About Cotton Sustainability

• Overview
• Responsible Economic Development
• U.S. Cotton
• Cotton vs. Other Fibers
• Manufacturing
• Recycling
• Ask the Sustainability Desk

Cotton vs. Other Fibers

Cotton, of course, is not the only textile fiber available, but it has significant environmental and performance advantages over other fibers. A few examples:

• Cotton uses sunlight and converts it directly to a fiber without intermediate processing steps. That’s increasingly important, since processing other fibers, even those from biological sources, require a large amount of energy to produce fiber.
• Wool requires four times more land than does cotton to produce fiber.  Silk requires 20 times the land to produce the equivalent amount of silk fiber.
• Fibers that are based on corn and bamboo also require intermediate processing and additional chemicals to create a rayon-type fiber, which is still not a direct plant-based production of fiber.

As a natural, renewable fiber, cotton has obvious environmental and sustainability advantages over petroleum-based synthetic fibers. Unlike petroleum-based fibers, cotton is energy self-sustaining, and does not contribute to net green house gas emissions.