Well since I was a kid I don’t know if I would call myself an environmentalist
but I always fell in love with nature.
I am Marc Palahi, the director of the European Forest Institute.
I am originally from Barcelona. Now living in the middle of the
forest here in Finland. Our forests are hosting 80%
of all the biodiversity globally. They are our largest terrestrial carbon sink.
And the good news is that with the emerging technologies,
we can transform that wood into a totally new range of innovative bio-based solutions.
Fashion is an incredible sector. It's a $3 trillion business.
The fashion industry is responsible for around 5% of the global greenhouse emissions.
So it’s also responsible for 20% of the global wastewater.
And the fact that we are using oil-based materials like polyester
also generates a big problem of microplastics in our oceans.
The change that we need to put forward is massive
if you consider that we are producing roughly 100 million tons of textile fibres today.
Wood is the only significant alternative for the textile sector.
We can transform wood into a new generation of sustainable bio-based textile fibres,
The tree does the same thing as the cotton plant. It actually produces cellulose.
In the case of wood, what you do, is you need to get it somehow out of the tree,
you need to dissolve it. It's very comparable to the paper
industry.
You dissolve the cellulose and then it looks, in the end, like honey.
And then you blow air onto it and then the molecules start to arrange,
and suddenly you get a very beautiful fibre. There has been a lot of
investment in innovation, to make wood based textiles sustainable.
This means using circular systems, where the chemicals are 99% circulated.
There is Lyocell, Ioncell and maybe you have heard about Tencell,
which is the way that Lenzing commercialised. But there are many other now technologies.
And there is even now a Finnish startup called Spinnova, which does not use even
chemicals at all. To buy a sustainable piece of garment,
the difference between an environmentally acceptable choice
and an unacceptable choice is as small as 20 - 30 cents.
I know that H&M is very interested in moving towards sustainable wood-based textiles.
I know that Nike also is trying to promote recycling to produce their
own footwear products. So I think the movement is
taking place from many different brands
and using different sustainability strategies, but I think all converging into the same point
that we need sustainable materials and we need sustainable processes.
Patagonia, Stella McCartney, they were indeed trailblazers who I think made the theme
more acceptable for more High Street, you know, normal fashion
brands. NGOs started to work on
the brands. Consumers started to wake up.
Consumers put, you know, pressure on the total value chain.
Consumers put pressure on governments. Governments wake up to the challenge.
We get an EU Green Deal, and things just start to fall into place.
And I think whether we want it or not, the whole industry will follow.
We really need to connect both technology and nature.
I think this will be the secret of the 21st century,
connecting technology and nature to really rethink our economy.
And I think now the secret in the coming decades is to recognise
that the true purpose, and the true engine of our economy is nature.