Case 102: Cluster: fibers, food and biodiversity

Currently, the main natural fiber used in the textile industry is cotton. It turns out that cotton also has an incredibly important ecological imprint due to the way it is cultivated. The search for alternative sources of fiber for the textile industry has led us to study nettle fibers and textiles based on seaweed, two under-exploited resources which greatly contribute to biodiversity. Algae is not only an ideal source of fibers, these natural marine plants also separate carbon dioxide, can be used as a source of nutrition and a range of fine chemicals, leading to the creation of a new cluster. Textiles impregnated with coffee is another innovation from this group. The capacity of coffee to absorb odors and give synthetic fibers a hydrophilic quality is used to produce functional textiles. First we drink it, then we wear it. These new options use locally available resources, which were considered to have little value, and end up creating value -generating jobs and mobilizing capital.

Keywords: textile industry, functional fibers, seaweed (algae), malnutrition, nettle, coffee, biodiversity, competitiveness.

Author: Gunter Pauli
Editor: Tara Van Ryneveld
Illustrator: Henning Brand

An introduction to the future of fibers

One of the interactions that sparked my interest in fibers was the one with Yvon Chouinard, from Patagonia, and his team. When I built the first ecological factory in 1992, I ordered in Patagonia underwear in capital in all my workers, in order to keep them warm when I reduced the heating of the workshop to save energy costs . This unusual order was welcomed with disbelief by the representative of Patagonia in Paris, who thought that I was preparing a large expedition to climb the Himalayas. I quickly got to know Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, who told me that I had placed the biggest order of his new underwear to date. Over time, Yvon told me about his concerns about the destructive environmental quality of his fibers.

We had telephone conferences with their research team in 1999, about alternative fibers which would at least be as good as conventional fibers, but less damaging to the environment. I was still looking for ways to "hurt less".

The work of Professor Keto Mshigeni, a marine scientist born in Tanzania, trained in Hawaii and collaborator of Zeri at the University of the United Nations between 1995 and 2000, drew my attention to the fate of the Sisal. The Sisal is from Mexico, but it was transplanted in East Africa where large areas were converted, over a century ago, to make ropes of boats, carpets, paper and fabric , until synthetic substitutes lead to the disappearance of an entire industry. Professor Mshigeni, applying the Zeri logic of grouping of industries, and seeking to do more good with the resources available locally, noted that as long as the Sisal was used only as a fiber, it would lose in the face of oil -based alternatives. On the other hand, if the Sisal was used for its natural sugars, it could provide alcohol, serve as animal food or even produce pharmaceuticals such as hacogenin and inulin. In 1996, Professor Mshigeni and I went to Tanga (Tanzania) to attend the Sisal farms crisis.

Despite the abundance of knowledge of the scientific community on the possibilities offered by the SISAL, production fell by more than 50 % during the following decade, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs and livelihoods.

We are not the only ones to seek alternatives to the operating mode of the current textile industry. Sybilla Sorondo, an eminent creator of Argentine fashion mode, has made a name for himself with a portfolio for Louis Vuitton and his own brand Sybilla, which is popular in Japan. During a burn-out in her career, she thought about the real impact of her products and realized that the materials were rarely natural and that few workers were paid enough to earn a living. During one of the training seminars on the blue economy organized in its center in Mallorca, Sybilla and I discussed the possible ways to move forward. She quickly created Fabrics for Freedom and began to develop a series of integrated textile projects focused on social and environmental performance.

Assisting the disappearance of the Sisal, and the jobs associated with it, brought me closer to the main natural competitor in terms of fibers: cotton. Katherine Tiddens, the founder of the ecological store Terra Verde, in Soho, New York, had shown me the extraordinary variety of colors that cotton can take naturally. She had alerted me to the heavy ecological footprint of this one: too much water and too much pesticides. It even seemed better to buy synthetic than cotton. A trip to China in 1997 put me in front of the realities of cotton of the time. The United States has lost its competitiveness in cotton cultivation, but not because of the low production cost in China. The growing cost of water, pollution of water tables and the obligation to apply less toxic (and more expensive) chemicals to protect cotton from caterpillars made the Americans were happy to transfer cotton production to cotton to cotton China and India - today the world's leading and second cotton world. Over the years, I have noted the growing discomfort of Professor Li Wenhua, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, faced with the enormous consumption of water and the use of chemicals. China has slowly realized reality, as others have done, and the support of political decision -makers in pursuit of cotton boom has decreased.
The link between Patagonia, Sisal and Cotton prompted me to create a special network for the fibers of the future within Zeri. The future of cotton is determined by the extreme rarity of water in China, and elsewhere. A t-shirt requires 2,700 liters of water. We have done research and traveled worldwide, but the only major alternative that we noted was hemp. But I estimated that a lot of work had already been done on hemp - it has already reached nearly 2 million tonnes of production in 2012. Cotton replacement, a culture of 30 million tonnes, by a single culture n 'will not bring a fundamental solution. It is necessary to diversify the offer. So I chose to concentrate the creative energy of Zeri on different opportunities, less obvious than hemp.

