this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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From an EU briefing on textiles and the environment:
The huge quantities of land required should absolutely not be underestimated as a climate problem. If we're going to survive this we absolutely need to give land back to nature at a massive scale, and the easiest (humanely tolerable) way of achieving this is to produce the same goods at a much lesser surface area. Lab cotton could, hopefully, be efficiently grown in a high rise building with a minimal physical footprint.
Would be interesting to see how easily vacant office space can be converted to vertical farming, since developers seem insistent that it can't be turned into residential space for various reasons. There's rather a lot of it in the wake of work-from-home and the AI revolution.
You could imagine a feature where cities are farms and office workers live in the country side. That's fascinating.
While there are not many details this is hopefully a great step toward more efficient cotton production. There are a number of possible reductions from this method (hard to know without full details though), that being lower usage of land, water, pesticides, herbicides, and shipping.
Longer term what I find exciting is the some of these lab grown systems may work well "closed loop" which mean they might work off planet at some capacity or another. That is a much longer term vision though and we have a long way to go before we master that aspect.
I guess for water getting a closed loop should be almost without challenge. I'm more interested in the potential of making life livable on earth though, at least in the short term. Still, the requirements are similar - lowered use of resources. :)