What’s the Deal with Natural Fibres?
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/04/26
What’s the deal with natural fibres? Why are they important?
Organic Cotton, Jute, Hemp, Alpaca, Cashmere, Flax, Silk & Wool. Oh My!
So, what’s the deal with natural fibres? Natural fibres are “elongated substances produced by plants and animals that can be spun into filaments, thread or rope. Woven, knitted, matted or bonded, they form fabrics that are essential to society.”[i],[ii]
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, they are “any hairlike raw material directly obtainable from an animal, vegetable, or mineral source and convertible into non-woven fabrics such as felt or paper or, after spinning into yarns, into woven cloth. A natural fibre may be further defined as an agglomeration of cells in which the diameter is negligible in comparison with the length.”[iii]
These can include the fifteen main natural fibres – Abaca, Alpaca, Angora, Camel, Cashmere, Coir, Cotton, Flax, Hemp, Jute, Mohair, Ramie, Silk, Sisal, and Wool, and many others.[iv] That is, natural fibres provide a great variety of possible materials from plants and animals from which to make fibres.
Read more about sustainable natural fabrics here.
Natural Organic Plant Fibres:
The plant fibres include abaca, coir, cotton, flax, hemp, jute, ramie, and sisal. Plant fibres are come from seed hairs, stem or bast fibres, leaf fibres, and husk fibres.
The animal fibres include alpaca wool, angora wool, camel hair, cashmere, mohair, silk, and wool. Animal fibres come from hair, secretions, or wool.
The Government of Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) provides information on four specific examples: cotton and flax for plant fibres, and silk and wool for animal fibres. [v] Cotton and flax are made of cellulose and vegetable fibres. Silk and wool are protein fibres made of a variety of amino acids from animals.
There are some geographic considerations and plant/animal specific information such as the fact that cotton and wool represent the most pervasively utilized vegetable fibres in North America, and silk and wool as they are animal in origin are subject to affects from ageing of the animal.[vi] However, these are highly detailed bits of information best left for the end notes.
Why are Natural Fibres Important?
It’s actually pretty straightforward. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations argues from five “choices”: healthy choice, responsible choice, sustainable choice, high-tech choice, and fashionable choice.[vii]
“Each year, farmers harvest around 35 million tonnes of natural fibres from a wide range of plants and animals…[and] [t]hose fibres form fabrics, ropes and twines that have been fundamental to society since the dawn of civilization,” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated in 2009.[viii]
Throughout the last 50 years, synthetic, or man-made fibres, began to dominate the landscape previously carved out by natural fibres in “clothing, household furnishings, industries and agriculture.”[ix]
Natural fibres, as a means for production and, thus, “livelihoods of millions of people” is adversely effected by the global economic downturn and the increased and ubiquitous competition from synthetic materials; In fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations declared 2009 the International Year of Natural Fibres to attests to natural fibres’ importance to those millions of producers and their consumers, too.[x]
Let’s look into their arguments from 2009, which remain as salient as now as they were then.
Natural fibres as the healthy choice. There is natural ventilation from natural fibres. Wool can be an insulator in cool and warm weather. Coconut fibre has a natural resistance against fungi and mites. Hemp fibre appears to show various antibacterial properties as well. What’s not to love?
Natural Fibres: The Responsible, Sustainable Choice.
They remain the source of economic vibrancy for millions of people including small-scale processors and farmers. That means “10 million people in the cotton sector in West and Central Africa, 4 million small-scale jute farmers in Bangladesh and India, one million silk industry workers in China, and 120 000 alpaca herding families in the Andes.”[xi]
Natural fibres are the sustainable choice for the future, and a high technology choice too. That is, the emergent technologies in the coming decades will increasingly be the ‘alternative’ energies such as wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and others. That is, the oncoming and ongoing green economy. So that means “energy efficiency, renewable feed stocks,” and “industrial processes that reduce carbon emissions and recyclable materials…Natural fibres are a renewable resource,” and natural fibres are, as noted in A How-To On Composting Your Clothes, are capable of decomposition compared to synthetic materials.[xii]
They’re based on high technology with good mechanical strength, low weight and low cost” and are, therefore, “attractive to the automotive industry.”[xiii] Take, for instance, the European example with their car manufacturers utilizing an approximate 8,000 tonnes of natural fibres per year for the reinforcement of thermoplastic panels, which, as with all of the aforementioned information from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, comes from 2009.[xiv]
Finally, and a more minor, but personally importance choice for many people much of the time, natural fibres exist as a fashionable choice, too. There’s a whole area of eco-fashion, or things like sustainable clothing based on clothing for all ages and styles for wearing and disposing, and then, one can assume, for decomposition. The cycle of natural fibre.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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