Steve made a most stimulating comment yesterday which I plan to go on about at length today regarding textiles and veganism. However, today’s post isn’t primarily about veganism so much as textiles, to a limited extent since there’s something of a gap in my knowledge there.
My mother-in-law once asked Sarada whether there was any area about which I knew nothing. The answer is of course that there are huge gaps in my knowledge, and it may be more that I’m good at sounding like I know what I’m talking about, an observation another in-law once made of me. If you remember those venerable institutions called libraries, you may also recall the Dewey Decimal Classification System, rather awkwardly named because it sounds like “duodecimal” but isn’t. It’s probably good evidence that I’m in the autistic landscape that I find it very appealing and reassuring, but my ex had problems with it because she couldn’t decide which aspect of a subject rendered it sufficiently important to place in a particular category, and she makes a good point, which however should not be entertained if you’re a librarian because then nobody will be able to find anything. Anyway, the answer is yes. There is in fact a huge hole in my knowledge in the 600s and 700s, not consistently through the whole range but in the area of things like ceramics, architecture and in particular textiles. This was particularly ironic, since my mother-in-law was a needlework teacher who had also gone so far in her education regarding embroidery that she couldn’t in fact go any further without doing it at a university, although she’d done a City & Guilds in it and had exhibitions, and she did value her knowledge but somehow didn’t recognise that for me, this was one of the biggest gulfs in my education. It wasn’t through want of trying on my part either. I enjoyed needlework at primary school and was very disappointed at not being able to pursue anything like that once I got to my secondary school due to the gender segregation of subjects. Consequently, much of what I have to say here is going to be quite naïve and it’ll probably be in the “obvious” category for many of you.
I may not know much about textiles, but I know what I like. On the ethical side, nothing I’m wearing right now corresponds to depeche mode, but all too often it does. As far as I can see, fast fashion very often seems to involve polyester, which is definitely not a Good Thing environmentally. It isn’t significantly biodegradable right now, and to some extent that’s a plus because it means it lasts longer for the consumer, but it’s also one of the worst offenders as far as shedding microplastics is concerned because it’s brittle, or so I believe. Polyester textile is the same stuff as is used to make disposable plastic water bottles, one of which happens to be sitting on this table right now although I hasten to add it isn’t mine or Sarada’s, and the mere fact that the shape of the item formed from it is very thin and cylindrical doesn’t alter its physical properties per se. In an average six kilo wash, garments containing polyester shed something like a million and a half particles of microplastic, which of course end up in the sea and elsewhere on the planet, including in food destined for human plates. We now contain plastic, all of us, and polyester’s, and therefore fast fashion’s, contribution to that is considerable. That said, as I’ve mentioned before a microörganism evolved recently capable of breaking down polyester and using it as an energy resource, and this is likely to happen, or has already happened, with many other synthetic fibres simply because as a species we are creating vast amounts of substances which are an untapped resource for other life forms and therefore new ecological niches. There is hope for the future there because the biosphere may provide to some extent. Not that this should be used as an excuse for what capitalism is putting that biosphere through, and for all we know it may have unforseen or undesirable consequences. For instance, whereas synthetics may be broken down by organisms, we don’t know that the waste products won’t turn out to be toxic, and the same materials may form part of important structures such as roads and buildings, or prosthetic parts inside human bodies keeping them alive, so do we really want these to evolve?
The picture at the top of this post is a poster for the excellent Ealing Comedy ‘The Man In The White Suit’, starring Alec Guinness. I won’t spoil it for you much although if you want all the surprises, stop reading until the next paragraph, but it’s basically about a man who invents a new textile which is incredibly tough and durable, but finds the industry won’t use it because it will put them out of business, since people will stop needing to buy new clothes. It’s also remarkably fair-handed. It portrays the trade unions and management as equally opposed to the innovation for the same reasons. Apart from the prominence of the unions, the film could be remade to day with few basic changes, and it illustrates a basic problem with capitalism: it disincentivises the production of durable goods. In fact, if the ‘White Suit’ scenario happened in real life, the problem would probably have been resolved by accelerating changes in style and fashion, and it’s notable that the fabric couldn’t be dyed because if it could, the problem would’ve been solved that way.
