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Fabric Made From Coffee Grounds
January 19 2010
Two fabrics that are now found in our high street stores are Modal and Tencel, which are made from wood. One company, Lenzing, makes it from sustainable Austrian beech wood, where by-products are not released into the environment, half the raw waste is sold commercially and the rest is used to create energy to power their own processing plants in Austria and Indonesia, hugely reducing their CO2 production.
These fabrics can be found as a mix in garments sold in Next, M&S, Topshop and Zara UK, but at the moment you can’t easily find clothes made exclusively from them.
There are also a number of other new eco fabrics coming into the market, like that from coffee grounds! Most coffee grounds end up in landfill but Singtex is now collecting waste grounds and turning them into sportswear. The fabric is soft, light, flexible and breathable and can be used to produce a water resistant fabric. Apparently, it only takes the grounds from one cup of coffee to make enough material for two tee-shirts. That’s what I call economic!
Another innovative fabric being trialled is spun from nettles, which were used to produce fabric for thousands of years until people switched to cotton in the fifteenth century. Nettles can be grown sustainably, organically and with little water and are prolific growers! A company based in Yorkshire, Camira Fabrics, has been working with Defra and has produced a range called Stingplus, a tough hardy textile used for bus and car seats. Nettle can be turned into finer fabrics too, with a texture like linen. It has the ability to wick moisture away from the body as well as keeping the wearer cool and trapping warm air, plus being naturally anti-bacterial and mould resistant, very much like bamboo. Brennels, a Dutch fashion designer, has brought out a range of smart-casual clothes made from nettle fabric, but they are quite expensive as the process is still so new.
Buying your own eco-friendly fabric in small quantities is not easy, although Green Fibres, sells organic cotton, silk and hemp, Brighton has a Hemp Shop and you can buy cotton, hemp, soy and bamboo from Eco earth fabrics. I am sure that, because the demand is there and innovative people are producing new fabrics with rapid speed, there will soon be ranges of yummy delicious eco fabrics for us to buy by the metre and wrap ourselves in, and that our children will look back on the seventies and eighties fabric choices as positively prehistoric!
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