The difficulty of correctly assessing the sustainability of cotton

Cotton has been the world's most popular clothing fibre for years. Surveys confirm this time and again. However, cotton is no longer the most produced clothing fibre. Its market share in the total fibre market is now only around 20 percent. This was not always the case. In the 1960s, its share was about 70 percent, and at the end of the 1980s it was still almost 50 percent. The year 2000 marked a turning point for cotton. Since the turn of the millennium, the chemical fibre polyester has been the most produced fibre in the world, with a market share of 57 percent today, as data from the industry organisation Textile Exchange shows.

Although cotton's market share shrank due to the emergence of chemical fibres, the amount of cotton produced continues to grow, driven by the hunger for new fibres, new clothing and new fashion. Total global fibre production per capita has doubled in the last 50 years. In 2023, around 25 million tonnes of cotton and around 84 million tonnes of polyester were produced. Two things have remained surprisingly constant over the years. First, the area under cotton cultivation has not increased significantly (it always fluctuates a little, but the trend has remained constant since the 1980s). Second, the price of cotton has hardly changed at all over the years.

Cotton cultivation: Prices and acreage remained almost constant

"The global area under cotton cultivation has not increased. It has remained almost the same for over 70 years," says Elke Hortmeyer, director of communications & international relations at the Bremen Cotton Exchange. The Bremen Cotton Exchange is one of several cotton exchanges worldwide that deal with the contractual processing of the cotton business and, as an association, represent the interests of cotton producers, manufacturers and traders. The fact that the area under cultivation has remained relatively constant is not due to a lack of interest in the natural fibre, but primarily to the increasing competition for agricultural land with a rising population and the need to produce food. "For cotton, this means that we have to produce more on the same area," says Hortmeyer.

However, this is not equally successful in all countries. Cotton is grown in around 60 to 70 countries worldwide, and cultivation methods and yields differ considerably. "While in Australia, for example, 2,000 kilograms per hectare can be harvested, some areas in Africa only manage 250 kilograms. There, cotton cultivation is a form of poverty reduction," says Hortmeyer. The low production quantities are particularly problematic because the price of cotton has hardly changed in recent decades. While countries such as the US, Australia or Israel have been able to increase production and achieve higher yields on the same area through high-tech precision agriculture, some African smallholder farmers are effectively earning less and less from cotton cultivation.

Sensitive issue of cotton's water consumption

The fact that cultivation is still worthwhile for the farmers is mainly due to the fact that they have little other choice. "Cotton is a desert plant. It can be grown in areas where not much else grows," explains Hortmeyer. The plant's taproot goes deep into the earth and still finds water even when everything around it has long since dried up. For many people, it thus secures a relatively stable income in areas where agriculture is otherwise hardly possible. This makes it all the more incomprehensible to Hortmeyer that cotton, of all things, is often portrayed by environmentalists as a "water guzzler".

The cultivation and processing of cotton consumes a large amount of water, according to the World Wildlife Fund website, for example. "Surface and groundwater are often diverted to irrigate cotton fields, leading to freshwater losses through evaporation and inefficient water management," the environmental organisation says.

The cotton industry has been fighting against this image for years. "Because cotton is a desert plant, it is grown where it is dry. It is not dry there because cotton is grown there," Hortmeyer of the Bremen Cotton Exchange counters. "That's why there are many countries that have the greatest water shortages, but still grow cotton." Incorrect figures for the plant's water requirements have been circulating for years and are persistent, she says.

Water consumption has become a "sensitive issue" for the cotton industry. In fact, the incorrect figures are based on a study from 1999, according to the Cotton Exchange. There, the water requirement for producing one kilo of cotton was stated as 7,000 to 29,000 litres. This figure is, on the one hand, completely outdated because yields have been increased enormously today without increasing water consumption, and on the other hand, the study did not examine average cotton, says Hortmeyer.

