Vollebak's algae and plant t-shirt that's 100% biodegradable.
Twin brothers, Nick and Steve Tidball, started their future-forward clothing tech company, Vollebak in 2015. They wanted to create clothes that were both functional, long-lasting, rugged and left a small footprint on the planet.
With only a handful of seed rounds with angel investors, the brothers - both athletes and designers - created a Graphene jacket and '100 Year Pants' that could withstand fire, nature, water for 100 years. Their solar charged jacket won numerous awards including Time's Best Invention of 2018, Fast Company's Innovation by Design awards and Wired's Gear of the Year.
In August 2019, Vollebak took environmental clothing to a new level with the creation of a plant and algae t-shirt made entirely algae grown in bioreactors, pulped eucalyptus and beech from sustainably managed forests.
Steve Tidball, CEO and co-founder of Vollebak said they wanted to make a piece of clothing entirely out of natural materials so that once it reached the end of its lifespan, it would simply return to nature and leave no trace.
"We felt it was very important to demonstrate the possibility of sustainable closed looped systems in clothing in a way people could easily understand," said Tidball.
According to Tidball, once you’ve finished wearing it, you can bury it back in the earth, and it will biodegrade in 12 weeks.
This is important for several reasons and in many ways is the action that climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been begging governments and people to embrace - the impact of mankind's behavior on earth.
The high cost of fashion is toxic to the planet. Clothing can take decades or centuries to biodegrade — polyester alone does not biodegrade - it takes between 20 to 200 years just to decompose. According to the EPA, only 14.2% of clothes and shoes were recycled in 2015. And11.9 million tonnes of clothing and footwear were thrown away that same year with about 8.2 million tonnes ending up in landfills.
New York City has developed a new program to offset these numbers with more than 1,000 drop off points for clothes recycling in the hope of making a dent in those numbers.
But Vollebak isn't waiting around for things to change. Their low-impact t-shirt is both fashionable and good for the planet
"While we’ve made clothing with some of the most cutting-edge materials on Earth [..] what we wanted to do here is demonstrate that natural materials can be just as cutting-edge," added Tidball. "And, not adding to that 8.2 million tonnes felt like the very definition of cutting edge to us. So we created a t-shirt that would leave no record of its existence is a stark contrast to an industry that creates enormous waste."
Tidball says that as well as not adding to landfill, one of the most exciting elements for the company is the psychological impact it could have on people who buy it.
"When you’ve finished with the t-shirt a few years or a few decades, you have to think [..] consciously about how to dispose of it. You can either bury it in the soil or put it out with the compost," added Tidball.
Tidball adds that you probably wouldn't forget the day you dug a hole in your garden and buried your t-shirt. And so from their point of view, it makes what is typically an unconscious act, a deliberate one.
"We hope that this is likely to make people think more consciously about the life cycle of everything else in their wardrobe," said Tidball.
Turning algae into a printable ink
The ink in the t-shirt is created from algae grown in a bioreactor. To collect the algae, Vollebak passes water from a bioreactor through a filter.
According to Tidball, this process separates the algae, leaving a soupy algae paste. The paste is dried in the sun to create a fine powder which is then mixed with a water-based binder to make algae ink.
The ink is printed onto a shirt that is made of wood pulp which has been turned into a fiber, yarn, and finally fabric. All the wood is harvested from sustainable forestry plantations and certified by both the Forestry Sustainability Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).
In contrast to polyester, fabrics from natural fibers like cotton, wool, and silk will biodegrade faster, but according to Tidball, most of these garments have been dyed with chemicals which will then filter into the soil, or contain elements like metal zips or plastic buttons that won’t biodegrade.
In the Vollebak t-shirt, every element is made from organic matter and left in its raw state.
"There is no dye, ink, or chemicals to go into the soil. Just plants and algae which are organic matter. So when it disappears in 12 weeks nothing is left behind," adds Tidball.
"Our idea with all our clothing is to cut down on the amount of clothing that ends up in landfills and [..] make people think differently about how long they could or should own a piece of clothing for," said Tidball
Tidball believes that if we all thought about handing our clothing down to the next generation like we might a watch or a house, people would buy clothing very differently and create less waste.
Vollebak's plant and algae t-shirt are created and grown from soil and water and that’s where it’s designed to end up too says Tidball.
