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Lab-Grown Cotton Enters The Market (www.forbes.com)

submitted 11 months ago by ono@lemmy.ca to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] nhgeek@beehaw.org 77 points 11 months ago

The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.

That's why. Cotton is notoriously bad in all of those categories. To that I would add the most cotton grown commercially is paired with a lot of pesticides as well.

[-] sab@kbin.social 31 points 11 months ago

From an EU briefing on textiles and the environment:

Cotton accounts for 24 % of global fibre production, according to Textile Exchange. It can be problematic because it can require huge quantities of land, water, fertilisers and pesticides and cannot easily be recycled into virgin fibre. However, the environmental impacts of organic cotton can be reduced drastically compared with conventional cotton, as it uses less water and pollutes less.

The huge quantities of land required should absolutely not be underestimated as a climate problem. If we're going to survive this we absolutely need to give land back to nature at a massive scale, and the easiest (humanely tolerable) way of achieving this is to produce the same goods at a much lesser surface area. Lab cotton could, hopefully, be efficiently grown in a high rise building with a minimal physical footprint.

[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 12 points 11 months ago

Would be interesting to see how easily vacant office space can be converted to vertical farming, since developers seem insistent that it can't be turned into residential space for various reasons. There's rather a lot of it in the wake of work-from-home and the AI revolution.

[-] sab@kbin.social 13 points 11 months ago

You could imagine a feature where cities are farms and office workers live in the country side. That's fascinating.

[-] irongamer@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

Lab cotton could, hopefully, be efficiently grown

While there are not many details this is hopefully a great step toward more efficient cotton production. There are a number of possible reductions from this method (hard to know without full details though), that being lower usage of land, water, pesticides, herbicides, and shipping.

Longer term what I find exciting is the some of these lab grown systems may work well "closed loop" which mean they might work off planet at some capacity or another. That is a much longer term vision though and we have a long way to go before we master that aspect.

[-] sab@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

I guess for water getting a closed loop should be almost without challenge. I'm more interested in the potential of making life livable on earth though, at least in the short term. Still, the requirements are similar - lowered use of resources. :)

[-] lotzenplotz@feddit.de 6 points 11 months ago

To make the Galy cotton, a team collects samples from a plant and harvests its cells. The cells are grown in bioreactor or fermentation vessels in a cell culture process similar to beer brewing. The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.

Maybe I just misread the sentence. But the full quote seems deliberately obtuse to me. They don’t explicitly say that they need less water than traditional farming.