Just the other day, we were speculating about NAT’s growth rates, and left it up to how the company’s bulk commercial hemp trials worked out. Well, some of the results are already in, and it’s looking pretty good for both Naturally Advance Technologies and the hemp industry writ large.
You see, part of hemp’s biggest potential is also one of its largest obstacle: as a fabric. Now, while cotton needs an immense amount of water (i.e. heavy irrigation), hemp can often subsist on rain water. Furthermore, while cotton is a destructive crop that quickly depletes the soil, hemp makes a great rotation crop while the soil is being left to recover.
The problem with hemp as an alternative to cotton, however, is twofold: (1) it does not make as soft of a fabric as cotton does, and as a result (2) it cannot be as easily spun by machines as cotton can. All this seriously drives up the cost of using hemp as a fabric, which in turn reduces demand for hemp fibres, which in turn discourages the kind of investment required to find a solution to all. It’s all a vicious cycle.
Well, NAT may have solved this problem with its Crailar organic fiber. Crailar is a traditionally spun yarn, but using bast fibers (like those found in plants like hemp), as is consequently a replacement for cotton. Incidentally, Crailar was part of the aforementioned bulk commercial hemp trials. These trials, moreover, were conducted in conjunction with Hanesbrands Inc. (the maker of Hanes t-shirts), and they have not only yielded a way to mass process hemp into a viable cotton substitute, but NAT has already secured a distribution deal with Costco. As Ecotextile reports:
PORTLAND – [17.11.08] An industrial hemp blended yarn has been successfully spun on conventional cotton ring-spinning equipment without modification and then knitted into jersey fabrics in trials sponsored by Hanesbrands Inc.
The hemp yarns were spun at North Carolina State University using fibres made with the ‘Crailar’ enzyme process from Naturally Advanced Technology, which uses enzyme technology to produce soft, comfortable textiles made from hemp and bast fibres that can better compete with cotton.
Tim Pleasants, Spun Yarn Lab Manager, NC State University, said, “[...] This is the first time in my 23-year yarn spinning career that I have seen hemp processed on conventional cotton spinning equipment.”
Earlier this summer, British Colombia-based Naturally Advanced Technologies (NAT) raised nearly US$2 million through a private placement of its shares and more recently signed a new promotional deal with Costco’s US stores.
Overall, NAT’s achievement with their Crailar fiber is a business accomplishment par excellence. Not only have they found a way to replace one of the most destructive textile crops with one of the most sustainable ones, but they’ve secured distribution deal for their go-to-market strategy. This kind of innovation and entrepreneurship is just the kind of proactive approach that the hemp industry needs to overcome the economies-of-scale that its less eco-friendly alternatives have held over it for so long.
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