Is Carbon-Capturing Clothing the Possible Future for Fashion?

Carbon-capturing technology, or Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS), has been around since the 1970s. Known for its industrial prowess in collecting carbon for underground storage and prolonged usage in oil extraction, it was only around a decade later that scientists found its climate mitigation potential. However, back in the 70s and 80s, climate change was not as widespread of a concern as the Cold War and nuclear warfare, and CCUSs were not cheap. Thus, a possible industrial marvel that could have evolved and kickstarted the mitigation of Carbon Dioxide emission and its effects on the climate and could have created a precedent for more environmentally friendly industrial practices never took off. Right now, there are only 21 large-scale CCUS projects for the reduction of factory emissions globally, a valiant yet powerless number that hasn’t been able to do much to stop the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere from reaching 416 parts per million, almost double of the pre-Industrial Revolution emissions.

Still, environmental science is an area of constant exposure to innovation in today’s world. Over the past ten years, technology has been able to make carbon capture processes cost up to 70% less than before with new solvents and chemical “sponges” to capture CO2 and catalysts to speed up the CCUS processes. Upcoming inventions like MIT’s electronic battery-like electrode filter may help the developing market even more. Yet, industrial applications for CCUSs are not the only approaches people have taken to apply such environmentally friendly procedures. Fashion is always the wild card when talking about humanity’s future, be it about wearable tech, the evolution of fads due to popular culture, and its impact on the environment. The latter point is important to consider since, in 2018, the fashion industry was responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions and nearly 20% of wastewater, especially when talking about jeans production. Moreover, fast fashion (a real wolf in sheep’s clothing) is super toxic, highly pollutant, and very wasteful. So, it is refreshing to see that fashion has been part of the carbon-capturing train in its own small-scale way.

Algae has been experimented with as a carbon-capturing fabric before. Examples include New York designer Charlotte McCurdy’s see-through jacket made of algae powder that is heated and later cooled into a transparent garment, and Canadian-Iranian designer Roya Aghighi’s proof of concept textile called Biogarmetry, made of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii algae that are spun together with nano polymers to form the fabric. The Post Carbon Lab is a biotech design start-up that has also worked for a long time transplanting photosynthesis into cloth, creating layers of living algae inside their experimental clothes (more on them below). So, the newest stride in carbon-capturing fashion may argue that the future is algae.

During the 2021 Paris Fashion Week, DS Automobile, a premium automotive brand owned by Peugeot and Citroën’s conglomerate PSA Groups, unveiled a new capsule collection in collaboration with Post Carbon Lab (told you) and EGONLab, a French designer brand. The selection consists of one unisex bomber jacket and one unisex trench coat with adornments coated in algae, and two unisex t-shirts completely layered with the photosynthetic organism. The attires also feature slogans expressing messages like “Lead The Charge,” “Power Sustainability Dreams,” and “Green Bomber.” EgonLab lead designers Florentin Glemarec and Kévin Nompeix mentioned in an interview that they took “inspiration from the city of Paris and the strong spirit of its residents” to imprint those phrases onto the garments, which they designed and weaved before the algae were coated onto them.

This partnership comes on the heels of DS Automobile announcing that they are currently selling E-Tense electric versions of their previous cars and intend to switch to exclusively manufacturing plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles by 2025. Yet, this is not the first time the marque has collaborated with EGONLab. The brand featured DS Automobile cars in their 2020 Spring/Summer clothing collection photoshoot. Still, working with Post Carbon Lab is a novel feat inspired by its new “Future Craft” method, which aims to use sustainable and innovative materials in crafting their vehicles.

The Post Carbon Lab was founded by Dian-Jen Lin, a London College of Fashion graduate from their fashion futures program, and Hannes Hulstaert, an Architecture graduate of the University of Antwerp. Their mission in creating the company was to promote something they call Regenerative Sustainability Activism, which they describe as “making sustainability as easy and accessible as daily conveniences like putting on clothes and commuting,” which includes designing garments with photosynthetic and pollution-filtering properties to reduce the environmental impact of the fashion industry. They haven’t released many prototypes of their work, so their collaboration with DS Automobiles and EGONLab is one of a kind and something that may (and at least should) signal the future of “living” photosynthetic clothing.

So, how does the collection work? In the founders’ words, the garments feature a “living algae coating, consisting of layers of photosynthetic micro-organisms that can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen [and glucose].” To keep the algae alive and carbon-capturing, though, the outfits need to be looked after as if they were almost like plants. Caring procedures include daily watering, ph neutral detergent washing when needed, direct heat prevention, and storage in well-lit, ventilated spaces. Lin and Husltaert explain that the garments’ lifespan can vary a lot, but their research points to them lasting for a couple of years if properly groomed.

Since this capsule collection is a very novel step the Post Carbon Lab is taking in materializing their research, it is partially a wearable technology pilot project made for them “to gather more qualitative and quantitative insights before making conclusions.” Therefore, the lab still lacks data about the science and logistics behind making “living” carbon-capturing fashion and translating the coating process and algae culture into a “mass-producible” or at least a consumer endeavor. Still, they have been able to record carbon-capturing measurements for their research during the ten-week dying and coating process, finding out that the garments were able to sequester together about 1452 grams of CO2, which is equivalent to a six-year-old oak absorbing and pooling carbon in a period of six months.

In the end, EGONLab’s founders sum up the sentiment behind the garment’s importance with these fitting words: “We love how each piece has turned out and how accessible they are for people looking to make a statement and reduce their carbon footprint.” Even though the capsule collection is only a designer concept, it shows that as time progresses, more and more companies may strive to reduce their carbon footprints through innovation and sustainability efforts in an attempt to build a less gloomy future, following the possible new, more environmentally conscious trends of society.

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