While many research had been undertaken across China, the 2008 summer Olympic Games served as a trigger for the design of an alternative strategy. The city of Qingdao was to host the water -related Olympic Games. Unfortunately, each summer, the portal area is invaded by seaweed (we prefer not to use the term algae). Its prolific growth forced municipalities to call on the Chinese army and navy to clean the sea or cancel the Olympic Games, which was not possible. The total amount of algae picked up just before the world games amounted to 2 million tonnes.

Considered weeds, seaweed was poured into a discharge, generating methane. Scientists from the National Laboratory of New Materials of the University of Qingdao worked with group Xyingmen, one of the largest manufacturers of China towels, and have embarked on a research program aimed at producing fibers based on 'algae. The total potential for algae -based fiber production in China was estimated in 2009 at ten million tonnes. Field research, conducted in cooperation with the Zeri Foundation in 2012, have determined that Indonesia and India are the other two countries capable of replacing the current cotton supply chain with a renewable alternative such as extracts from 'seaweed. Macro-analysis-cotton cultivation-was now validated by research data.

It was Professor Lucio Brusch, founder of the Zeri Brazil Foundation, who discovered algae when he was a management teacher at the Pontífica Universidad Católica do Rio Grande Do Sul. He continued the discussion with Professor Jorge Alberto Vieira Costa from the Federal University of Rio Grande. They noted that southern Brazil is home to the largest biodiversity of micro-algae in the world. At the same time, this region is faced with unacceptable levels of malnutrition. The teachers embarked on a research program to cultivate algae to fight hunger, based on the strength of their biodiversity. They started with pilot programs in rice fields in 1997 and quickly extended the production of algae to the retention basins for the cooling towers of the electric power plants. This program has become an integral part of the "Fome Zero" initiative (zero hunger) of the Brazilian president of the time, Ignacio Lula Silva.

The team has developed over the years to become a remarkable center of knowledge on algae, which is now considered one of the best five in the world. While fiber producers have discovered that their supply chain could produce nutrients, Brazil algae producers quickly understood that they could produce fibers. Dr. Michele Greque de Morais, then a young doctoral student in the Jorge laboratory, was the first to identify the path to extract the algae esters and obtained a patent for this breakthrough. The CNPQ, the Brazilian Council for the Promotion of Research, supported research and results with dozens of scientific articles published on the subject. The Brazilian project was unique insofar as it considered that fuel production from algae was not a priority. These research initiatives in the South mainly evaluated plants and algae as sources of nutrition and fabrics. The new fibers are derived from locally available resources (micro-algae) which today provide no economic value. This follows one of the principles of the blue economy: converting nothing (or something of worthless) to something of great value.

In recent years, some advances have been carried out. The German company Smart Fiber AG (www.smartfiber.de), producer of Seacell, treats algae from the Irish coast to create its textile fibers. It can replace up to 25 % of the fibers used to make products such as vitasea fabric, marketed by the Canadian company Lululemon (www.lululemon.com/ Education/Info/Natural) and the American company Underwear Options (www.underwear - Options.com/seacellfibers.html). If the seaweed fabric is slow to penetrate the market, it is more a supply problem. It is necessary to refine production technologies.

The Belgian company Sioen (www.sioen.be), adopted the algae fibers and obtained the support of the European Union commission to try to overcome the production difficulties. The European Union now recognizes algae as an under-exploited resource for human food, animal feed and biochemical raw materials, including ingredients to produce fabric. Bert Groenendaal, the director of Sioen R&D, believes that with covered science, this emerging textile will generate an industry of several billion which will stimulate growth and employment using an abundant and little appreciated resource. However, algae harvest in the wild for the cultivation of strings and fibers will never appear as a competitive force. Culture methods at Solund (Norway), Oban (Scotland) and Galway (Ireland) have demonstrated yields of 16 kg of wet seaweed cultivated per square meter, with prospects for increase to 20-25 kg. This yield is more than five times higher than that of algae traditionally harvested in the open sea.

