When life gives you chickens, make cashmere. New York-based Everbloom takes fiber materials that would otherwise be wasted in supply chains — including poultry feathers, bedding, and discarded wool — and transforms them into new fabrics, TechCrunch reported. The company says it can replicate materials from polyester to cashmere by running the scraps through a series of machines, with its AI model tweaking how the machines operate and the chemical reactions that alter the fibers within them.
The model maps how wasted materials behave on a molecular level under various conditions, like temperature and moisture levels. It then predicts how the fibers will look, feel, and hold before manufacturing them, and recommends specific processes to get the best results out of different materials. It’s a bold experiment, but one that could help the case for upcycled fashion as consumers’ environmental footprints grow.