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Orange Fiber and Keel Labs are platforms for exploration and innovation that can reverberate across the fashion industry and prove that sustainable feedstocks and production processes can create both financial and planetary prosperity.
The current iteration of the $1.7 trillion fashion
industry is responsible
for roughly 10 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions and is the second-biggest
consumer of the global water supply. It is also largely comprised of polyester —
the primary material in about 65 percent of all our clothing — which requires
around 70 million barrels of oil per year to produce. Recent
research
by Race to Zero also suggests that if the sector continues as is, it will
miss the 1.5° goal set out in the Paris Agreement by 50 percent.
There is no denying that the fashion industry must readjust how it creates and
delivers its products. While brands
large
and
small
are working to reduce their impacts and build supply chains around more
sustainable textiles, a handful of biomaterial startups are proving that some of our best
solutions can be found in nature.
Orange Fiber
Image credit: Orange Fiber
Back in 2012, Italian design students Adriana Santanocito and Enrica
Arena began exploring the potential to create a fabric made from industrial
byproducts — in their case, they
turned to what was naturally abundant, and widely wasted, in Santanocito’s
hometown of Catania, Sicily: oranges. After an experimentation phase in
partnership with Milan Polytechnic University, Orange
Fiber came to life in 2014.
That same year, Orange Fiber presented its first prototype textiles — silk-like
fabrics made from citrus cellulose extracted from juice industry waste — at
Vogue’s Fashion’s Night Out event in Milan. A year later, the company
secured funding from Smart&Start by Invitalia — enabling the building of
a pilot plant in Sicily, where the company extracted enough citrus pulp to scale
production.
Orange Fiber’s first garments debuted in the 2017 Ferragamo Orange
Collection, which was
selected for the Sustainable Thinking
exhibition
at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in Florence. The startup soon began
starring in exhibitions at museums across the globe — including the Fashion for
Good
Museum
in Amsterdam, the Dutch Hygiene
Museum,
and the
V&A
in London. In 2019, the fabrics were included in H&M’s Conscious
Exclusive Collection and were
integrated into luxury neckties designed by prominent Neapolitan brand E.
Marinella.
The popularity of its product allowed Orange Fiber to launch a successful equity
crowdfunding campaign in July 2019, which raised €650k from 365 investors — well
above its original goal of €250k — with which the company built a brand-new
plant in Sicily in 2020; this enabled the startup to scale production and provide a glimpse of a future in which the textile industry helps to preserve natural
resources and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
In July 2021, the company joined forces with Lenzing
Group
to manufacture the first-ever Tencel Lyocell fibers made from
orange. This
material is processed in the same award-winning closed-loop
process as standard Tencel Lyocell
fibers; but the Orange Fiber textile requires less wood cellulose thanks to the
cellulose extracted from the citrus pulp, enhancing the sustainability by
relieving pressure on forests.
Keel Labs
Image credit: Keel Labs
Another biomaterial company is looking to improve fashion by exploring the power
of marine ecosystems in the production of textiles.
Founded in 2017 as
Algknit
by Fashion Institute of Technology grads Tessa
Callaghan and Aleksandra
Gosiewski, the company
recently rebranded as Keel Labs — and says it
is seeking to establish itself as a ‘platform and
parent’ for innovation that places community
and nature at its center.
Keel Labs produces its Kelsun yarn from
an abundant biopolymer found in kelp called alginate — creating a versatile,
drop-in solution for existing yarn and textile production methods. Kelp — a
large, brown, fast-growing seaweed — is also a carbon-sequestering
powerhouse
that can absorb more CO2 per acre than land forests, making it a valuable tool
in the climate fight while it cleans up the fashion industry.
With a $2.4
million
infusion in bridge financing in 2021, Keel Labs
expanded
to North Carolina and opened an innovation hub designed to enhance
technological development whilst scaling production of its aquaculture-based
yarn. Then, earlier this year, the company scored another $13
million
in Series A funding — led by Collaborative Fund with additional support from
Starlight Ventures, Third Nature Ventures,
H&M CO:LAB, SOSV and Horizons Ventures — which Keel Labs says it
will direct toward reducing the textile industry’s carbon footprint.
The fashion industry is set to grow up to 63 percent over the next 10 years.
This means shifting towards practices that reduce reliance on oil as well as
practices of deforestation caused by the extraction of wood cellulose is key.
Experimenting with alternatives to conventional, resource-intensive fabrics is
no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
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