It’s probably fair to organise types of textiles into the following big categories: organic synthetic, organic biological, inorganic synthetic and inorganic mineral. Biological fabrics could be further divided into protein- and cellulose-based. In terms of materials which are not heavily processed or modified by industrial methods, all widely-used vegetable fibres are based on cellulose. They’re all variations on a theme, and off the top of my head they amount to cotton, ramie, canvas, bamboo, jute and sisal, with an honorable mention for rayon, which is cellulose in solution extruded through a nozzle. Among protein fibres, again practically all the widely used ones are either silk or α-keratin, unless you count leather, which is substantially collagen. Feathers are β-keratin, which is more wont to form sheets than the other form, and allows it to be iridescent, blue or green due to structural colour effects, but it isn’t really a textile and no mammals make it. Keratin, leather and silk are obviously not vegan, but they’re still interesting chemically. Keratin, being a protein, has a primary, secondary and tertiary structure. The primary structure is simply the chain of amino acid residues from which it’s made and for which the animal’s DNA codes. The secondary structure is the low-level form of small parts of protein molecules, and in the case of α-keratin is an α-helix, a spring-like shape where every amino group bonds to a carboxyl group four amino acids away from it along the chain. Two such helices bond together through the sulphide bonds on the large number of cysteine molecules. Cysteine and methionine are the two essential sulphur-containing amino acids, and their existence is crucial to the shapes of protein molecules. Cysteine’s structural formula looks like this:
Into the tertiary (largest scale) structure, these paired helices are then bonded further with others through more sulphide groups. This is why burning hair smells awful. Wool, camelhair, fur, angora, any mammalian textile you care to mention, is made of this stuff.
Silk is somewhat different. It’s produced by arthropods including silkworms, but notably also spiders and a large number of other species in that phylum. It’s made from two proteins, sericin and fibroin. Fibroin molecules are sheets described as β-sheets because of the way they’re linked together, through hydrogen bonds. Incidentally, the formation of similar sheets of amino acids occurs in Alzheimer’s disease, and since it’s difficult to break down it interferes with the metabolism of brain cells, although there are other hypotheses such as τ protein. I’m guessing this contributes to the toughness of silk. The other protein, sericin, is by amount about a third serine:
There is a third, little-used, animal protein thread secreted by many bivalves to anchor them to surfaces. Mussels use it to prevent themselves being dislodged from rocks by pounding waves. This is the byssal thread, and consists of collagen. It’s used to make sea silk, when secreted by pen shells, which are endangered, and although it used to be employed throughout the mediterranean it’s now only worked with by a small number of people, possibly only one, on the island of Sant’Antioco off Sardinia. Hence it’s rare and very expensive.
Getting back to wool, by which I mean generic keratin-based fibres, I’m interested in this particular column of the periodic table:
The bottom two are highly radioactive and therefore irrelevant in a universe whose strong nuclear force has the ratio it has here to electromagnetism, but the two below sulphur do sometimes occur in amino acids, substituting for it. Selenocysteine does exist in animals, and is involved in antioxidant activity. Tellurocysteine crops up in fungi occasionally. There’s also selenomethionine, which is occasionally randomly substituted for methionine, and is the form in which selenium as an essential trace element occurs in some nuts and pulses. In the crust, selenium is only about a ten thousandth as common as sulphur and tellurium is ten times rarer than that. However, there is a DNA codon which codes for selenocysteine, so in theory it would be possible to produce a sheep whose wool was based on selenium instead of sulphur, although the diet would have to be very specialised and artificially manufactured. Selenium-based wool would be somewhat denser than real wool, and tellurium-based wool denser still. However, such a concentration of selenium would be toxic to the animals concerned, so it probably wouldn’t work.
There are also plant-based protein fibres, but they’re not as successful as their animal equivalent and have to be synthesised from plant protein as they don’t exist in the living organisms themselves. Peanuts are one example, a slightly confusing one because there is also cellulose fibre in the husks. They can also be made from maize and soya. The peanut version is called ardil, and is almost forgotten. During the Second World War, there was a wool shortage for uniforms and ICI invested in developing it. For a while after the War, the wool industry was concerned about the competition, as ardil is similar to wool. However, the Groundnut Scandal put paid to it along with difficulty in competing with synthetic fibres made from petrochemicals, so it didn’t happen. However, it is technically possible to produce a wool substitute from peanuts. This is because, as is so often so, peanuts are not botanical nuts but beans, and are therefore high in sulphur-containing amino acids. Due to the random substitution which occurs in sulphur-containing amino acids in plants, ardil would have some selenium content but I won’t harp on about it. The point to bear in mind, ultimately, is that it’s entirely feasible to produce vegan “wool” from plant sources and not oil.
