In Taiwan, we make fabrics from oysters

The island's oyster producers have been wondering for years how to manage the mountains of empty shells that their industry generates every year. To relieve them, a company in southwest Taiwan has succeeded in creating a very strong textile with this waste.

They called this new fabric sea wool. Yes, you can now buy scarves, sports T-shirts or baby clothes made from oyster shell residue. These technical fibers are anti-odor, anti-bacterial and retain heat very well.

Their creation required several years of work in the laboratories of the Creative Tech Textile group, in the city of Tainan. Engineers had already developed polyester textiles that incorporated waste plastic bottles and then tried to add oyster shell powder, which contains a lot of calcium carbonate.

The process is a bit complicated. You have to crush the shells to create sort of tiny balls, then you heat them at a very high temperature and mix them with recycled plastic granules. We can then draw a thread to weave. It looks like some kind of wool. To the touch, it is very soft, hence the name “seawool”, sea wool.

Eddie Wang, the boss of Creative Tech Textile, explains that he has always had strong memories of the remains of oyster shells which littered the streets of his childhood village, where oyster farming was a big business. Already, at the time, the inhabitants burned and crushed these shells to make an insulating material which they used in the construction of houses. So he said to himself that there was perhaps a way to take advantage of these insulating properties of oysters in textiles. For him, it is also a way to manage this accumulating pollution. Every year, Taiwan harvests 200,000 tons of oysters. And that’s more than 150,000 tonnes of abandoned shell waste. In its factory, the company currently recycles 100 tonnes per year. It's still little but it's a start.

We can also produce other materials with these shells. Another company from Taiwan called TaiSugar is also working on this recycling. It recovers calcium carbonate from the shells and transforms it for several industries. It is used, for example, to make soap, fertilizer and even cat litter. And there is no shortage of raw material, since according to United Nations calculations, the world throws away more than 3 million tonnes of oyster shells each year.