Climate catastrophe

michaels

Does anyone know what the comparative impact of cotton vs polyester is if you wear your clothes until they wear out? I much prefer to wear cotton and am not surprised to here that polyester continuously sheds to the environment (no doubt cotton does too but it presumably biodegrades).

I find it annoying that in basic items like shirts, bed sheets etc it becomes harder and harder to find 100%/high cotton content and more and more they are up to 50% polyester.

Apodemus

Clearly cotton biodegrades much better than polyester and growing cotton incorporates today’s Carbon, rather than fossil Carbon. Even so, it is estimated that cotton production releases 3kg CO2 per kg cloth produced compared to 2.3kg per kg for polyester.

Cotton growth and production needs a lot of water and much of it is produced in parts of the world where water is not in abundance. Growing and producing cotton requires about 1,000 times as much water as polyester.

Cotton production is often only economic because cotton is also a major food crop - cotton oil for food use and cotton-seed cake as animal feed. Without livestock production, the cost of cotton would rise considerably.

If you live in UK, neither is likely to be produced locally (although there is a very low chance that the polyester might be).

It takes more energy to produce polyester than cotton, about 97kJ per kg for poly and 60kJ per kg for cotton.

Polyester sheds fibres when clothes are machine-washed which don’t biodegrade and end up in the environment. Cotton fibres shed less and degrade quicker.

In some circumstances polyester-blend clothing can function better and be longer wearing, lengthening the product life-cycle.

sevenhills

Merlin139 wrote: »

Other than that cannot see any point in changing anything else as it would make no difference.

I got rid of my car about 15 years ago, I now have a car again because I felt it affected my families life in a negative way.
Only a cooperating world Government could solve climate change, and we cannot even stay within the EU, so there is no chance of that.
Yes, do all you can, to make your local area clean and responsible.