Business

How Leftover Foods Are Being Turned Into Green Fashion

Eco-fashion is joining in the fight against food waste with some cool new innovations. Designers are figuring out how to incorporate leftover food and food-related byproducts into fabrics, which are then turned into wide variety of stylish products, from coats and belts to wallets and shoes.

The United Nations currently estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes of food go to waste annually, which is approximately one-quarter of all calories grown for human consumption. While turning food into fashion is not going to resolve the issue altogether, it will help to a small extent and also educate people about the importance of recycling, upcycling, and reusing.

In an article called "From Coffee Grounds to Couture, Food Waste Turns Into Fashion," writer Bekah Wright outlines the food-based innovations featured here:

1. Coffee Grounds

With people drinking an average of 3.1 cups of coffee daily, there are a lot of leftover coffee grounds, which is why a Spanish company called Ecoalf has figured out how to turn them into fabric. Wet coffee grounds are collected from restaurants and dried. Leftover oil is extracted, then the coffee is ground to a fine nano-powder. This is blended with recycled polyester polymers to create a yarn that is spun into fabric. Ecoalf's description sounds impressive:

"The resultant fabric is soft, light, flexible and breathable and can also be used to produce an outer shell that is water resistant. The fabric thanks to the coffee grounds becomes UV-resistant, wicks water away, keeps you cool and it has odour control properties."

2. Salmon Skin

Billions of pounds of fish and crab byproducts are discarded into the ocean annually. Wright cites former commercial fisherman Craig Kasberg: "Sustainable fisheries, by nature, cannot simply harvest more, so the only way to increase their resiliency is to utilise their catch to its fullest potential."

Kasberg's new company, Tidal Vision, strives to use every part of the fish, creating aquatic leather and chitosan, a polymer extracted from crab shells, using vegetable-based tanning products, rather than the harsh chemicals that are common to the industry. Tidal Vision now makes belts, wallets, and handbags, and its textile factory will soon be producing shirts, socks, and base layers that combine chitosan with other natural fibres.

3. Coconuts

Eco-fashion company Nau has developed a special insulation for its winter coats that is made from coconuts, in an effort to move away from goose down.

The process begins by incinerating leftover coconut husks and mixing the ash with recycled polyester, which creates the fibre for clothing insulation.

From Nau's website: "Activated carbon derived from coconut husks is blended with recycled polyester. This, in turn, increases the surface area of the insulation allowing it to dry faster and resist odours (you can imagine a pool of water takes longer to evaporate than if you spread the same liquid across a counter), and carbon, being dark in colour, is able to absorb more heat. In the end, you have a garment that retains heat, dries faster, resists odours and provides a higher warmth-to-weight ratio than other synthetic insulations."

This insulation, formerly called Cocona, is now named "37.5™ Technology" and is also used by other outerwear companies, including Adidas, Under Armor, Eddie Bauer, and The North Face.