Fibe: Clothing from Potatoes

What it does

Fibe is a textile fibre made from potato stalks that are discarded as part of the potato harvesting process. The fibres offer an alternative to cotton with the potential to use 99% less water, 82% less emissions and no land.

Your inspiration

2.5% of the world’s arable land is used for cotton, and a T-shirt requires over 2700L of water, the same amount an adult consumes over three years. Bast fibres such as flax and jute use the natural fibres within the stalk of plants. Taking inspiration from this concept, we aimed to develop a cotton alternative using crops already grown for food production. This approach significantly reduces the resources attributed to feedstock cultivation while promoting food production. With potatoes being the 5th most grown crop in the world and their stalks discarded due to being poisonous - there is enough waste to replace 70% of the world's cotton.

How it works

Fibe is a soft, durable, and sustainable cotton-like alternative made from leftover potato stalks. We start by purchasing the leftover stalks from farmers during their potato harvest, making their farms more profitable. Using a biological process, we break down the plant's natural glues to release any fibres. These fibres are then filtered and refined through a series of proprietary machinery. The final product is a fibre that seamlessly integrates into existing cotton spinning infrastructure and requires no change to potato farming practices.

Design process

We have been developing this novel material for the last 2.5 years. The concept began while growing potatoes over lockdown where we noticed the large above-grown section of the crop. Given the crop's abundance and wasteful qualities, we made potatoes the core of our innovation. To develop our process, we began by reviewing academic literature in the field of fibre extraction from crops such as hemp, flax and nettle. In parallel to initial physical experiments in our garden we spoke to experts to refine our technique and identify a genuinely sustainable process. While various fibre extraction technologies exist, due to the low throughputs we were working with as well as cost constraints, we were forced to develop proprietary machinery. A key challenge was removing impurities from the fibres while retaining durability. Understanding the impact on stakeholders was crucial. We visited dozens of farms to learn about their harvesting practices and even grew potatoes ourselves. We built relationships with brands and spinners worldwide to gather feedback on our material. Since the project's inception, we have created thousands of prototypes to optimise processing parameters. To prove supply-chain integration, we successfully created yarn using a conventional cotton spinning line.

How it is different

Fibe is unique as it is the first textile fibre made from potato crops, and it's the first to valorise the crop's stem in any form. Besides its novelty, Fibe has mechanical properties similar to cotton, outperforming hemp and linen. Working with a cheap and abundant waste stream allows Fibe to become significantly more cost-competitive than other cotton alternatives. Instead of a conventional chemical approach used by other waste-based textiles, we use a non-toxic, renewable, and biodegradable biological process, making it vastly more sustainable. Our proprietary machinery simplifies the process with fewer steps and greater control. This technology is feedstock agnostic and can extract fibres from various agricultural waste streams.

Future plans

The next steps include: reducing the cost of our bioprocessing in order to make it suitable for mass manufacturing, scaling up our in-house machinery, obtaining and expanding IP protection on any machines and processes, automating the collection of potato waste, identifying the potato variety and growing parameters that yield the most fibres, developing commercial agreements with brands and carrying out an independent LCA to verify environmental savings. These plans are with the aim of building a pilot production facility and commercially implementing the material in 2026.

Awards

Royal Academy of Engineering 2023 Enterprise Fellowship; Future Manufacturing 2024 Winner; Imperial College London Moonshot Prize 2023; The Mills Fabrica Techstyle for Social Good Textile Grand Prize Winner 2022; Recipient of multiple IUK grant awards.