Actual water consumption

According to a study published in April by the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), the water requirement of cotton averages 6,239 litres per kilogram per year. Cotton consumes about 75 percent rainwater and only 25 percent from artificial irrigation. The organisation stresses that focusing on cotton's rainwater consumption can be misleading. Only scientific analysis of artificial irrigation identifies regions with inefficiencies that can then be improved, emphasises communications chief Mike McCue in an email.

The Transformers Foundation, an organisation from the denim industry, has also taken the topic of cotton as an opportunity to clear up the myths in a report of over 100 pages. Given the variety of cultivation methods, the diversity of local climates and the available irrigation, local data on cotton and water are far more meaningful than global averages, it says.

The study also points to significant data gaps on cotton water use. More data is available in wealthy cotton-growing countries like the US than from producers in low-income countries.

Is cotton more sustainable than a chemical fibre?

But it is not only the discussion about water consumption that has damaged cotton's image in recent years. The discussion about pesticides, genetically modified seeds, forced labour, deforestation to gain arable land and finally the fact that today - despite all sustainability efforts - only about two percent of cotton is produced according to the criteria of controlled organic cultivation (not to mention the criteria of regenerative cultivation, which are not yet uniformly regulated) have contributed to cotton being critically questioned.

Cotton cultivation occupies about 1.9 percent of the world's cultivated area and requires more than 125,000 tonnes of pesticides and seven million tonnes of fertiliser annually, representing about 3.7 percent and 2.9 percent of total world consumption, respectively. This is shown by figures from the current Cotton Databook of the ICAC and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

This goes so far that studies on the environmental compatibility of textiles sometimes rate the fibres polyester, polyacrylic and even elastane better than cotton. On the one hand, because cotton, in contrast to most chemical fibres, cannot be recycled endlessly and without loss of quality. On the other hand, studies also show that when it comes to microplastics, which for a long time were only seen as a problem with chemical fibres, natural fibres can also become "microplastics" if they are heavily treated with chemicals.

"Natural fibres also end up in the environment and remain there for a long time. This is due to the many chemical processes that natural fibres undergo, which ensure that they are not broken down either," says Elliot Bland, researcher at The Microfibre Consortium (TMC). According to his findings, natural fibres are not necessarily better than chemical fibres when it comes to the impact of microfibre emissions. Together with the University of Leeds and with the support of the European Outdoor Group (EOG), the NGO is investigating how the textile industry can contribute to reducing the amount of microplastics generated.

Nevertheless, in contrast to fossil chemical fibres, natural fibres at least have the basic capacity for biodegradability if more ecological criteria were applied to their further processing.

Imbalance in sustainability assessment?

Above all, the long supply chain is the downfall of cotton in many sustainability assessments. "Cotton has the 'misfortune' of being a natural fibre and not made from petroleum," says Hortmeyer, describing the imbalance in the current discussion. "With chemical fibres, only a few companies and people are involved, but with cotton cultivation, many developing countries and 150 million people are involved, who make their living from it. This makes the supply chain long and more difficult to control."

This social significance is not given sufficient consideration in the sustainability assessment of cotton, nor is the fact that cotton removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during its growth. As a plant, cotton actively converts CO2 into biomass and thus contributes to climate protection. "The cotton plant has a climate-positive effect in the field and absorbs so much CO2 that it more than compensates for the subsequent processing into cotton textiles," writes the German organic textile manufacturer Cotonea on its website, referring to a scientific paper by Kai Hughes, head of the ICAC, from 2021.

According to ICAC and Cotonea, cotton in particular can be "the path to a climate-friendly textile industry", because this ability makes cotton superior to almost all other textile fibres; only flax fibre is even more climate-friendly. At Cotonea, the entire production and supply chain is in one hand, from the organic cotton fields in Kyrgyzstan and Uganda to its own web shop for home textiles and clothing. As a result, Cotonea alone sequestered 1,260 tonnes of CO2 last year through the cultivation of cotton, the company calculates.

