So the “great thinkers” in Washington, as he called them, came together to develop a solution to the China problem. They believe that China is becoming too strong and powerful, so the U.S. needs to improve its relationships with countries within that Asian sphere, he added.

 

“And they came up with this great concept: Let’s give away hard, economic assets,” he said. “Let’s give away your job and your company to folks in Vietnam so that we can have a stronger and better relationship with them and they can then push back on China’s expansionism. Now, that makes sense to certain people at the National Security Council or the State Department, but it obviously doesn’t play well in Charlotte, N.C.

 

“So it’s our job in Washington to remind those great thinkers that they’re not playing with Monopoly money here,” he continued. “They’re playing with real companies, real people and real jobs and they’re playing with our economy and our livelihood. So what we do is go back into that system and try to press back against these grand concepts and make them more rational and feasible.”

 

As he has mentioned on numerous occasions in recent years, the NCTO’s biggest concern with TPP is Vietnam, given the size of its apparel industry, its extensive government subsidies and the government’s ownership of VINATEX, the largest apparel exporter in Vietnam. More than 499,000 U.S. fiber, textile and finished product-related jobs in the U.S. and more than 1.5 million in the Western Hemisphere are at risk if TPP is passed without level-playing field rules being built into the agreement. As such, the NCTO is pushing for a fair and reasonable yarn-forward rule of origin, fair market access rules and tariff elimination formulas and strong and effective Customs enforcement rules.

 

“Vietnam is not the junior varsity when it comes to our industry,” Tantillo said. “Vietnam is an economic superpower in textiles. They have all kinds of advantages that you could never imagine.”

 

The deadline to reach an agreement on TPP continues to move, with the target conclusion date the end of this year.

 

“It’s a legacy issue,” he said. “President Obama wants it done, and he wants it done sooner rather than later.” (Read trade ministers' most recent report here.)

 

Fibers from PET recycling

 

Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, head of sales and customer service and executive vice president at BB Engineering, GmbH, discussed potentials, markets and technologies for recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate). BB Engineering is a joint venture company of Oerlikon Barmag and Brueckner. PET, he said, the most common polymer for manmade fibers and has become a major material for bottles as a substitute for glass.

 

PET recycling is popular for a number of reasons, Ernst said:

 

• Legal aspects/regulations – the industry has to fulfill a certain recycling ratio;

• Economics – recycled material is cheaper than virgin; and

• Image – “green sells,” he said.

 

Ernst showed a diagram and explained how PET recycling works, before providing statistics indicating the breakdown of worldwide bottle collection. Globally, bottle collection is 8.2 million tons a year, but only .8 million tons per year in the U.S. China, he added, is processing 53 percent of the world’s collected bottles. Huge amounts of flakes are used in China for staple fiber and filling fiber production, he added. For filament yarn, some producers use rPET (recycled) chips in conventional extrusion spinning lines, and a key factor is melt filtration performance, he said.

 

Due to a large amount of bottles and good availability, rPET provides a high potential as a raw material for spinning applications, he said. And pricewise, rPET can provide a significant cost advantage, he added.

 

Among challenges, he said that the quality of rPET chips or flakes is dependent upon the upstream process and collection. Hence, flake or rPET chip suppliers may offer varying quality, he said. Yarn manufacturers considering these products should become familiar with the raw material treatment and consider a “make or buy” decision, he added.

 

Fiber trends, raw materials and recycling

 

In his semi-annual report to the group, Alasdair Carmichael of PCI Fibres offered his well-researched deep dive into fiber trends, raw materials and recycling. Looking at global fiber trends, Carmichael said the picture for polyester never goes away in terms of its dominance. But cotton is holding its own, he added.

