Fungal retting of jute fibre

Abstract

Jute is an important commercial crop and price of its main commercial product i.e. fibre depends on its quality or grade. Retting is one of the most important factors determining quality of jute fibre. Jute is traditionally retted with water which requires large slow moving water bodies. However, such water bodies are diminishing day by day due to scarce rainfall during the retting period. As a result farmers are have no option but to ret the harvested jute stem in shallow water resulting in poor fibre quality. Moreover, farmers have to go for several charges in a season in the same water bodies which not only deteriorates fibre quality but also causes environmental pollution. Water retting also causes skin infections as farmers have to stand in the polluted water for hours to extract the fibre. In order to overcome this problems several retting technologies (ribbon retting, accelerated retting, fungal retting etc.) have been evolved which minimize water requirement to various extent. Among these technologies, fungal retting technology is very promising as it allows jute retting with very little water. Fungal retting technology not only saves water to a greater extent but also eliminates environmental and health hazards but at the same time produces comparable qualities of jute fibre. In spite of being a promising technology, there are issues such as up scaling, cost/benefit ratio, complexity of protocol etc. which are required to be looked into before farmers can harvest the benefit of this technology.