Fashion For Good programme leads to pilot cotton project
The Fashion For Good initiative, which aims to help companies in the fashion supply chain work with innovative technology providers to make clothes more sustainable, has announced a new cotton project in India.
Fashion groups PVH Corp and Kering, and textile manufacturer Arvind have backed a pilot project in Gujarat. The project involves setting up a pilot cotton farm over 1.5 hectares and using technology from UK-based group Materra to produce high-quality, long-staple cotton using less water and no pesticide.
Materra, formerly called HydroCotton, was one of 13 start-ups that Fashion For Good selected in 2020 for inclusion in an accelerator programme it runs. Materra’s approach to cotton farming combines precision agriculture and controlled environments to create what it calls “radically resource-efficient cotton farms”.
The pilot farm will be equipped with a network of sensors to track data in real time. This will allow what Materra calls “efficient irrigation”, delivering the right amount of water directly to the roots of the cotton plants exactly when needed. This will avoid the use of excess water. The system is also pesticide-free: it monitors pest outbreaks and, when, necessary, the farm will use biological pest control to combat them.
Over the last two years, Materra has tried its ideas out at a test site in Essex. It now wants to see if its ideas and growth recipe will work in Gujarat. The project there will run for two years, at the end of which the partners hope to have generated 3 tonnes of cotton. Arvind, Kering and PVH Corp will each take a share of the cotton and make special-edition garments with it, bringing these to market in 2023.
If the project is successful, Fashion For Good will seek to work with partners to use the same technology and methods in other regions where cotton agriculture is challenged by limited resources such as water, and where there are few solutions for pest control and limited success at growing extra-long staple cotton.
Image shows cotton produced by Materra at its test site in the UK.
