Retailers are promoting natural textiles as green substitutes for plastic bags, but some people have suggested that synthetic fibres may actually be better for the environment – and the economy – than the natural fabrics they had replaced.
According to one argument, growing crops such as cotton consumes land and energy that could better be used for farming food. The historical demographer Tony Wrigley says that a return to natural fibres – and the introduction of biofuels – would shift us back into an "organic economy", in which the four essentials of life (food, clothing, shelter and fuel) are grown rather than mined. His book, Continuity, Chance, and Change, argues that Britain's population grew rapidly during the industrial revolution because wood, charcoal, thatch and horses gave way to coal, coke, slate and trains. Vast amounts of land were therefore released for growing food.
This raises the question, could all natural fabrics be replaced with synthetics, thus freeing up more land for food?
Patrick Tonks, the director of Precision Stitching, a company that specialises in creating artificial fabrics, said that wholesale replacement would have big drawbacks. "Production of synthetic textiles would have to go through the roof," he said. "It would ruin a number of different economies dependent on natural fibres. Developing countries depend on exporting natural fibres like hemp and lots of people have allergies to synthetic chemicals."
There is another downside to synthetics: they are created from oil, which is not a limitless commodity.
"We have a battery – fossil fuels – and there's only so much life left in the battery," said Stephen Ashworth, chemistry lecturer at the University of East Anglia. "No doubt there are plenty of fossil fuels left, and as they become more expensive, more people can mine them economically … but eventually the energy required for pumping oil will be more than the oil's worth – there will be no net energy gain."
Oil-free synthetics could solve that problem, but only if whatever replaced the oil didn't take up land that could better be used to grow food.
"If we can replace oil with a plant derivative that would be beneficial," Ashworth said, "but, as with biofuels we have to be careful about land competing with food crops. If you could arrange for a material that's either grown on poor quality soil or a by-product of food crops (e.g. using peapods as a material) then you're onto a winner."
Wrigley's book links this debate back to the fundamental ambivalence of science and technology. It notes that we fear climate change because thousands of people may die, but if we had never used fossil fuels at all then most of us would never have lived, as we wouldn't have had the resources to sustain large populations.
"You probably know the Greek myth about Pandora," he says. "Opening the box let out both great evils and great powers. There is something of the same about the industrial revolution. It transformed society's ability to produce all types of goods and so made it possible to support much larger populations, but it also introduced new and potentially very serious hazards and sources of instability."