Beetroot is used as a natural dye and this we already know. The news is that it can also be used to make the beet fabric Virent, eco-friendly, 100% made from vegetable raw material.
I mentioned here in the series “Dress up Food” (did you miss it? No problem, just click here, here and here. You won’t regret!) the culture of cotton, which is highly toxic to the planet, as it consumes about 25% of all insecticides used in the world. There is an urgent need to produce clothes that do not harm the environment. An important step in this direction is Virent®.
Virent is a beet fabric, made of white beet sugar. It is made from PET bottles discarded and these bottles are made from sugar. This sugar is the base for a biopolymer or bioplastic polyester.
A biopolymer or bioplastic is a plastic that has the same properties of common plastic, but differs since it uses as raw material, biological sources like sugar cane fiber, corn starch, bacteria and, in this case, beetroot (to see more definitions like this, plese check our Innovation Dictionary). Polyester is one of the most used synthetic fibres in clothing in the world, the problem is that its main component is paraxylene, a derivative of petroleum, non-renewable resource.
White beet. Photo by Don Morishita
Garments made with beet fabric are versatile and have similar performance to those of cotton, with a lower carbon footprint. Innovative technology to produce biological paraxylene goes by the name BioFormPX. Virent made some t-shirts with the beet fabric for demonstration purposes, but they do not know when the product will be available on the market.
It is necessary to decrease the dependence on oil. Innovation allied to foods made possible the creation of promising bioplastics. These new materials open up a myriad of uses in several industries. Would you wear clothes like this?
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