On the 29th of April, BlueCity Lab hosted its second Fiber Club. During the meetup, participants talked about how flax can be a resource in a biocircular economy. We hope to encourage more connections amongst fiber enthusiasts and to stimulate the sharing of knowledge. We spoke about flax from two perspectives.
Flax in a global economy
David Kasse is secretary of the Flax & Linnen NL organisation. He has worked for decades on the promotion of these plants and shared his knowledge on what the current status quo is in the sector. Numbers, specific valorization techniques, selection of seeds: David’s job is to promote the sector and is always around for answering questions.
Local – for – local: The Linen Project
Pascal Gatzen shared how she, together with her fellow members, creates a strong economic and ecological basis for working with flax towards linen in The Linen Project. We shared thoughts on the value of the work on the field. This brings things into perspective since we want to create more local production chains, yet landprices and paid labour are very expensive in western Europe. This means that radical new models need to be investigated when we truly want to head inot that direction. The pioneering work of the people in The Linen Project really helps actively looking for these models: learning by doing.
Other cool stuff we talked about
→ Article on a spinning facility for the long fibers of flax and hemp (and perhaps cattail?) (thanks for sharing this Eduarda Bastian)
→ Researcher Anna Wetzel who works on making a spinning machinery and is looking for investors.
Thanks to
Arie Hooimeijer from PaperInnovator for being such a knowledgeable and great co-host, Jamie Hornis for organizing behind the scenes, Pascal and David for sharing their work and not to forget: Yara Ruby for the great visual summary she created from our talk. Follow her work via @yara_ruby or visit her website. And of course all our partners of the Fiber Club to make it financially possible.