As the population grows, prime farmland is diminishing. The combination of these two opposing realities makes larger questions about how to source the fiber we use to make clothing much more difficult to answer.

For one, natural fibers like often cotton require the same farmland and resources as food crops. And while the global demand for synthetic fibers is more than double that of natural fibers, most of it is petroleum-based polyester, a non-renewable resource.

“Existing textiles will not be able to satisfy the increasing demand in quantities and quality,” says fiber entrepreneur Enrica Arena. They key, she adds, is to focus on reusing natural byproducts that are not rival to food consumption, but that can provide sustainable resources. In other words: making clothes out of food waste and food by-products.

“We have to solve the problems of food and clothing for a world that is expanding,” says University of Nebraska Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design professor and textile chemical engineer Yiqi Yang. Yang and his team have been researching two main food products and their potential to be turned into fiber: corn husks and chicken feathers, both by-products of large food industries.

Cotton accounts for about a third of overall fiber consumption, and is a crop whose production demands huge quantities of water and chemicals to grow. Finding innovative ways to turn food waste into fiber is an opportunity to maximize on space available for crops, reduce the amount of waste and agricultural by-products entering landfills, and reduce dependence on petroleum-based products.

Orange Fiber

In Italy, two designers have focused on the potential of one of their country’s big agricultural crops: citrus. In 2011, Adriana Santanocito was studying Fashion Design in Milan, writing her thesis on sustainable materials. She and Arena began to research the potential of oranges, which are processed for orange juice in Sicily, resulting in 700,000 tons of annual waste.

“This waste represented a cause for the closing of some citrus juice companies,” says Arena, either because of illegal disposal or because correct disposal is too expensive to sustain. The two women also knew that an ever increasing percentage of people in the fashion industry were in search of sustainable materials. “We wanted to leverage oranges, which are typical of Sicily, and Italian excellence in textile, developing a disruptive technology,” says Arena. Their fiber line, Orange Fiber, was born.

The resulting yarn has a soft and silky feel, which Arena likens to silk and viscose. The process for turning citrus waste into yarn—which depends on the peel’s cellulose content—isn’t reserved just for oranges.

While for now, Arena and Santanocito are solely focused on citrus derivatives, “in theory, every vegetable contains cellulose, so we might try to replicate and adjust our process to a number of other foods,” says Arena. Given that cellulose is the most abundant organic compound on earth, accounting for about 33 percent of all vegetable matter, it has a wide variety of potential for fibers. Fiber is already being made from crops like corn, hemp, and wood pulp.