Making clothes that breathe

Imag­ine clothes that could reduce your per­son­al car­bon foot­print as you wear them. Ush­er in the intrigu­ing world of Post Car­bon Lab where fash­ion pho­to­syn­the­sis­es.

This biotech start­up is pilot­ing micro­bial pig­men­ta­tion and pho­to­syn­the­sis coat­ing for tex­tiles. From their facil­i­ty in East Lon­don, they treat exist­ing fab­rics with nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring micro-organ­isms, such as algae, which then “live” on the fin­ished prod­uct, extract­ing CO2 from the air while emit­ting oxy­gen, thus ren­der­ing the wear­er cli­mate pos­i­tive.

Founders Dian-Jen Lin, a grad­u­ate of Lon­don Col­lege of Fashion’s MA fash­ion futures pro­gramme, and Hannes Hul­staert, who stud­ied archi­tec­ture in Antwerp, describe their organ­i­sa­tion as “a trans­dis­ci­pli­nary design research stu­dio with a focus on sus­tain­abil­i­ty”. Their ambi­tion is to become the world’s first cli­mate-pos­i­tive dye house. Just don’t ask them to sell you a t‑shirt.

“The obvi­ous thing is to make a sus­tain­able prod­uct and sell it,” says Lin. “I’ve had this con­ver­sa­tion with many peo­ple from seri­ous busi­ness back­grounds who think we need a prod­uct-based mod­el to thrive in the econ­o­my. How­ev­er, we resist that.”

For Lin and Hul­staert it comes down to pur­pose. “Why are we doing this? The rea­son is not to chase huge prof­its,” says Lin. “You can eas­i­ly imag­ine us chug­ging out t‑shirts treat­ed with our process, we have the facil­i­ties to do so, but that is not dis­rup­tive.”

Getting people to think about the lifespan of their clothes

On the sur­face, Post Car­bon Lab is in the busi­ness of car­bon seques­tra­tion, but there’s deep­er stuff at play. The duo start­ed out with a design provo­ca­tion: what if fash­ion could have a pos­i­tive eco­log­i­cal role?

“We want to get peo­ple think­ing about their respon­si­bil­i­ties,” says Lin. “To embed a rip­ple effect through the notion that if you don’t take care of [our treat­ed fab­ric], it could pos­si­bly die. It makes people’s heads spin because it’s a dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

In Jan­u­ary, Lin spoke at the 9th Future Fab­rics Expo about the chal­lenges of embed­ding inno­va­tion in the fash­ion sup­ply chain. For starters, Post Car­bon Lab’s results are not stan­dard­ised, at least not yet.

We want to get peo­ple think­ing about their respon­si­bil­i­ties… if you don’t take care of [our treat­ed fab­ric], it could pos­si­bly die

“It’s not like [order­ing] a Pan­tone colour,” she says. “It will be with­in a range, but maybe light pur­ple to a lighter pur­ple.” And while their bac­te­r­i­al pig­ment dyes are fixed, the pho­to­syn­the­sised coat­ings can change colour accord­ing to con­di­tions. “We have to put a lot of effort into com­mu­ni­cat­ing,” says Lin, but that’s a pos­i­tive when your approach is col­lab­o­ra­tive.

“We want to open the door to research and the lab,” Lin told the Expo. By employ­ing the ser­vice provider mod­el, they’ve side-stepped the bar­ri­ers to entry – risk, investors, non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments – that mean many pro­to­types take years to reach mar­ket. “Send us a mes­sage by Insta­gram; we can have a chat. Tell us what kind of gar­ment you want to coat,” she said.

Last year, emerg­ing design­er Olivia Rubens did just that. The result was a series of “liv­ing knits” that debuted at Helsin­ki Fash­ion Week in July. “I love that you lit­er­al­ly have to take care of it like a plant,” says Rubens. “You can actu­al­ly see it dying if you neglect it.”

Revolutionising the fashion supply chain

There are three ele­ments to keep­ing the treat­ed fab­ric healthy, explains Lin. First, light, “which can be mod­er­ate; they are not very light inten­sive”. The sec­ond is ven­ti­la­tion. “You can’t put it in a very dark enclosed envi­ron­ment for long, which is good, because that would defeat the object. You want to be inter­act­ing with it, so it can cap­ture your car­bon emis­sions and emit fresh oxy­gen.” Third is air mois­ture. “You can do that through spritz­ing,” she sug­gests or by hang­ing the gar­ment in the bath­room after a show­er.

Lin is excit­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of mul­ti­ple hands form­ing a chain of cus­to­di­ans for the liv­ing fab­ric. Accord­ing to Fash­ion Rev­o­lu­tion, a hun­dred pairs of hands touch a gar­ment before it reach­es the cus­tomer.

“As a bio-dye house, we come in with our pho­to­syn­thet­ic coat­ing quite ear­ly on, say, after the farm or after the fibres have been extract­ed. Then after­wards? Let’s make a guess: there could still be 50 or 60 peo­ple involved in bring­ing this gar­ment to you and those peo­ple all have to rise to the chal­lenge of tak­ing care of the treat­ed piece.”

It sounds like a logis­ti­cal night­mare though? “Maybe we’re too ide­al­is­tic,” she laughs. “But pil­ing up prod­ucts before they’re ready to be sold is an old busi­ness mod­el. Brands are look­ing to reduce inven­to­ry as much as pos­si­ble, adopt­ing pre-order­ing and resale mod­els, which are chal­leng­ing the idea that you have to col­late stock in one cen­tralised area. Poten­tial­ly the sup­ply chain becomes much more dis­trib­uted and localised.”

Can Post Carbon Lab scale sustainably?

Lin and Hul­staert are still try­ing to fig­ure out how best to scale Post Car­bon Lab. “At the moment, our tar­get mar­ket is Europe-based small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es,” says Lin. “We are still small. If you want to ampli­fy car­bon seques­tra­tion, it’s real­ly good to scale up. But do we want to export to Aus­tralia, Amer­i­ca, Asia? How does that add up from a car­bon per­spec­tive? We can’t for­get why we are doing this.”

Fashion’s cli­mate impacts are in the spot­light. In August, Glob­al Fash­ion Agen­da and McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny pub­lished the Fash­ion on Cli­mate report that revealed the sec­tor was respon­si­ble for 2.1 bil­lion met­ric tonnes of green­house gas in 2018, rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the entire economies of France, Ger­many and the UK com­bined. Emis­sions from fash­ion account for around 4 per cent of the glob­al total and are way off track for meet­ing Paris Agree­ment tar­gets.

Brands’ car­bon neu­tral­i­ty goals tend to focus on off­set­ting emis­sions, rather than reduc­ing them. Few are will­ing to dis­cuss degrowth or com­plete­ly new busi­ness mod­els.

“Mit­i­ga­tion and off­set­ting aren’t enough,” says Lin. “We need a par­a­digm shift, regen­er­a­tive prac­tices, to stop think­ing some­one else will fix this stuff for us. We need to take care of our own car­bon emis­sions. But also, and this doesn’t get dis­cussed enough in the sus­tain­able fash­ion con­ver­sa­tion, it’s much more sus­tain­able to take care of what you have right now than to buy new clothes. Maybe it’s not about sell­ing brand new prod­ucts?

“We’re still gath­er­ing data on how Post Car­bon Lab’s users feel from an emo­tion­al point of view. We are ask­ing them, ‘Does hav­ing to par­tic­i­pate in this care prac­tice make you feel more con­nect­ed to your gar­ment?’” So maybe it’s not about mon­ey either. How might the indus­try grap­ple with that?

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