The search for sustainable fabric
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Modern textiles are environmentally problematic. Cotton needs gallons of water to produce, while polyester comes from crude oil. So could organic materials such as mushrooms and banana leaves hold the answer?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to Dr Richard Blackburn, chemistry professor at Leeds University, who has been studying the ecological impact of the garments industry for decades. Meanwhile the BBC's Elizabeth Hotson investigates innovative new fabrics preparing to hit the market, including MycoTEX, a material made from fungal mycelium, developed by Aniela Hoitink.
(Picture: Branch of ripe cotton; Credit: Gargonia/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, futuristic fashion, it's certainly going to be different. |
| 0:10.5 | There's an Italian company in the north of Italy using milk protein to make fabric, which is very soft, as you can imagine. |
| 0:17.8 | It's this desire to say, we can make anything out of anything. And why we might |
| 0:24.9 | well be chucking out some of our old staples. A kilo of cotton takes about the amount of water |
| 0:30.3 | you drink in your lifetime to grow the cotton. And that's before you even, yeah, that's before you |
| 0:35.0 | process it. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:42.9 | What you wear and how you wear it matters to the environment. |
| 0:47.4 | Growing cotton, for example, uses huge amounts of water and land. |
| 0:51.9 | Many other textiles are made from polluting petrochemicals. |
| 0:55.5 | In fact, the United Nations says that the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of the world's |
| 1:01.5 | wastewater and 10% of global carbon emissions. So just how environmentally damaging are some |
| 1:09.1 | of our most worn fabrics. |
| 1:14.2 | I asked someone who studied this long before it became fashionable. |
| 1:19.5 | So my name is Dr Richard Blackburn and I am an associate professor and head of the Sustainable Materials Research Group at the University of Leeds. |
| 1:23.7 | The most common fabric that we use, well the two most common fabrics we use are cotton and polyester. |
| 1:28.6 | Cotton, although it's natural, is probably the most environmentally damaging fibre that we have. |
| 1:34.2 | It's terribly unsustainable based on terrific use of water, pesticides, fertilisers, grown in places in the world where there's massive clearing of land to grow cotton. |
| 1:48.4 | And its impact is devastating on communities in terms of where it's grown. |
| 1:54.5 | And just in terms of water usage, how much water does it take to make one pair of jeans? |
| 1:59.9 | Just to grow the cotton, about a kilo of cotton, which I don't know, depending upon your size, maybe two, three pairs of jeans. |
| 2:06.6 | And I'm sure most people have two or three pairs of jeans in their wardrobe. |
| 2:10.0 | A kilo of cotton takes about the amount of water you drink in your lifetime to grow the cotton. |
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