Environmental concerns are slowly getting Asia's textiles to go green
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2011/01/28 16:26 | by admin ]
2011/01/28 16:26 | by admin ]
PARIS -- Green-friendly fabrics may be expensive, but increasing consumer demand for the environmentally-correct is now forcing Asia's asia textile giants to go the extra mile to produce clean cloth.
In a sign of the times, at Paris' twice-yearly Texworld asia textile trade fair this week, around 60 of the 660 firms exhibiting from around the world flew the green flag, a sharp increase on previous sessions, organizers said.
In China, Bangladesh and India, the world's top asia textile producers, as well as in Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, natural fibers, organic yarns, fair trade practices and clean processing are creeping into an industry often chided for polluting soils, wasting water and employing asia textile child labor.
“We will be starting organic and fair trade by next year,” said Sajedur Rahman Talukder, a marketing manager for Bangladesh's biggest asia textile-maker, Normanasia textile Group of Industries, whose tens of thousands of workers supply asia textile western firms such as Ikea.
“It is a market demand.”
Eco-friendly fabrics, added South Korean firm Ludia, might currently be a niche product around 15 percent more expensive than run-of-the-mill asia textile, “but in two or three years the consumers will pay the difference.”
“Eco-friendly is our key item, the market has asia textile changed,” said a company manager.
2009 is being branded U.N. “International Year of Natural Fibers” to give a shot in the arm to the asia textile 40-billion-euro global annual business in cotton, linen, sisal, hemp, alpaca, jute, wool, angora, cashmere, and the like ... much of it grown by small farmers in poor nations.
“Some 30 million tonnes of natural asia textile fibers are produced annually,” 25 million of them cotton, the UN's food and agricultural agency FAO said last month. “Since the 1960s, the use of synthetic asia textile fibers has increased and natural fibers have lost a lot of their market share.”
But 15 years ago, Chinese entrepreneur H.L. Ding already had his sights set on homegrown hemp, a 4,000-year-old fiber used in sails for old ships asia textile that he describes as the “fabric of the future.”
Strong, resistant, in need of little water or care, asia textile and no fertilizers, “it is a very special plant, the strongest of the natural fibers, even better than linen.”
In a sign of the times, at Paris' twice-yearly Texworld asia textile trade fair this week, around 60 of the 660 firms exhibiting from around the world flew the green flag, a sharp increase on previous sessions, organizers said.
In China, Bangladesh and India, the world's top asia textile producers, as well as in Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, natural fibers, organic yarns, fair trade practices and clean processing are creeping into an industry often chided for polluting soils, wasting water and employing asia textile child labor.
“We will be starting organic and fair trade by next year,” said Sajedur Rahman Talukder, a marketing manager for Bangladesh's biggest asia textile-maker, Normanasia textile Group of Industries, whose tens of thousands of workers supply asia textile western firms such as Ikea.
“It is a market demand.”
Eco-friendly fabrics, added South Korean firm Ludia, might currently be a niche product around 15 percent more expensive than run-of-the-mill asia textile, “but in two or three years the consumers will pay the difference.”
“Eco-friendly is our key item, the market has asia textile changed,” said a company manager.
2009 is being branded U.N. “International Year of Natural Fibers” to give a shot in the arm to the asia textile 40-billion-euro global annual business in cotton, linen, sisal, hemp, alpaca, jute, wool, angora, cashmere, and the like ... much of it grown by small farmers in poor nations.
“Some 30 million tonnes of natural asia textile fibers are produced annually,” 25 million of them cotton, the UN's food and agricultural agency FAO said last month. “Since the 1960s, the use of synthetic asia textile fibers has increased and natural fibers have lost a lot of their market share.”
But 15 years ago, Chinese entrepreneur H.L. Ding already had his sights set on homegrown hemp, a 4,000-year-old fiber used in sails for old ships asia textile that he describes as the “fabric of the future.”
Strong, resistant, in need of little water or care, asia textile and no fertilizers, “it is a very special plant, the strongest of the natural fibers, even better than linen.”
