Ginning, blowing, carding, drawing, roving, spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, sewing, ironing, shipping and trucking — all the steps it took to turn some cotton bolls into your T-shirt. Those processes also contribute the most to the planet-warming impact of the clothing fiber.
Growing cotton bolls itself sucks up huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilizers. For all the water you’ll ever use to wash your cotton T-shirt over its entire lifetime, it will have taken 50 times as much water to grow the cotton that went into it. Cotton uses about 2.3% of global arable land and accounts for 16% of all insecticide sales. And the fashion industry has been forced to reckon with allegations of forced labor and poor working conditions in certain cotton-harvesting regions.
Boston-based startup Galy says it has found an alternative that avoids all of these problems by growing cotton in a lab. The company shared an evaluation by environmental consultancy Quantis to show that, at an industrial scale, its process reduces water use by 99%, land use by 97% and the negative impact of fertilizers by 91% when compared with conventional cotton.
Brazil-born Luciano Bueno, CEO of Galy, founded the company in 2019. But cotton has featured in his business life for much longer. “I started selling T-shirts door-to-door just to pay my bills in high school,” he said. His first job at Deloitte involved working for textile companies. His first company Horvath Co., which he founded in 2015, tried to develop sweat-resistant shirts.
But after Horvath got stuck in an exclusivity deal, he took a break and studied entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. It was during the heyday of fundraising for lab-grown meat startups that Bueno thought he should apply the same idea to cotton. It’s taken Galy a few years, but now the startup has shown enough progress to secure investments from huge cotton consumers: Hennes & Mauritz AB and Zara-owner Inditex SA.
Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/