As they come, most plant sources of fibre are extremely monotonous. They’re basically all cellulose, although they do have different qualities. This makes them harder to dye than wool. Cotton and linen are the most obvious and until recently the most familiar. Cotton is a mallow, like marsh mallow and hollyhocks, and has an historical association with the slave trade. There was also some kind of controversy about its production in India in the nineteenth century. Today, nine-tenths of Indian cotton is Bt cotton genetically modified to produce its own insecticides as found in a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, and is banned in several other places, although it may not actually reduce the use of pesticides or increase yield. It’s been blamed for an increase in Indian farmers ending their lives triggered by economic difficulties. I perceive cotton as the default plant fabric. However, this has not been the case historically. Flax, the source of linen, was widely used in the past and has the issue of its fibres being covered in wax, which makes it even harder to dye. Canvas, made from hemp, is a heavier fibre similar to the related ramie, made from stinging nettles. These are traditionally “retted”: left in water for the non-cellulosic matter to decompose. After that they’re rinsed and ready for cloth. Sisal and jute are more like sackcloth and not really suitable for clothing. A newcomer is bamboo, which deserves its own section.
Bamboo is, crucially, a monocotyledon rather than a dicot. Among the distinctive features of monocots is that they never have secondary thickening, that is, they are never trees. The plants referred to as trees among those plants, such as bananas and palms, are in fact not. This is important because it means they don’t take so much time to grow and can grow in smaller spaces, such as steeper slopes, than trees can. Bamboo only takes a little over three years to grow to a usefully harvestable form. It can also be grown in temperate regions such as Canada, although of course most bamboo is from China. This means it has a longer supply chain and is harder to audit ethically than more local products, and the reason most of it is from China is that the working conditions there are worse. Although the fact that bamboo can potentially reduce deforestation because it can be grown in terrain unsuitable for forests, its popularity means that forests, including ancient woodland, are cut down in order to grow it and biodiversity is reduced due to the fact that this is then a monoculture. Moreover, wild bamboo is also “mined” unsustainably due to this pressure. However, it produces 35% more oxygen than trees and has a lower carbon footprint than either European conifer forests or FSC certified tropical hardwoods. Talking of certification, however, this doesn’t exist yet for bamboo because its use in the West is a recent development. Bamboo products generally have a much higher carbon footprint than their wooden analogues because they’ve been transported here from China. Although bamboo can be retted, it’s usually just rayon, which makes the comparison with trees particularly relevant, and at this point I should discuss rayon as such.
Rayon is cellulose dissolved in a solvent and then recovered back from it (people know this, don’t they? Help me out someone: I think this is common knowledge but I’m not sure). There’s an older method which was used in the nineteenth century and a newer one which began in the 1920s. The newer method produces a textile referred to as viscose rayon because the solvent used is viscous. This method is also more convenient because it can cope with lignin, the main constituent of wood, meaning that a cotton-like fibre can be made directly from wood as a raw material. The original idea was to make a cheaper and easier silk substitute, although it doesn’t seem very similar. It has the advantage over cotton of not pilling so easily because the fibres are basically homogenous smooth cylinders, and it’s smoother and shinier than cotton. A more recent form is modal, which unlike rayon can be tumble-dried and can also be stronger generally.
The last fibre I want to cover today is Vinalon or Vinylon – 비닐론. This is associated strongly with North Korea and is made from anthracite and limestone, minerals available in the country. Whereas I am no fan of North Korea, it’s worth noting that it was invented by the Japanese some time before the country came into existence, and the ingenuity is admirable as such. It’s a rather stiff fibre used for most clothing in the country and clearly its Green credentials are other than marvellous. It forms part of an attempt by the country to achieve economic self-sufficiency, and whereas Juche – 주체사상 – cannot be described as in any meaningful way communist, it is true that in order to avoid economic leverage or sabotage, it might make sense for this to be an aim in a country attempting to oppose global capitalism.
Since this is getting rather long, I’m going to break off at this point and continue tomorrow.
A Box Of Chocolates 