Europeans interested in algae textiles also consider this activity as a cluster. Algae provide polysaccharides of seaweed as additives for processed foods such as chocolate milk, yogurts and beer. Fine extra extraction could give lipids, antioxidants, geeures, vitamins and essential minerals. It is the combination of food and textiles based on biodiversity that makes innovations within the attractive cluster. It is
both profitable and with reduced imprint on the environment: algae absorb the CO₂, which allows in the long term to exploit natural resources.
This leads to the long -term exploitation of this greenhouse gas. This changes the framework and potential for quality of life, job creation and life within the limits of the charge capacity of the ecosystem. It's very different from cotton, where it all started.

When the team of Zeri España went to the county of Lea Artibai, in the Basque Country, to identify new possibilities of commercial development from local resources, it found an abundance of nettles, which were formerly used as source of nutrition and clothing. The wisdom of the past has been replaced by cotton. Zara, the Galician -based textile giant, is one of the biggest cotton buyers in the world. The irony is that it is located on one of the regions richest in seaweed and nettles in the world. After the local government was exposed to the possibilities of the two, political, civilian and commercial leaders began to review their appreciation of the textile industry, long considered to be part of history.

The EU funded a group of German companies, Austrian and Italian to advance the treatment of nettles. This project was led by Dr Falko Feldmann, at the time scientific director of the Plant Culture Institute in Linkau, Germany (www.mykorrhiza.de). Nettles have also drawn attention to the United Kingdom with in-depth research carried out at the University of Montford de Leicester, under the title Sustainable Technologies in Nettle Growing (Sting). Camira Fabrics (www.camirafabrics.com/be-inspired/design-stories/nettle-collection), a world leader in fabrics for commercial interiors based in the United Kingdom, produces 8 million meters of fabric per year and includes the nettle in his wallet.

Nettle has also become an essential component of quality textiles offered by the Swiss company Swicofil (www.swicofil.com). It is one of the few textile companies that has managed to maintain its competitive position in a country where costs are high thanks to its remarkable tissue innovations. Swicofil gets in Nettle wire in Nepal. The Himalayas is full of nettles, which grow prolific in the wild up to 3,000 meters above sea level. It displays both a historical wealth and is positioned as a fabric of the future. Even today, Bhoutani men continue to wear their national costume, the GHO, traditionally made of nettle fibers.

While the European textile industry is slow to adopt any new natural fiber, Alex Dear, Cambridge (United Kingdom), produced its own "Nettle Culot", as part of a series of lingerie. Sue Clowes, the English designer of textiles and fashion, is known for her collection of nettles launched by Boy George, the British singer and composer. The Bob Crebas Internet millionaire has chosen to create a new company - Brennels BV (www.netl.nl) - to launch the production of nettle -based fashion products. He obtained the best seeds on the market and planted 80 hectares of nettles in the Netherlands, with additional cultures in the Czech Republic and Lithuania. However, this nettle company closed shortly after its creation. The fast money won on the internet was not up to the patience required for the long term in innovative fibers such as nettles. The network of the blue economy, which implements Zeri philosophy, is used to translate vision, often resulting from imagination, in reality, balancing science and the taste for risk.

In 2006, Jason Chen, from Taiwan, launched a new company under the name of Singtex. Its market niche is that of functional textiles. He has used what many already know by practice: coffee absorbs odors. Jason and his team managed to mix coffee with fibers to control the smells. During their research, they also found that coffee protects color pigments and ultraviolet rays fibers, and that it can transform a synthetic fiber into a hydrophilic tissue. The use of coffee (post-industrial and post-consumption) now has a surprising new application: textile coffee.

It was Bill Werlin, then national director of Patagonia in Japan, who informed me of this opportunity. A few weeks later, during a trip to Taiwan, I visited Singtex and the enthusiastic team that Jason and his wife had gathered. We assumed that lasting tissues had to be natural fabrics that form clusters of products and services from the treatment of biomass. However, sustainable tissues could also be the partial substitution of petrochemical ingredients with synthetic fibers with an organic contribution from coffee. Singtex is revolutionizing the textile industry. This innovation company, placed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2014, now provides more than 100 brands known in coffee -based textiles.

The product does not only modify the design of the products of Patagonia and Adidas, it also stimulates the entrepreneurial spirit, as shown by Javier Goyeneche, the founder of Ecoalf (www.ecoalf.com). The most charming marketing campaign for the use of coffee in the fabric of shoes may have been offered by Timberland: "Drink It-Wear It". Given the decades of work that we devoted to the cultivation of coffee, it seemed to be a surprising, but logical extension, of our commitment to the means of subsistence of the 640,000 coffee producers in Colombia. We therefore undertook to introduce the producers of Colombian coffee to textiles made from coffee remains.

