COTTONING ON
PRACTICALLY EVERY TEXTILE IN YOUR HOME IS MADE EITHER ENTIRELY OR PARTLY FROM COTTON. JOIN US ON A WHISTLESTOP TOUR OF THIS NATURAL, VERSATILE FABRIC
Just like love, cotton is all around. Chances are you’re wearing it; sitting on it; it’s billowing in the breeze at your open windows and glowing vividly on your sofa in the shape of a few artfully placed scatter cushions. It even had a place in your wallet once, before polymer banknotes consigned cotton paper as the currency material of choice to the dustbin of history. It’s a natural product, it can be recycled, it can be made up into all sorts of different fabrics – and when discarded, it’s speedily biodegradable. Here, we delve a little deeper into this material world.
FABRIC OF CHOICE
We’ve used cotton for clothing for at least 7000 years, which is not surprising when you consider that it keeps you cool in summer and warm in winter. Cotton has come a long way – from handweaving homespun garments to machine-looming threads into myriad fabrics, such as light muslin or luscious velvets. It’s a product grown in more than 100 countries, notably the US, China, India, Pakistan and Australia – and some 26 million tonnes of it are produced each year. Swedish retail giant Ikea uses just under one per cent of the annual global output for its products, which include the vibrant ‘Jassa’ range of cushions (opposite, top).
NATURE AT WORK
Cotton starts life as a flowering shrub, with four main species used in current commercial production. The most common is gossypium hirsutum (or upland cotton), a native of central America and the Caribbean. When the flowers drop off, they are replaced by bolls, which are pods stuffed full of lint and seeds (below). The lint makes cotton fabric – it’s picked either by hand or machine and sent for processing to a cotton ‘gin’, which separates the lint and seeds. More processing cleans and ‘combs’ the lint and then spins it into yarn, ready for weaving into whichever type of fabric awaits.
“Our vision is to make more sustainable cotton affordable and accessible, and also better for the environment and the people who grow it” ~ Pramod Singh, Ikea cotton leader
FIBRE MATTERS
Cotton is graded by fibre length, and the general rule is the longer, the better. As with most natural products, not all cotton delivers the same quality, which can be affected by the variety and the growing conditions of the plant – for example, an extended dry period can mean the fibres end up shorter than usual. The highest-quality fibres are known as extra-long staple (ELS), which give a soft, fine thread that can be woven into the best fabrics. Egyptian cotton – the stuff of ultra-luxe sheets – is typically ELS. Australia has a growing reputation for producing the highly sought-after, long-fibre cotton.
better cotton
Not all natural products are created equal, and cotton’s environmental credentials have suffered a few dents. More than 90 per cent of its production is non-organic, it needs lots of water to grow and has traditionally been farmed with lots of pesticides. The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), launched in 2009, is tackling these issues – Ikea, a major end user, and the not-for-profit World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) were two of the founding partners. Home Beautiful, as a guest of Ikea, saw the benefits of the initiative first-hand last year in India, which produces nearly one-quarter of the world’s cotton supply, much of it on tiny farms in some of the country’s poorest communities. Introducing practices such as drip irrigation, crop rotation and companion planting means less water and fewer hazardous chemicals are used, yields increase and farmers can enjoy a better level of income, which benefits their families.
“We’ve been working to improve standards in the cotton supply chain, where cotton production gets better at no extra cost to the consumer” ~ Pramod Singh, Ikea cotton leader