Hello,
One of the problems about all this is that the way that the bamboo is processed is something of a secret that the Chinese are not giving much away on! However, there are a few different things to consider with it all.
- Eco friendliness.
Bamboo requires no or minimal artificial chemicals to grow as it grows so fast and strongly anyway. There is currently no actual organic certification for it, which is why it's not called organic, even though it essentially is.
Artifical fibres such as that used to make Fluffles could be seen as being non-eco friendly. However, they dry so fast, and stay so soft that they don't need tumble drying, so that's really eco friendly!
Conventional cotton is one of the most damaging crops in the world. Bamboo AND microfibre is better... although organic cotton is fine, and should also be fairly traded as part of the organic certification.
- Nappy features. Bamboo fibre is around 60% more absorbant than cotton, but not massively more absorbant than many cotton/hemp mixes. However it is naturally anti bacterial and anti fungal which is brilliant in a nappy!
- "Fairtrade". To my knowledge there is no nappy certified as "Fairtrade". However, Wham-Bamboos are ethically produced in Europe - ie good working conditions, no child labour and so on. Tots Bots have stopped producing all of their nappies in Scotland and have outsourced some production to Turkey. I am sure that their production processes will be ethical as they are a good company, but I will ask them the question.
The Fair trade issue is really interesting. I was chatting to one of our suppliers in Bangladesh who supplies us with Fair trade products, and she manufactures for some of the really big nursery & baby companies. She's been in discussions with, shall we say, a major supermarket who were thinking of introducing a fair trade range. However, they just wanted to say that they were made in a fair trade project - where the raw materials came from, and whether they were ethically produced, didn't interest them. So, you could have non-organic cotton grown in a farm with forced child labour, spun into cloth in a third world sweatshop and then sown into a garment by a fair trade project - and it would be called fair trade. She refused to participate, but it goes to show how the fair trade and organics labels can be highjacked... but at the same time if at least one of the processes is done ethically then that's better than nothing... but it makes it very hard for us eco retailers as we need to do so much research into the whole lifecycle of the production of a product and sometimes make very difficult decisions about what to take, and what isn't "ethical enough".
This thread has given me lots of food for thought and I will do some more investigating.
The upshot is that everything we do makes an impact, but more and more of us are making decisions based on best option, or at least worst bad option, and the more info we have the better we can make the decisions - provided we can cut through the marketing you know what.
Emma