 

“We’re actually a little more optimistic about cotton than the cotton people are,” he said. “The cotton guys in the past have criticized us for being too bullish about synthetic fibers. The roles have reversed a little now. The cotton guys are paranoid about the share that polyester continues to gain. And they see that all coming out of cotton. They really don’t see that polyester is such a versatile fiber with many end uses that cotton really doesn’t have. The cotton guys need to focus on their volume rather than share. Every time they compare with share, it’s going to be a bad result. But if they look at volume, we think there is good opportunity for cotton growth.”

 

Carmichael showed a number of the latest charts regarding fiber demand, production and prices. Related to cotton, he said that China over-produces and over-imports, ending 2013/14 with stocks of 170 percent of production. The Chinese policy is to reduce their own cotton crop next season, with estimates being a reduction of .6 million tons to 6.4 million tons. And demand is forecast to be 7.5 million to 7.9 million tons. He added that China has a WTO obligation to buy about 900,000 tons of cotton, leaving a shortfall of up to .5 million, which may be taken from Chinese reserve, he added.

 

He went on to cover raw material prices for various fibers and recycling statistics, then provided an overview of the North American markets. He showed a chart listing an impressive number of polyester, nylon and nonwovens investments over the last couple of years.

 

“And there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest and investment in cotton spinning in the U.S.,” Carmichael said, listing the new spinning plants that have been announced recently.

 

In conclusion, he said that China will remain powerful to 2013, but its dominance is threatened by South Asia and India; overall manmade fiber growth remains moderate; and, for polyester pricing, further weakening will occur in the short term and, if oil remains steady, in the medium term. “Then, it’s difficult to see reasons for increasing polyester pricing,” he said.

 

DNA marking

 

Dr. James Hayward, chairman, president & CEO of Applied DNA Sciences, Inc., concluded the conference by providing an overview of his company’s DNA marking solutions for authenticity and traceability. The global impact of counterfeiting is immense, he said, with a $1.77 trillion trade loss being realized and 2.5 million jobs being affected by 2015. As a result, consumers’ desire for traceability is increasing, from 54 percent in 2011 to 61 percent in 2013, he pointed out.

 

Applied DNA Sciences of Stony Brook, N.Y., has a global reach for the textiles, government and security sectors, he said. In the cotton area, the company has marked 50 million kg of U.S. Supima cotton, he said. Its core intellectual property is designing DNA to bond with and identify most all substrates and detect DNA to identify and examine provenance.

 

Its applications include agricultural, where DNA is applied on raw cotton or wool fibers, or applied in the soil; commercial, where DNA is applied into textile finishing treatments for yarns and fabrics and also is applied into security inks and varnishes for product packaging; industrial, where DNA is extruded into plastic materials or added to coatings to mark metal parts; and government, where DNA is applied into spec inks and varnishes for marking a wide range of electronic components and products.

 

Hayward presented details about a number of case studies and explained how its SigNature® brand of DNA marking technology works.

 

“Textile counterfeiting is a problem and help is needed,” he said. “The solution requires full industry engagement.”

 

Economic report

 

Robert Fry, Jr., Ph.D, senior economist at DuPont, offered an economic report focusing on global manufacturing. He noted that, except for weather-depressed January 2014, U.S. manufacturing has grown strongly since mid-2013. Industrial production is up 4.4 percent since July 2013. In Europe, manufacturing turned down in May, mostly due to the impact of turmoil in Ukraine and confidence in Germany, although production rose in July. Production in much of Asia has been flat or down since early 2011, but Taiwan has turned up, and India has seen some positive signs, he said. In China, growth has slowed since mid-2011, and the May-June reacceleration has faded, he added.

 

The U.S. economy, he said, is stronger than annual GDP growth will show. A weather-related decline in first-quarter GDP will hold down annual growth, he pointed out, adding that the GDP has grown at just a 2.2 percent rate over the first 20 quarters of the recovery. Employment growth has picked up, with the decline in the unemployment rate due largely to the lower labor force participation rate, Fry said. The housing recovery is slower than expected, but steadier than the data show, he added. And motor vehicle sales in August were the best since 2006, he pointed out.

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