Have you ever saved 1,000 liters of water with a T-shirt? Or did you know that you can make four entire WoodShirts from just one kilogram of wood?

Since 2015, we have been making sustainable clothing from wood that is not only produced in an environmentally friendly way, but is also created together with selected partners who share our values of quality, sustainability, and fair working conditions.

Although sustainable clothing made from 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 used for our clothing comes exclusively from sustainably managed forests, including in Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic.  

Sustainable forestry describes a form of forest management that reconciles ecological, social, and economic aspects. The focus is on the forest’s natural capacity for regeneration, 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 provide a habitat for a wide variety of animal, fungal, and plant species. They also help protect water and soil, as their roots increase the soil’s water-retention capacity and protect it from erosion.

Forests are also extremely important for our climate. They remove CO² from the air and store it in trees and soil. It is estimated that 49% of the world’s CO² is stored in trees. Processing wood into wood products keeps the contained CO² stored, as it is only released when the wood biologically decomposes. In this way, wood products such as our WoodShirts help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and can replace more climate-damaging materials.

Unlike conventional cotton, a significant difference in terms of environmental friendliness can already be seen when planting trees. While forestry does not require additional fertilizers to achieve yields for the production of wood fiber, various fertilizers and pesticides are used to grow cotton. These substances, including aldicarb, have a major impact on the environment and contribute to freshwater and terrestrial pollution. The pesticide mentioned is responsible for more than 80% of the freshwater pollution caused by agricultural land.

In addition, the high water consumption caused by artificially irrigating cotton plantations in areas with low rainfall can even lead to significant, lasting 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 greater quantities than a comparable open area.

Another advantage of wood as a raw material for clothing lies in the land area required. For the same quantity of fibers, the area needed for cotton is on average 300 to 500% larger than for fibers derived from wood. In addition, land does not first have to be cleared to manage forests, as is the case with monocultures such as cotton, for example. 

The process used to produce viscose fibers could probably be described as the ancestor of our fabric and was developed as early as the 1890s. However, the viscose production process has several disadvantages. Carbon disulfide is used as the solvent, which is not only harmful to the environment and human health, but also requires a great deal of resources.

By contrast, the process used to produce the fibers for our wood-based clothing is particularly convincing because of its environmental friendliness, especially compared with other cellulose-based regenerated fibers. 

In the first step, cellulose is extracted from the wood. This produces pulp, which is then dissolved in organic, environmentally friendly N-methylmorpholine N-oxide (NMMO) by removing water, without chemical modification. It is important to mention that toxic reagents, such as the carbon disulfide (CS2) already mentioned above, are avoided throughout the entire process. The pulp is then filtered and finally pressed through spinnerets. The resulting fibers are precipitated in a bath containing an aqueous NMMO solution and subsequently combined into a fiber tow.

The solvent can be recycled again and again because its excellent water-mixing properties make it very easy to remove from the fiber. The recycling rate is an impressive 99.5–99.8%. This makes fiber production environmentally friendly and conserves valuable resources.

The amount of resources that can be saved is already apparent when comparing the water consumption of the wood fiber we use with that of cotton.

To produce 1 kg of wood fibers, 0.02 m³ of process water and 0.243 m³ of cooling water are required. By the time a fiber has been produced from the cotton plant, only 0.005 m³ of process water and 0.037 m³ of cooling water have been used, but a full 5.69 m³ of water has been used for irrigation. In addition, 70% of the water used to produce cotton fibers comes from groundwater and 30% from surface water. Overall, cotton fiber production therefore consumes 10 to 20 times more water—or, excluding cooling water, 100 to 500% more—than the production of the wood fibers used in our clothing. Finally, it should be noted that most of the water consumed in the production of wood fibers is used solely for cooling and is returned untreated to surface waters.

The energy balance of the process used to produce fiber from wood is also impressive. In fact, by the time the fiber is fully produced, only 0.1 kg of CO₂ is released per kilogram of fiber, whereas cotton production generates 2 kg of CO₂ per kilogram of fiber. Accordingly, using wood fibers instead of cotton can reduce CO₂ emissions twentyfold. It is also important to mention that the energy used to produce wood fibers is generated almost exclusively from waste products (such as bark and lye); more precisely, 86.3% of the fuels used are non-fossil and CO₂-neutral.

Fibers derived from wood, just like the wood they come from, are highly biodegradable. Unlike synthetic materials such as polyester, which are the most commonly used materials in the fashion industry and take centuries to decompose or break down, cellulose-based fibers such as Lyocell take only a few years to biodegrade and leave no harmful residues behind.

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

That is why, since wijld was founded, 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 launched our own reforestation project. We want to restore this forest, which was destroyed by climate change, together with you so that a biodiverse forest can emerge.

With wijld, on the one hand, we want to support the use of sustainable raw materials, while on the other, we also want to draw attention to the working conditions under which clothing is made. Unfortunately, most fashion worldwide is produced under inhumane conditions. This refers not only to sewing clothes, but rather to the entire process, beginning with the raw material, such as the cotton plant.

We want to raise awareness of how many people work together to create a garment. Understanding this background, as well as the long production chains involved, makes you see clothing in a different light. We hope that our small project can help create greater transparency and understanding, encouraging people to shop more consciously and wear their clothes for longer.

That is exactly what sustainability means to us.