? Grow the cotton inside a vertical farming environment, which uses no pesticides and can potentially be built closer to the consumers.

With this idea in mind, Gooddrop is building what Wardle calls a “grow-to-wear” cotton apparel business. The idea is to grow cotton in vertical farms, and keep spinning mills on the site of the farms, to cut out emissions from transport.

“We believe we’ve got a solution for cotton, but it will need to scale, and the scale potential is enormous,” he says. “We’ve chosen a type of cotton that is 90%-plus of the global market. We’re looking at the mass products to make the biggest impacts and the biggest environmental and financial impacts.”

Read full story from AgFunderNews….

From Fast Company: Someday Your Jeans Could Be Grown In A Greenhouse Down The Street

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on June 14, 2024. Posted in Blog.

Fast Company recently featured an interesting story on Dutch denim label G-Star Raw and its partnership with researchers to grow cotton for denim in a greenhouse. It might be the future of fashion. As reported by Elizabeth Segran at Fast Company:

Over the past few years, Patagonia, Citizens of Humanity, and Christy Dawn have started sourcing cotton from farms that use regenerative agriculture methods. But soon, sustainable fashion brands might also consider cotton from another source: a greenhouse. Dutch brand G-Star Raw wants to turn this into a reality.

The brand partnered with a Dutch university on a small pilot project to grow cotton in a greenhouse, then use it to create denim. The end result was five pairs of jeans, made from end-to-end entirely in the Netherlands. Now, G-Star Raw is exploring how to scale this production so that denim brands around the world can create locally made jeans that have a far smaller environmental footprint.

THE LOCAL JEANS CHALLENGE

Cotton grows best in very hot, humid conditions, which is why most of the world’s crops are grown in China, India, Brazil, and the American South. Northern Europe? Not so much.

This presents some complications for European brands like G-Star Raw, a denim brand founded in the Netherlands in 1986. Given the current global supply chain, it must source its cotton from far away, which means shipping cotton long distances, generating extensive carbon emissions. “It also makes traceability more complicated,” says Rebecka Sancho, G-Star’s head of sustainability. “And the first step to sustainability is traceability.” She also points out that new regulations are rolling out in the European Union that demand brands track the entire supply chain of their products.

So it was intriguing to Sancho when Wageningen University, which is globally recognized for its agricultural research, reached out to the brand. Researchers were interested in collaborating on an experiment to see whether it was possible to grow cotton in the Netherlands by using a greenhouse. And they wanted to quantify the environmental footprint of this cotton, as compared to traditionally grown cotton.

Read full story at Fast Company...