Fabric made from waste potato plants could offer a more sustainable alternative to pure cotton, as pressure grows on the fashion industry to reduce its environmental impact.
Potatoes pose a headache for farmers. The tubers are harvested and eaten, but the above-ground plant contains the poison solanine, so can’t be used for fertiliser or animal feed. Farmers usually pulverise or incinerate this matter before potatoes are harvested.
Now, UK start-up Fibe wants to avoid this by extracting fibres from potato stems to make a sustainable fabric. In April, it unveiled the world’s first potato thread, a blend of 75 per cent cotton and 25 per cent potato fibres.
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Potatoes are the third most important staple food crop in the world, but create around 150 million tonnes of waste plant matter per year. Fibe says it has developed a new way to extract the fibres using a biological process, rather than chemicals. “We are controlling the biodegradation process, in a way that yields us fibres,” says Gal-Shohet.