Our close relationship with Singtex and the Colombian Federation of coffee producers led to the creation of a new commercial proposal: textiles made with 100% Colombian coffee. Thanks to a year of exchanges, a new integrated textile initiative was born in Colombia. It was Constanza Jaramillo, Executive Director of Café Buendía, who appeared as the entrepreneur of this company. Constanza produced in Chinchiná, in the heart of the Café region known as "El Eje Cafetero" of instant coffee. The factory extracts with CO2 the soluble part of the beans. The rest, 25 tonnes per day, is cremated. An investigation mission led by Jason Chen identified the opportunity to separate coffee oil (up to 20%) of solids, and to use the two fractions as additives for woven and not woven textiles.

This passage from the incineration of waste to the creation of raw materials for functional cafes-textiles intervened when all the strategists concluded that the free trade agreements of Colombia represent the end of the textile industry. The approach of the blue economy once again demonstrates that this traditional economic analysis is wrong. Thanks to the technical assistance of Singtex, Lafayette (Bogota) produces wire and fabric, starting from the Colombian coffee grounds of the Instant Coffee Production Unit Cafe Buendia. Supertex (Cali) transforms it into fabric and Juan Valdez, the chain of 400 cafes belonging to farmers, sells elegant t-shirts on the local market. The short -term impact of this coffee and textile initiative on a global scale is tiny, but its potential is enormous. It has the potential to change the future of coffee producers, using what is available locally, offering high performance products at competitive prices.

The functional textile wire is expensive. However, when the technical component can be obtained from renewable sources, at prices greater than the value of integrated energy, it is then possible to sell better quality at a lower price. While no farmer can never dream of obtaining more than a thousand dollars per tonne of coffee, his waste can now be converted into an input for the fabric which not only offers a unique sales proposition, but which even pays better. This is what the blue economy is.

We have been looking for the "next" textile industry for almost two decades and have explored some options. We are convinced that the global network of researchers with which we had the pleasure of working and coming into contact represents only part of the emerging cotton transition to a wide range of "blue fibers". Since this cluster does not cover the work of Novamont in Italy, with the production of polymers from agricultural waste, nor analyzes the pioneering research initiatives of the Prof. Dr. Fritz Vollrath with natural polymers produced by insects, since The two are part of other cases, he already demonstrates that a whole new field of industries is emerging, where competitive force is not the lipid or the oils contained in plants or algae, but Rather the combination of nutritious foods and functional tissues.

While our network continues to follow the multiple entrepreneurial initiatives and to interact with all these actors through our local researchers and agitators, we take the pulse of the arrival of the necessary and urgent breakthroughs, while approaching the dynamics of The creation of jobs in the regions where the textile industry has been striped from the map.

Consequently, this cluster is part of a reindustrialisation movement which characterizes the initiatives of the blue economy. To date, we count $ 120 million in research and development, capital investments and marketing programs, most of the money being spent in China and Taiwan, followed closely by programs research in Brazil. While there are at least 20 times more investments
in the transformation of algae into fuel, we disregard this figure because we have no relationship with the actors. More importantly, we do not think that this is the strategic change we need. Burning biomass or an extract must always remain the last option. With regard to the creation of jobs, the current figures indicate that the closely defined activities of this cluster directly employ 1,400 people and that the creation of indirect jobs adds 1,100 others, especially in sales and marketing activities in downstream.

We know that the earth is not able to produce more cotton. In addition, we have to reduce our cotton consumption as much as we have to reduce our meat consumption. And just as we have to produce proteins in a more sustainable way, we must dress the world more intelligently. In the end, we must learn to do more with what the Earth offers us instead of exhausting already rare resources like Earth and Water. This will allow us to create a new reality, where we can meet the basic needs of all.

Translation in Gunter Fables

The activity of nettle textiles is translated into fable n ° 51 entitled "Netties Sting". It is dedicated to Sybilla Sorondo which inspired the creation of this pole, in 2004, by its self -criticism of the fashion industry and its commitment, in 2009, to create Fabrics for Freedom. The innovative use of algae is reflected in fable n ° 39 entitled "Embressed up in algae". It is dedicated to Suzanne Lee, who created Biocouture in order to promote the bio-design of fashion. The two fables will first be published in Chinese and English in China and will be available in the form of an electronic book on (www.guntersfables.org).

Documentation

http://www.feldmann-lifescience.de/transfers/urtica.htm

http://sff.arts.ac.uk/fibre%20processing/bastfibresproces.html