Cellulose textiles could give fashion a sustainability glow-up, and not just the tree-hugging kind.
A study headed by researchers from Chalmers University University of Technology in Sweden has found they can turn farm “trash”—byproducts like wheat straw and oat husks into dissolving pulp for clothing—using fewer chemicals and less hassle than wood-based methods.
Why it matters: cotton crops guzzle water, leaving a carbon footprint behind. So, textile innovators have been chasing alternative cellulose sources. Until now, the focus has been on forests. But by tapping abundant agricultural leftovers—oat husks, wheat straw, even potato and sugar-beet pulp—researchers are boosting farm waste value and shrinking production impacts. In their trials, oat and wheat byproducts proved to be the top performers for clean, scalable textile pulp.
“With this method, which we further developed in this study, we show that you can make textile pulp from certain agricultural waste products,” said Diana Bernin, assistant professor at the department of chemistry and chemical engineering at Chalmers and senior researcher in the study. “This is an important step towards being able to create textiles from waste products instead of using cotton, which isn’t climate-friendly, or wood, a material that we want to use for so many things while also needing to preserve it for the benefit of the climate.”
The team used soda pulping as one part of the process—boiling the raw material in lye as opposed to the sulfurous byproducts found in traditional (kraft) pulping—to make manufacturing more sustainable.
“Lye doesn’t contain any toxins or substances that impact nature,” Bernin said. “Soda pulping doesn’t work for wood fibers, so making textile pulp from wheat straw and oat husks requires fewer chemicals than making forest-based cellulose. It’s also a simpler procedure, in part because it doesn’t require processing such as chipping and debarking. In addition, it increases the economic value of oats and wheat, when leftovers from their production can be used as raw materials for cellulose extraction.”
Other agricultural waste products can likely perform similarly using this method, Bernin said.
She’s involved in an international project exploring potential alternative feedstocks. In continued yet-to-be-published studies, the researchers have taken another step toward the practical application of the dissolving pulps: creating textile fibers with the pulp from wheat and the press-cake from grass.
In the long run, per Bernin, there are promising opportunities to tap into the pulp-and-paper industry, “which already has technology and processes in place,” to make dissolving pulp from agricultural waste.
“If we can make use of our existing industry and adjust their processes instead of building new production facilities, we’ve already come a long way,” she said.
A former postdoc at Chalmers University, Joanna Wojtasz, was lead author of the study. Wojtasz is now a researcher at innovation company TreeToTextile, a Swedish firm backed by Lenzing and one of the partners in the project.
“The study shows that there is a lot of potential in agricultural waste,” Wojtasz said. “We really shouldn’t disregard the opportunity to use this type of cellulose streams for our future clothing.”
The study, titled “Producing dissolving pulp from agricultural waste,” was published in the scientific journal RSC Sustainability, as funded by Bioinnovation and conducted in collaboration between Chalmers University, TreeToTextile and the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute at Bioinnovation’s industrial graduate school, Resource-Smart Processes.
