Combining Hemp With Organic Cotton.

Why combining hemp with organic cotton is the best first step

As the hemp industry is starting to make its way back into our life, it is also necessary to realize that we still have a long way to go before hemp can reclaim its place on the world stage. However, in order to grow the hemp industry, you have to start somewhere. In creating hemp clothing and bringing it to the customer you have 2 main ways of operating.

The first way is making 100% hemp clothing. However, the obstacle you face here is that the clothing will be very expensive and not as comfortable as normal clothing because hemp hasn’t had the same innovation that cotton experienced over the last hundred years. We are slowly getting to the goal that hemp is becoming more affordable and comfortable, but we are not there yet.

The second way of operating is combining hemp with other textiles in order to produce clothing. It would be counterproductive to combine hemp with normal cotton or polyester and lose the sustainability benefits. Because of this, we looked at organic cotton. This second way of operating by combining hemp with organic cotton results in the fact that the clothing is more affordable and comfortable without losing on sustainability. By combining the two textiles you still get the quality and sustainability benefits of the hemp plant, while at the same time making the clothing very comfortable and still 100% sustainable.

Organic cotton

Organic cotton has a few big sustainability benefits compared to normal cotton, although these benefits aren’t as good as hemp. We won’t make a deep dive into the benefits in this article, but to help you get an idea, we took some benefits from a reliable source (credited below this article).

• Organic cotton is grown without harmful chemicals, leaving the soil, air, and water free from contaminants that cause harm. Organic cotton produces around 46% less CO2e compared to conventional cotton.
• It also uses far less water to grow since organic cotton growers typically utilize rain far more than irrigation. On top of all that, organic cotton growers use beneficial insects to control unwanted pests instead of relying on harmful chemicals, thus encouraging biodiversity.
• It is also known that various skin allergies relate directly to the chemicals used in non-organic cotton farming.

The goal

Because we use hemp in our clothing, every piece of clothing is Co2 negative which means the hemp absorbed more Co2 during the growth process than the amount that was used to produce the clothing. The combination between hemp and organic cotton results in the fact that the clothing is still Co2 negative, but less than if we used 100% hemp clothing. Our goal is to increase the percentage of hemp and keep making the clothing more sustainable while still being attractive and comfortable for the customer.

As a last piece of information, we would like to address the fact why some companies use around 50% hemp and 50% cotton. The reason this percentage of hemp is higher than with us is that these pieces of clothing are almost always made in countries like China or Bangladesh. These countries still use a lot of pesticides, chemicals, and excess water in order to produce clothing. The simple fact is that at this moment, it’s just too expensive to make 50/50 hemp and cotton clothing while not using any chemicals or pesticides. This results in hemp clothing that is a lot less sustainable and filled with chemicals. When looking at hemp clothing, always look at the country of origin, where it is made, or where the textiles are from. Also, the price is a good indicator of understanding if the clothing is as sustainable as possible. A high percentage of hemp while still being cheap should be a red flag.

We hope this article gave you a better understanding of the benefits of combining hemp with organic cotton, and why we choose this operating way in order to reach our goal.

Organic cotton: (https://www.swedishlinens.com/blogs/news/organic-vs-conventional-cotton#:~:text=Organic%20cotton%20is%20grown%20without,rain%20far%20more%20than%20irrigation.)