Hydroponic cotton is making major advancements across the Atlantic Ocean. ARKET, the sister company to H&M, announced a fall clothing line featuring products made of hydroponic cotton from Mediterranean Agro Technologies (Magtech). The hydroponic growing process feeds water and nutrients straight to the roots of the plant, eliminating the need for soil.

“Hydroponic has been around for decades, but during the last five years, it’s been focused on annual crops. Hydroponic has not been scaled or investigated on perennial crops, like cotton,” said David René Rodriguez, co-founder of Magtech.  

Magtech utilizes an expansive gutter system to grow cotton crops hydroponically which is a step forward in conserving water when growing crops. This system of growing plants provides several environmental benefits by minimizing waste.

“It’s like a very long box. Inside of the gutters you only have water, nutrients and oxygen. Those are the things that plants need to grow. Soil is not responsible for growing [crops],” Rodriguez said.

In October, Magtech began a project that collected waste water, cleaned it, and re-used it in the cotton-growing process. This process made tremendous progress in improving sustainability when growing hydroponic cotton.

Water is not the only important resource to conserve. According to Rodriguez, Hydroponic cotton can also conserve massive amounts of land.

“The cotton industry is 3.5 times the state of Maine, similar to the size of Italy in Europe,” Rodriguez said.

Hydroponic cotton fields hold a tremendous number of plants in a rather confined area. These growing areas contain around 30,000 cotton plants in a single hectare, per Rodriguez. For standard cotton-growing processes, there are around 30,000 cotton plants in an entire acre. One hectare is just under half an acre. With hydroponic cotton models, this space is conserved drastically.

“We were talking with the industry in Texas the other day about the possibility in the future to grow cotton in the middle of the desert, and around the oil [mining] areas,” Rodriguez said. “For one barrel of oil, you get three-to-six barrels of contaminated water. They don’t know what to do with that water, because they can’t inject it back into the soil.” 

The amount of waste water discarded during the oil drilling process is immense. The hydroponic cotton industry creates an environmentally friendly and sustainable use from the vast amounts of water that are discarded in an otherwise environmentally harmful process.

Of course, there are still problems with growing cotton hydroponically. The breeding process that allows cotton to adapt to the lack of soil has reduced the quality of the cotton.

First, hydroponic growing processes of any kind—edible or not—are expensive to start and maintain, per a report by Bruce Dunn, a professor of horticulture at Oklahoma State University. Additionally, diseases can spread more rapidly from plant-to-plant. This is especially the case if there is a disease or virus living in the water of these systems. A variety of diseases can spread between plants extremely quickly. 

The genetics of these plants have also needed to adapt significantly to the strange hydroponic environment. This adaptation has reduced the overall quality output of cotton plants in hydroponic environments, per Rodriguez.

“There’s a lot of genetic improvement that we can do to work on the architecture of the plant. We are working in an environment with cotton varieties that were never adapted to this environment. There’s a lot of research that needs to be done in terms of nutritional formulation,” Rodriguez said.

The best way to fix problems like these is for the market to grow. As the hydroponic cotton industry becomes more competitive, different companies across the world (like Materra, who is working on technology for improving hydroponic cotton fields) are going to find new ways to improve the quality and sustainability of this type of cotton—Magtech included.

Hydroponic cotton is making its way into the fashion scene as a viable alternative to standard cotton. The environmental benefits of hydroponic cotton are too vast to ignore. With large European companies, like ARKET using this type of cotton in clothing lines, it’s only a matter of time before hydroponic cotton ushers in a new age of environmental sustainability in fashion across the western hemisphere.