6 Reasons to Call Jute a Golden Fibre

February 16, 2024

And that does not include its colour!

Look at its salient features:

1. Jute is the second most important vegetable fiber after cotton in terms of usage, global cost, production,  and availability. Jute is one of Nature's bounties that has multiple areas of usages hence making it most cost effective.
2. Jute has low pesticide and fertilizer needs. This makes it even more attractive from the environmental-friendly perspective. As pesticides and fertilizers are essentially chemicals which finally draing and seep back into the soil, a minimal usage is better for the earth. This is an unavoidable to make commercial cultivation viable. However, we can minimise it by relying on crops like jute that dont need high dosages of either pesticide or fertilizer. 
3. It is the cheapest vegetable fiber procured from the bast or skin of the plant's stem. The jute leaves have immense usages in themselves, that is a separate topic for discussion. Here, we can use the jute stems to make the fibres for jute fabrics which are further moulded into myriad products including bags, rugs, clothes, baskets and many more. 
4. It is 100% bio-degradable and recyclable and thus environmentally friendly. Since jute fibre is derived from the jute plant, it has a natural life cycle of disintegrating back into the earth. 
5. It has high tensile strength, and low extensibility, and ensures better breathability of the fabric. Therefore, jute is very suitable for agricultural products in bulk packaging. Traditionally, we have seen jute being used in gunny sacks or hemp bags used for packaging of coffee beans, grains, onions, potatoes and other cash crops. Jute sandbags made in India were used extensively in World War I trenches by the British Army. The strength and durability of the fabric has remained the same even as we have found better ways to refine it and make it presentable enough to be used in fashion bags and even wearable fabrics. 
6. Advantages of jute include good insulating and antistatic properties. While they were used to cover traditional travel water bottles, now we have fashioned these into wine bags with lamination to make them a presentable gift item. Take a chilled wine bottle along to a party and it will not become soggy with the condensation and break like paper bags. A jute wine bag with inner foam and foil lining can even sustain the cool temperature of the bottle for a while, making it ready to drink when presenting.

With so many points in its favour, it is no wonder that this crop was grown and used since the Indus Valley Civilisation. It has surely evolved over time to become a very sophisticated fibre, that has myriad usages while retaining its natural advantages.

Keep visiting this page to know more about how we have made it even more fashionable and softer in the next edition!