A new benchmarking tool stands to help cotton yarn spinning mills track their productivity and performance, while highlighting the unique benefits of U.S.-grown crops.
Debuting at the Textile and Garment Technology Exhibition in Milan (ITMA) this week, the Cotton Council International’s (CCI) U.S. Cotton Performance Index will allow mills to benchmark their material yield, machine and labor productivity, efficiency and energy management capabilities against data from across the sector.
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These capabilities have the capacity to improve a mill’s overall performance, according to CCI executive director Bruce Atherley. The tool “shows how mills compare to their direct competition and how sourcing U.S. cotton ultimately increases productivity and provides higher yields,” he said.
The patent-pending Index amasses anonymous data across key cost-driving efficiencies, synthesizing it and presenting it to users on a web-based platform. According to CCI, it will be available on an invitation-only basis to spinning mills that are part of the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol that use at least 10,000 bales of U.S. Upland and Supima cotton each year.
This week’s launch at the textile and garment technology expo comes after the completion of a pilot program that included 47 mills in 13 countries. The experimental phase showed that U.S. cotton demonstrated increased labor productivity, better running conditions, fewer ends down, higher yield in combed and carded yarns, better machine output and higher spindle speed.
Third-party research commissioned by CCI showed that U.S. cotton provides a number of benefits to the mills that use it, compared with other cotton fibers sourced globally. Because cotton grown in the U.S. is contamination-free, traceable and has long fibers, it provides significant commercial advantages, the findings showed. One particular upside is the superior consistency of the American fiber’s moisture content, and it outperformed cottons from across the globe at every stage of processing.
While U.S. crops typically trade at marginally higher rates than competitor cottons, products produced with U.S. cotton also generated higher profits than cheaper alternatives, CCI said.
