Letters to the Editor
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Chemistry?
There's a bit of confused chemistry in this article - sodium hydroxide is neither "volatile" or "organic". (It may be the main ingredient in Drano - oooh, scary - but it's also used to make soap and lots of other products.) The rayonizing process is environmentally problematic, but not because of sodium hydroxide specifically.
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Not such bizarre math...
"In the bizarre math of global economics, it takes less diesel fuel to ship something to California across the ocean from China than via truck or train from New York..."
I'm confused about what makes this 'bizarre math.' Ships have lower carbon footprints than trains which are lower than trucks.
That isn't global economics nor cheap labor or anything...just the simple math of how much can you carry how far on how much fuel.
If carbon taxes become truly high _maybe_ we'll return to sail...how romantic :-)
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"Organic"
KayWWW is correct that sodium hydroxide is not organic and has many safe and important uses including the soap manufacture. Also, carbon disulfide is not usually considered organic either. Organic chemicals have carbon and hydrogen.
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Bamboo vs. Hemp
There's another natural fabric out there- one that requires about 1/3 the water of cotton to grow; faces no natural pests comparable to the devastating boll weevil; is simultaneously more breathable and at least twice as durable as cotton- hemp.
In the early 1990s, I was once able to buy 50/50 hemp/cotton jeans, made in Romania, that were cut pretty much indistinguishable from cotton Levis- except that they broke in easier, were more comfortable, and lasted 3 times as long. Their weak spot was the thin pockets, evidently made of 100% cotton, that wore through long before the rest of the material wore out.
Those jeans were a blend, but 100% hemp can be woven as fine as linen. Its potential as a fabric has never been realized.
As "fashion", cannabis hemp was pushed into the "hoodlum youth" market by the mid-1990s, as part of the ongoing hoodlumization of cannabis/marijuana "weed" that's been so inevitable as a part of its mystifying illegal status. Now it seems to have gone the way of many another fashion fad- especially since the cultivation of cannabis hemp remains illegal in the USA. So, it's back to 100% King Cotton, which has always been much more comfortably capitalized as a crop- as well as drinking much of the American West dry, for its irrigation, and requiring saturation doses of pesticide.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fashion trendiness. I just want some eco-friendly, durable, breathable clothes to wear. Which marks me as one of the dreaded "hippie movement", I suppose.
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cabdriver. I thought you were still on strike and wanted higher wages and polyester jump (color-code-orange) suits? I tease.
Hemp- ...picked the glistening hemp flower that sparkled in the sun and gave it to the cabdriver for a calm ride in a whirly bird helicopter ride home...
Hemp provides soil tilth. Ya's have to puff a rolled joint the size of a telephone pole to get a calm sensation. Ya's just hack and cough.
Bamboo-... if you plant it in the wrong place ya's later shout boo, shoo, no grow bamboo.
Boo. shoo you. no grow.
Gabbie! a wave in the air to you. Ya's ride me home for free? I give you some bamboo.
O, Cabdriver, hush?
Grow cabbage.
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syntax
I guess you rode your bike on the road
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Digression about Bamboo
Don't plant Bamboo! I live on an island and it's rhizomes have popped up everywhere. It's true it grows about a foot a day and will decimate your yard,it's invasive and the leaves make a mess. You have been warned would be bamboo planters.
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What about... gasp... regional fabrics???
I live in a place where neither cotton, bamboo nor hemp grows especially well. But sheep do fine, so wool's my fabric of choice. When I lived at lower altitude, I wore a lot of linen, again because it grew safely and sanely in the region in which I lived.
There's a big reason that during the medieval period, cotton and silk were luxury fabrics in Northern Europe - distance and transit. But every peasant had a tunic of linen and/or wool. Those were the fabrics that were most easily developed in their local areas. And yet, European production of linen and wool is at an alltime low.
Flax won't grow where cotton grows, and sheep don't thrive where bamboo and silk thrive. Long-staple hemp is equally picky about location. But that doesn't mean that we should give up on all of these fabrics because they're not universal -- nothing IS.
If we're going to do our bests to eat local, we need to work on wearing local, too. And that infrastructure is in worse shape than our food infrastructure.
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re: bamboo infestation
There are different kinds of bamboo, including the runner kind that will spread rapidly and wildly, and can only be stopped by deep trenches and concrete barriers. But there are other kinds of bamboo, I think called clumping, that I have used in my backyard.
about bamboo floors. They are beautiful, but very delicate and scratch rather easily. a big bummer. especially since they were advertised at lowes as hardwood and durable. not to mention their home installation service was a nightmare, but that's another story.
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Looking Out My Window on Maui
We have bamboo. LOTS of it.
Maybe a replacement for our dying sugar cane industry?
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organic?
Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is decidedly not an organic molecule. It's also called lye and is used, among a great many other things, to make soap.
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Another fiber source little discussed is palm wood.
Quarter sawn, the stuff is as beautiful as quarter sawn white oak. We've been seeing more and more of it as a flooring product. Using it thusly closes a life cycle of sorts as the main source of it currently is coconut palms. They will produce fruit for about 40 years. After this, the trees must be cut down for replanting. I don't know whether date or oil palms can be used in the same fashion.
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The Real Solution
Buy less stuff. Move into a house that looks OK to start with instead of scraping it. Ask yourself how much clothing you need. Stop shopping as a form of entertainment. When you are walking or driving along the street, look at all the stray pieces of clothing that are cast into the gutters as garbage. I don't suggest you pick it up, but dollars to donuts, the clothing is probably in good condition (after a washing). The problem is that people shop for entertainment, are wasteful about clothing (because slave labor has made it so cheap), and don't want to live with a house they have moved into - they have to scent mark it so it is "theirs")
Do that, and you will do more for the environment than selecting "green" products you probably don't need in the first place.
Oh, yeah, and the less an object looks like fiber, the more work and chemicals will have to go into turning it into fiber. Sheep wool, easy. Rayon, not easy.