Creating sustainable naturally coloured cotton

摘要

Textile industry innovators are seeking to create and improve naturally coloured cotton which can reduce or even remove the need for manufacturers to add dyes that can be expensive and generate significant levels of pollution. Natural coloured cotton is not new. Liv Severino, head of Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria (Embrapa), the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, a state-owned research corporation affiliated with Brazil’s ministry of agriculture, livestock and food supply, notes that there is evidence that human clothes were made from such fibres in the Andes 5,000 years ago. But these varieties lost favour since the industrial revolution, when naturally brown and green cotton fibres then in use were found too short to spin in mechanical yarn manufacture and so were cross-bred with longer, smoother white varieties.