JUTE FACTS

Ever wondered what your bags are made from and how they’re made? Read our Jute Facts to find out more!

What’s it like?

Well, if you want to be technical, it’s a vegetable bast fibre plant. (And no, we haven’t misspelled ‘vegetable-based’; there’s a kind of plant called bast. Linseed and hemp are two others.) It’s pretty adaptable, too, as plants go. You can grow it where it’s salty, sandy or full of clay.

 

Where it’s from?

Put it like this: don’t try it at home unless you’re thirty degrees north or south of the equator. It needs temperatures between 28 deg C and 35 deg C and humidity between 70% and 90%. (So that’s Newcastle out, then.) These days, it’s mainly from India and Bangladesh, where roughly five million people work in the industry. (Although the jute fabric industry was        pioneered by mill-owners in Dundee, Scotland, in the 1820s. By the 1850s they were setting up jute mills in India itself, and some of these mills are still working today.)

 

What’s it for?

What’s it NOT for? Although these days you’re likely to see it hanging off some of the savviest and best-dressed shoulders around, it’s in plenty less noticeable places, too: sacks, packaging, carpet-backing, ropes, hessian and canvas. We could go on, but you wouldn’t thank us.

 

Clever stuff

Growers who rotate jute with crops like rice and potatoes find it acts as a barrier to diseases and pests which damage those other crops. Plus growing jute leaves the soil jam-packed with the kind of organic gubbins and micronutrients that other crops really thrive on. Stop us if this is getting too technical.

 

Bad stuff

“Would you like that in a bag?” UK shoppers say “Yes, please” about seventeen and a half billion times a year. Those plastic bags end up in landfill sites, hedges, ditches, rivers and lakes. They take hundreds of years to break down. Internationally, they mess with whole ecosystems (blocking drains, polluting soil, causing flooding, that kind of thing) If you’re a scientist and paid to look hard at tiny things, you’ll even find particles of plastic in beaches around the world …

 

Good stuff

Jute, naturally. Unlike plastic, it’s not a by-product of the global petrochemicals industry. And also unlike plastic, it biodegrades completely, to the benefit of the soil.

 

 

Strong stuff

It’s The Bag That Ate Manhattan! Superman ran away so fast he laddered his tights! Jute keeps Godzilla in a cage! As a pet! Well, ok. But it is incredibly strong. And versatile. And in a fight with a plastic bag, you wouldn’t even get odds on the outcome.

 

 

Clean stuff

Get this: jute plants just gobble up CO2! And you know all about CO2, right? So, the world’s most potent greenhouse gas is jute’s dish-of-the-day, every day. And jute converts CO2 to oxygen faster even than trees can manage.

We hope you enjoyed our Jute Facts, if you would like to find out more about the material and the products made from jute, then please do get in touch, we’d be happy to help!