Orange Fiber

Orange Fiber ingredients deconstructed / Source: Orange Fiber

CelluloseEuropeLyocellOrange Fiber & TencelTextiles

WHAT WE SAY:

The citrus fruit industry creates a huge amount of cellulose-rich waste byproduct that Orange Fiber wants to use to create a silk-like luxury fabric.

Clearly it can deliver on quality. It launched with Salvatore Ferragamo in 2017 and the company has continued to win multiple awards since then, which is testament to its compelling vision. But we hope that the lack of truly widely available retail products is not a signal that Orange Fiber is struggling to scale, leaving it as a creative, niche, luxury material.

Orange Fiber material / Source: Orange Fiber

ABOUT ORANGE FIBER

Orange Fibre was founded in 2014 in Sicily, Italy by Enrica Arena and Arriana Santanicito, with the latter inspired to use orange pulp as a feedstock during her fashion degree.
The company extracts cellulose from citrus fruit byproduct, feeding this into its production line, like many other forms of cellulose, such as Lyocell.
Orange Fibre focuses on oranges as they are one of the largest fruit crops globally, as well as being one that produces a lot of waste. Indeed, approximately 50% of the fresh fruit mass is wasted during juice production, generating 10 million metric tons of waste a year. Even in Italy alone, there is more than 700,000 tons of citrus juice byproducts produced each year.
The company has raised over EUR 1 million (USD 962,000), including raising EUR 650,000 (USD 625,000) via CrowdFundMe in 2019.
Orange Fibre used the proceeds from the funding round to scale up its production capacity – upgrading its pilot plant in 2020.
In July 2021, Orange Fibre announced it had partnered with Lenzing to release first Tencel branded lyocell fibre made of orange and wood pulp.
Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo was the first to release a collection featuring Orange Fibre, in 2017; since then it also featured in H&M’s 2019 Conscious collection.
In December 2021, Orange Fibre won the Vogue Yoox Challenge, and was selected as one of the finalists in Conservation X’s Microfibre Innovation Challenge; it also won the 2015 H&M Foundations Global Change Award.