Have you ever saved 1000 liters of water with one t-shirt? Or did you know that you can make four WoodShirts from just one kilo of wood?

Since 2015 we have been producing sustainable fashion from wood that is not only ecologically produced, but also fair in Portugal, more precisely north of Porto.

Although sustainable clothing made of wood may sound unusual at first, it is an extremely environmentally friendly alternative to conventional materials such as cotton and polyester.

Wood is a natural, biodegradable raw material that, unlike cotton, is also native to our climate zone. The wood for our clothing comes exclusively from sustainable forestry and comes from Austria, Germany or the Czech Republic, among other places.

Sustainable forestry describes a form of forest management in which the ecological, social and economic aspects are harmonized. The focus here is on the idea of the forest's natural regenerative capacity, which in short means that the forest is preserved and protected for future generations. 

However, forests are more than a collection of many trees. They are a valuable ecosystem and serve as a habitat for a wide variety of animal, fungal and plant species. They also help to protect water and soil, as their roots increase the water storage capacity of the soil and protect it from erosion.

Forests also have an enormously high significance for our climate. They extract CO² from the air and store it in trees and in the soil. It is estimated that trees store 49% of the world's CO². When wood is processed into wood products, the CO² it contains remains stored, as it is only released during the biological decomposition of the wood. This means that wood products, such as our WoodShirts, contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and can replace materials that are more harmful to the climate.

In contrast to ordinary cotton, a significant difference in terms of environmental friendliness can be seen from the planting of trees. While in forestry no additional fertilizers have to be used to achieve yields for the production of wood fiber, various fertilizers and pesticides are used to grow cotton. The substances used, such as Aldicarb, have a strong impact on the environment and contribute to freshwater pollution and terrestrial pollution. This is because the pesticide mentioned causes more than 80% of the freshwater pollution caused on the cultivated land.

In addition, the high water consumption through artificial irrigation of cotton plantations in areas with little rainfall even leads to considerable, permanent ecological damage. A sad negative example is the drying up of the Aral Sea, once the largest inland body of water on earth.
Forests, on the other hand, do not need to be artificially irrigated and can also store water for longer and in larger quantities than comparable open spaces.

Another advantage of wood as a raw material for clothing is the area it can be cultivated on. For the same amount of fiber, the area required for cotton is on average 300 to 500% larger than for fibers made from wood. In addition, no area needs to be created to cultivate forests, as is the case with monocultures such as cotton.

The process for producing viscose fibers could probably be described as the forefather of our fabric and was developed in the 1890s. However, the process for producing viscose has some disadvantages. Carbon disulfide is used as a solvent, which is not only harmful to the environment and health, but also very resource-intensive.

The process used to produce the fibers for our woody clothing, however, is particularly environmentally friendly when compared to other cellulose-based regenerated fibers.

In the first step, cellulose is extracted from the wood. This creates the pulp, which is then dissolved in organic, environmentally friendly N-methylmorpholine-N-oxide (NMMO) by removing water without chemical modification. It is important to note that no toxic reagents, such as the carbon disulfide (CS2) mentioned above, are used in the entire process. The pulp is then filtered and finally pressed through spinning glands. The resulting fibers are then precipitated in a bath of aqueous NMMO solution and then combined to form fiber tow.

The solvent can be recycled again and again because it is very easy to remove from the fiber due to its good water mixing properties. The recycling rate is an impressive 99.5-99.8%. This makes fiber extraction environmentally friendly and valuable resources are saved.

You can already see how many resources can be saved if you compare the water consumption of the wood fiber we use with that of cotton.

To produce 1 kg of wood fiber, 0.02 m³ of process water and 0.243 m³ of cooling water are needed. However, only 0.005 m³ of process water and 0.037 m³ of cooling water were used to produce a fiber from the cotton plant, but a full 5.69 m³ of water was used for irrigation. In addition, 70% of the water used for cotton fiber production comes from groundwater and 30% from surface water. Overall, the water consumption of cotton fiber production is 10 to 20 times higher than that of the wood fibers in our clothing - 100 to 500% without cooling water. Finally, most of the water used in the production of wood fibers is used only for cooling purposes and is returned to surface waters uncontaminated.

The energy balance of the production process for wood fiber is also impressive. In fact, just 0.1 kg of CO2 is released per kilogram of fiber produced until the fiber is finished, while cotton production produces 2 kg of CO2 per kilogram of fiber. This means that using wood fiber can reduce CO2 emissions by 20 times compared to cotton. It is also important to mention that the energy used to produce wood fiber is obtained almost exclusively from the use of waste products (such as bark and lye); more precisely, 86.3% of the fuels used are non-fossil and CO2-neutral.

Wood-derived fibers, just like the wood from which they were created, have a very high biodegradability. Unlike synthetic materials such as polyester, which are most commonly used in the fashion industry and take centuries to decompose, cellulose-based fibers such as Lyocell take only a few years to biodegrade, leaving no harmful residues.

With our project, we want to do more than just produce environmentally friendly clothing. We want to show alternatives, create understanding for the complex work steps, provide insights behind the scenes and thereby increase appreciation. Since we use a raw material from nature, we would like to give more back and stand up for nature.

That's why, since the founding of wijld, we have planted a tree in Mexico for every order and supported a local reforestation project there. In 2021, we acquired our own piece of forest near Marsberg in the Sauerland region and started our own reforestation project. We would like to reforest this piece of forest, which has been destroyed by climate change, together with you so that a species-rich forest can emerge.

With wijld we want to promote the processing of sustainable raw materials on the one hand, but on the other hand we also want to draw attention to the working conditions under which fashion is created. Unfortunately, most fashion worldwide is created under inhumane conditions. This does not just mean the sewing of clothing, but rather the entire process, starting with the raw material, such as the cotton plant.

We would like to raise awareness of how many people work together to create a piece of clothing. This background, as well as knowledge of the long production chains, makes you see clothing with different eyes. We hope that with our small project we can help to create more transparency and thus an understanding that will lead to people shopping more consciously and wearing clothes for longer.

That is exactly what sustainability means to us.