Finally, the increase in reporting obligations and required transparency in the supply chain also raises the production costs of cotton and thus favour chemical fibres, which do not have to bear such costs. On the contrary, the already unbeatably cheap polyester fibre does not have to prove where its petroleum comes from. If Brussels does not take these aspects more into account, "the share of natural fibres will be very small at some point," Hortmeyer fears.

Transparency and sustainability come at a cost

So far, about 30 to 40 percent of cotton is traceable, cotton from the US or Europe often even 100 percent. The European cotton-growing regions of Greece and Spain have even discovered their unique selling point in the area of sustainability and consciously market their cotton as traceable, sustainably grown EU cotton.

"We have built up an entire cotton supply chain in western Greece, from the cotton field to the weaving mill. This considerably reduces the carbon footprint of our cotton," explains George Kitras of Nafpaktos Textile Industry, a Greek group of companies focusing on cotton ginning and spinning. Of course, EU cotton has a different price than cotton from Pakistan or India, and EU laws also make EU cotton more expensive, "but brands are looking for traceability and sustainability. And those who want to be sustainable also want to be able to prove it," explains Kitras. European premium and luxury brands in particular are increasingly interested in EU cotton and use it as a marketing tool for their customers.

The Swiss company Remei, on the other hand, neither sells luxury collections nor does its cotton come from Europe, and yet it has succeeded for years in guaranteeing the sustainability and traceability of its cotton. Remei produces around one million traceable basics and baby clothes made of organic cotton per year, for example for the Swiss retail chain Coop, and has built up its own self-sufficient system for this purpose.

Instead of buying cotton through intermediaries, the company works with around 2,000 smallholder farmers in Tanzania and India on direct contracts, with Remei guaranteeing the purchase of organic cotton for five years at a fixed price that is around 15 percent above the usual market price. To ensure that the right cotton ends up in the yarns, Remei also has its own spinning mill and a self-developed traceability tool, which the company has been working with for over 15 years.

"In the past, many people were rather critical of this, but today, with a view to the Digital Product Passport, it is only now becoming clear how useful this is," says Marion Röttges, Co-CEO of Remei, and wonders: "Even we as a small company can make this effort. We don't understand why large companies with much more manpower and money can't do this?"

How future-proof is cotton?

So cotton is currently not having an easy time for various reasons, also because different criteria in the sustainability assessment lead to different results. Finding uniform and realistic evaluation standards here in the future is an important task for the future. The question remains how well cotton is positioned for the future in view of climate change. According to the German Environment Agency, four of the five main cotton-growing countries are located in areas that have a very high to high risk with regard to water availability by 2040.

It is by no means certain whether the cotton-growing areas, which are already characterised by great dryness today, will still be suitable for cotton cultivation in the future. "We have seen in recent years how droughts have decimated the cotton harvest in the US and torrential rains have almost completely destroyed the cotton harvest in Pakistan," says Boris Planer, expert for trade and consumer goods at the Frankfurt Zukunftsinstitut. Remei has also found that cotton cultivation in India has become fundamentally riskier because the monsoon lasts longer or starts at different times than before.

If CO2 emissions remain high, half of the world's cotton-growing areas will face severe consequences of climate change by 2040, according to a report by the Cotton 2040 initiative, funded by the Laudes Foundation. The foundation was established by members of the Brenninkmeijer family, the owners of the clothing group C&A.

High temperatures could shorten the growing season in 40 percent of growing areas, according to the study. About 50 percent of cotton will be exposed to increased risk from drought, but extreme rainfall is also a risk for the world's most productive cotton-growing areas.

The question therefore also arises as to how cotton cultivation can be secured in the face of climate change. "It's about finding sustainable materials that are more independent of climate change. This is now a race against speed and innovation," says Planer. The Bremen Cotton Exchange is also aware of the challenges; in addition, agricultural land is increasingly competing with the cultivation of food.

The solution is even higher-yielding varieties and more efficient cultivation methods. Hortmeyer: "It is enormously important that a lot of international investment is now made in research." For Marion Röttges of Remei, cotton is definitely still contemporary: "If natural fibres are not a contemporary raw material, then the industry has lost the plot."

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