cotton is a natural material, what is the difference between organic and non organic ?they are both natural - it grows on a tree, but nowadays we also have artificial cotton or actually as we call it an artificial cellulose fibre. Cotton is cellulose. It’s just that mother nature has made it into this fluffy material that we use in a t-shirt, but we can also engineer this and we do this by taking a cellulose resource, which can be an agricultural by-product such as straw or whatever or it can even be algae or it can be trees like eucalyptus or pine and then when we extract cellulose from the material we can dissolve that cellulose and spin it into a filament which is extremely comparable to what cotton actually is.
you could have a cotton t-shirt, Without the relationship with the cotton plant? cotton is a cellulose fibre, is a cellulose filament and indeed we call this cotton, but in the future you will buy a t-shirt and it might made from something else than cotton, even though it will have the same chemical structure as cotton as so to say. what about bamboo blends? other materials?
natural fibres like bamboo, hemp, from fibres from pineapple or flax they are of course very ancient. They’ve been around for centuries. They went out of fashion a little bit, because they are quite hard to make comfortable, they’re quite rigid fibres and you have to process them quite well to turn them into a very comfortable material and of course they’re relatively expensive because of this so that’s why people usually use cotton. But especially now, with sustainability being an issue, they’re revisiting these types of materials for products like underwear, which is something you use frequently and wash often, I hope. It’s something these fibres because they’re super durable would be quite suitable for. it also depends on region aswell. for example, in Holland, that would be the hemp or the flax, but indeed in more tropical areas it might bamboo or from pineapple.
from the perspective of sustainability: what does this 100 percent silk blouse mean?the process of making silk, which is basically the filaments small caterpillars wraps around itself to become a butterfly, or a moth I should say, the caterpillar is killed. Its more about an ethics question. From a sustainability perspective it’s quite interesting, because this fibre has so many unique properties. its very light, it is extremely flexible, comfortable, it handles moisture really well, it is soft to touch and it’s a pure natural material. it’s very ancient, I call this the carbon of a thousand years ago.
imagine silk from other sources than this caterpillar; there are more animals producing protein based fibres, that this silk actually is. And is it possible to make it in a more artificial way on a sustainable manner? to imitate the process of silk-making... perhaps rayon, Quite successful, but not very sustainable.
the most used fibre is of course polyester fibre or nylon fibre or oil based materials. What could be the best alternative to have this kind of materials in an renewable way? biopolymers? finding alternatives for these materials from organic resources which we call bio based polymers. you could use corn or other agricultural waste streams, converge them into biopolymers. Typically, now, you have materials like PLA, which is made from corn, that is seen as a promising biopolymer that one day we can also perhaps use to make textile from. This is very challenging, because these materials are not fully developed yet, they don’t have the same amazing properties as some of these material you mentioned Like what kind of properties? The tensile strength, basically being UV resistant, being washable many of times,you know chemically resistant, I mean, the washing principle, I mean, you add chemicals to a textile to clean them. This of course has some effects, some of these. Does that mean that we, as a consumer, have to change our behaviour or do you say: the behaviour is there we have to put the right properties in the textile?
when it comes to washing textiles, we might have to change our attitude, because we will use different materials, but also it’s very difficult to change consumer behaviour, so it’s also an engineering challenge, especially to these kinds of fibres, to make them, to innovate them in such a way so that they are more suitable for this. Because they can be recycled and they are renewable, because the raw material is renewable, the corn it grows on a field, but even if you take these materials in and you can still make to put them into a techno loop if needed and use them again. it grows on the land, but is there a competition between growing for textile and growing for food, for example. the corn on that field going to be used for food or is it going to be used for textile.
new ideas from natural resources: For example pineapple leaves for making shoes.jellyfish, a shoe made of jellyfish. A lot of leather-like materials from fruit waste.
it’s mainly designers who invent these materials. And that’s because there it’s very difficult to actually develop a textile, like that’s a very complicated process, but this leather, these leathers that are developed are actually first steps into new textiles and fabrics that we’re making. We can only, we cannot make them as flexible yet, we cannot make them as thin yet, we cannot wash them at this moment, but perhaps we can use them as leather-like material and use them in shoes or in bags.
however, natural leather is very Long lasting. durable. a bidirectional material, it can flex many different ways, it ages specific way, it comes from an animal. All these properties when you look at these leather replacements they’re all sort of alternative systems to leather. But when you look at the application of these materials, their properties are, in some cases, quite similar. Not every leather product is designed for durability. Sometimes it’s just, you know, casual use of leather in a fashionable product and especially for these kind of applications all these leather alternatives are very suitable. Leather, you know, brown leather shoes, if you treat them well they will last for 10 years or more and it’s a fantastic material. But for most of these fast changing fashion outs and like bags and cheap shoes, these materials are great.
what about opportunities of a new material like mycelium. It’s called the new plastic. used a lot in the packaging industry, or as a leather replacement. when you look at these fungal materials, fungal fabrics, whatever you can call them, made from mycelium the amazing thing is that they are relatively easily to produce. They take a little energy, they can be engineered in different ways, they’re closely related to agricultural waste streams that we have and they’re most likely quite easy to return into an organic process, so you can recycle them, compost them quite easily.
So it would be amazing if we could actually unlock this technology and that the future of this textiles is not based on cellulose or cotton, as we say, but bases on a fungus, on mycelium and the unique properties of mycelium growing, growing textile that would be, that would be a great new addition to our material library.
how do you wash it, Such a material?these things need to be innovated and they need to still fit within our newfound understanding about sustainability. We can always add a lot of stuff to make things work, to make these textiles work for us, but if they then become unsustainable or unrecyclable again then it doesn’t make much sense.
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