Gooddrop’s ‘Grow-to-Wear’ Apparel Business Looks to Mass Produce Cotton Using Vertical Farms
December 10, 2024
The Gooddrop and University of Nottingham research team. Image credit: Gooddrop
Conventional cotton has been called “the world’s dirtiest crop” thanks to the heavy use of pesticides and other agrochemicals used in the growing process.
“Cotton is an aggressive and destructive crop on an ecological level,” Simon Wardle, CEO of UK startup Gooddrop, tells AgFunderNews. “It uses a great deal of land. It uses an enormous amount of water, and a lot of the chemicals that are used on the crops are pretty harmful — not only to the land and with the runoff into rivers and other water sources, but it can also be very damaging to the individuals that work in the field.”
Gooddrop’s solution? Grow the cotton inside a vertical farming environment, which uses no pesticides and can potentially be built closer to the consumers.
With this idea in mind, Gooddrop is building what Wardle calls a “grow-to-wear” cotton apparel business. The idea is to grow cotton in vertical farms, and keep spinning mills on the site of the farms, to cut out emissions from transport.
“We believe we’ve got a solution for cotton, but it will need to scale, and the scale potential is enormous,” he says. “We’ve chosen a type of cotton that is 90%-plus of the global market. We’re looking at the mass products to make the biggest impacts and the biggest environmental and financial impacts.”