“The way clothes are made and used today is massively wasteful,” Rob Opsomer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation tells The Guardian. “The equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is wasted every second, while less than 1% of clothing is recycled into new clothes. Clothes release half a million tonnes of microfibers into the ocean every year. On top of this, if nothing changes, the fashion industry will consume a quarter of the world’s annual carbon budget by 2050.”
Couture mainstay Salvatore Ferragomo, for example, is using waste orange peel in its pricey threads. The fibers are produced by Orange Fiber, a Milan company founded by Adriana Santanocito in 2013. Santanocito, a fashion student at the time, was trying to find a use for the large amount of orange industry waste in Italy.
Meanwhile, Germany’s QMilk is producing fiber from waste cow’s milk. Qmilk was founded seven years ago when biologist Anke Domaske began looking for non-allergenic fibers for clothes for her stepfather and came across YouTube videos demonstrating how fibers could be produced fro milk proteins.
“More than 2 [million] tonnes of milk is disposed of every year in Germany alone and, rather than throwing it away, we should make something from it,” Domaske says.
Backpacks and shoes incorporating Qmilk’s fibers were recently featured at Berlin’s Fashion Week.