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The Plant and Pomegranate Hoodie by Vollebak is fully biodegradable. It looks and feels like a normal hoodie. What makes it different is that it starts and ends its life in the ground. You have to physically bury it in soil or put it out in the compost if you want it to biodegrade. A lot of clothing made today will take anywhere between a decade and several centuries to biodegrade. In contrast, fabric built from natural fibers like cotton, wool and silk will biodegrade much faster. In this hoodie every element is made from organic matter and left in its raw state.
As it’s made entirely from plants and pomegranate dye, the hoodie is fully biodegradable and compostable. The speed at which the hoodie biodegrades depends on the environment you put it in.
The hoodie is made out of pulped eucalyptus. Eucalyptus trees are chipped and pulped, before being turned into fibre, then yarn and finally fabric. All the wood is harvested from sustainable forestry plantations and certified by both the Forestry Sustainability Council and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification
It’s produced by Vollebak, using a closed loop production process. In practice this means that over 99% of the water and solvent used to turn pulp into fibre is recycled and reused and on the Higg MSI scoring system which measures the impact of producing a kilogram of fibre – taking into account fossil resource depletion, water scarcity, eutrophication and global warming – this fabric scores 10 against cotton’s score of 60.
At the same time we’re exploring natural dyeing methods. Pomegranate trees can thrive in harsh environments. And in the case of pomegranates, we can make dye from waste. When the edible seeds are removed from pomegranates, the peel is normally just thrown away. So rather than let it go to waste we’ve used the skin to color the Plant and Pomegranate Hoodie. This powder is mixed with a water-based binder and filtered, to create pomegranate dye. Each hoodie is built by hand, and then the whole hoodie is submerged in a giant vat of pomegranate dye to give it its color.
