Preliminary Investigation into Plastic Contamination Potential at the Gin and Mill

Numerous sources of plastic have the potential to contaminate cotton and cause quality issues.  Various types of plastic, such as shopping bags, module covers and module wraps may be introduced to seed cotton during harvesting and/or ginning.  Additionally, some types of plastic contamination such as bale packaging may be introduced to ginned lint during textile mill processing.  The cotton industry is aware of the potential problem of plastic contamination and US cotton has a global reputation for being amongst the cleanest cotton in the world, however it only takes a small amount of contamination to make it into fabric to cause problems within the textile industry.  In this study plastic was intentionally added at the gin and mill in order to assess the real world implications of plastic contamination.  Waste was collected and analyzed throughout the ginning and textile processing in order to determine the efficiency of current machinery to remove the waste.  Yarn was produced and analyzed to determine the impact of the various contaminants on textile quality.