Finished cloth is the ultimate product of the United States cotton industry, whether that cloth be foreign or domestic. Foreign mill using American cotton are the traditional source of complaints involving neps. However, because of modernization and improved product quality, domestic mills are also voicing their concern about problems with neps. The question in: what is the nature of these neps that mills are complaining so much about?

Neps are distinguished from other imperfections found in cotton such as motes or seed coat fragments which have fibers attached. neps in card webs are defined as one or more fibers occurring in a tightly tangled and unorganized mass (1). Yarn neps are an instrument measurement of a thick place in the yarn whose length is less than a particular dimension. A yarn nep may arise from a raw fiber nep or possibly from a trash particle.