Underwater Kelp Cardigan

The ocean grows enormous fields of seaweed that don’t need soil, irrigation, pesticides or fertiliser. All they need is sunlight, saltwater and dissolved nutrients and can grow up to 24 inches in a day. That mix of low maintenance and hyper growth might make seaweed the most important raw material on the planet. For most of human history, everything we wore came from one of three places, plants, animals, and then oil. From animal pelts to cotton fields, sheep farms, and fossil fuels. Seaweed could be the next place we look. Seaweed is marine algae and inside its cell walls are biopolymers that can be extracted, spun and knitted into textiles that feel and work like natural fibres. But they’re far less bother. We’re talking around 70 times less water consumption than cotton, zero microplastic pollution, and complete biodegradation within days. So we blended a seaweed-derived fibre with Pima cotton, sent it to one of Britain’s best knitwear mills, and turned it into a classic long-sleeve cardigan.