 Farming With Lint - Scientific American, Aug. 1997
David Dotson, employed by Livingston Associates, an environmental consulting group based in Alamogordo, N. M, has found a win-win-win solution for a major problem in El Paso, Tex. El Paso is the garment-finishing capital of the world, and suffers from an overabundance of lint, the product of stone-washing, sandblasting and otherwise conditioning hundreds of thousands of pairs of blue jeans every week. Until recently, International Garment Processors (IGP) - just one of six major plants - spent $900 a week ($46.800 per year) for disposal of its lint.
Dotson came up with the idea of mixing the cotton lint with farmland soil. In the initial comparative tests with cotton and wheat seeds in five gallon buckets of soil enriched with various amounts of lint, germination rates increased by as much as 60% over an untreated control bucket. The lint also increased the water-holding capacity of the soil by 300%, a very important factor in the dry climate of El Paso.
Moreover, the unprocessed lint can also be applied directly to IGP's alfalfa fields, allowing the company to plant an additional 70 acres of presently poor soil to alfalfa, while reducing all irrigation costs by 25%. In one beautiful - and totally 'green' - stroke, IGP's overabundant lint has turned from a costly disposal problem into a profitable asset with great potential. Dotson is now looking at using lint sludge to make a superior compost for gardeners - and another source of profits from this former costly 'problem'.
Next, Dotson tested his method in White Oaks, N. M. where a harsh cyanide-leaching process used in mining had left the soil sterile for the past 100 years. Using a combination of fertilizers and lint, he found that grass yields increased by 1000% over untreated soil.
Others are collecting El Paso's lint as well. Naomi Assaidan of Texas A&M University's agricultural outreach center in El Paso has turned American Garment Finisher's (AGF) lint into bricks. AGF's proprietary process adds alum to its wash water, and its lint looks like feathery blue chalk. And when Assaidan fired up some of this claylike sludge in a kiln, it did indeed turn into bricks. Although blue rather than El Paso's customary pink clay, they are perfectly good bricks
Using El Paso's cotton lint - a perfectly 'organic' byproduct - to improve and enrich soil quality, fertility and water holding capacity is a beautiful instance of implementing the completely natural methods as described in "A Rich, Permanently Sustainable and Completely Poison-free Agriculture" on this web site. Here, a former and costly'waste' has been turned into a great, and profitable asset which will generate progressively richer and more fertile soil year by year and season by season. In twenty years, El Paso can be sitting on two feet of new, rich and fertile loam, and in another 20 years, on 4 feet of rich topsoil - and so forth, and so forth, ad infinitum. And the jeans manufacturers can now proudly point to this beautifully 'green' aspect of their business.
Making bricks from El Paso's lint - although another beautifully valid, totally 'organic', and profitable solution - is, in my mind, the second best use of a former 'waste' product. Although these lint-bricks are, if only ultimately, completely biodegradable as well, I think that use of lint for progressive soil improvement and food production fills a more critical and more vital need of our kind, of our time, and of our near and long-term future.
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