Food Waste Turned Into Green Fashion

Green fashion or the environmentally friendly fashion has provided increasingly high innovation every time. More companies are recycling food waste into trendy fashion. The company wants to further enhance its role in reducing food waste through various new steps. Local and international level fashion designers try to use leftovers into cloth, which is then transformed into stylish products ranging from bags, jackets, t-shirt, sandals to shoes.

 

Based on UN data, it is estimated that there are 1.3 billion tons of food that becomes garbage every year. This number equals a quarter of the total number of calories consumed by humans. Finding ways to solve this problem is a fairly helpful step even though turning food into a fashion product will not solve this problem as a whole.

 

The positive impact of green fashion is to educate the public about the importance of 3R: Reduce (reduce), Reuse (reuse), and Recycling (reprocessing) can be achieved.

 

List of Companies that Use Food Waste

Here is a list of some food wastes that have been successfully treated and recycled by several companies, namely:

1. Salmon Skin

There are many wastes from fish and crabs that are usually thrown into the sea every year. A sustainable fishery, in the end, is not only a matter of catching fish but increasing its utilization so that the waste is not disposed of back into the ocean.

 

Tidal Vision owner, 25-year-old Craig Kasberg, has spent years working on an Alaskan fishing boat. Aside from being the CEO of Tidal Vision, the startup he founded, Kasberg encourages to reuse the sustainable products made from marine waste.

 

Kasberg saw the amount of waste dumped by the fishing industry in the ocean so he negotiated with sea-food processors to buy the remaining waste and launched Tidal Vision to convert the raw material into products, including chitosan, which can be used by textile companies for clothing, and salmon skin, which he sells in sheets for fashion designers. In addition, he also sells wallets and belts in 130 specialty stores.

 

Chitosan is a type of polymer extracted from seashells and now they produced wallets, belts, and handbags while their textile factories have launched t-shirts, socks and other products that combine chitosan with other natural fibers.

 

List of Additional Companies Using Food Waste

2. Coconut Coir

The company called Nau has developed special coatings for winter jackets. This jacket is made of coconut, with the aim of reducing the use of goose feathers in the fashion industry. The process is by burning coconut waste and mixing the residual combustion ash with recycled polyester which eventually becomes yarn.

 

This product, originally named Cocona, is now named 37.5 Technology and used by leading sports equipment companies such as Adidas, Eddie Bauer, Under Armor and North Face.

 

3. Coffee Pulp

On average each person drinks 2 cups of coffee per day which means the amount of coffee pulp is piled up so a company from Spain named Ecoalf creates a way to turn the pulp into a thread that can be used to make clothes. Coffee pulp is collected from restaurants and then dried and oil extracted from the pulp is mashed until it becomes fine flour.

 

This fine flour is then mixed with recycled polyester which eventually produces yarn. The yarn that comes from food waste is soft, light and the outside has water-resistant properties.