Imasus

Algae-Based Bioplastic: New Explorations in Sustainable Materials

2026-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

We have received samples of algae-based bioplastic developed by Jingyi Yang, a material that explores new possibilities for sustainable fashion through natural resources.

One of its most relevant environmental benefits is that it is fully biodegradable, water-soluble, and compostable under natural conditions, helping to reduce long-lasting waste in the environment.

From a functional and aesthetic perspective, the material has a leather-like feel, a semi-translucent appearance, and a flexibility that changes depending on its thickness. These qualities open up potential applications across clothing, accessories, footwear, and home textiles, while supporting more responsible approaches to design.

In upcoming posts, we will analyse these samples using SEM (scanning electron microscopy) to better understand their structure at the micro scale.

You can learn more about Jingyi Yang’s work on Instagram: @jingyiii_y.

Webinar #2: Sustainable Design Principles and the IMASUS Training Modules

2026-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

We are excited to announce that the second webinar from the IMASUS series is now available!

In this session, we introduce the IMASUS training modules, focusing on sustainable design principles and how designers can integrate circular strategies into their creative practice.

The webinar explores a key idea at the core of the IMASUS project: sustainable fashion starts at the design phase.

While there is increasing awareness around sustainable materials and circular systems, designers often lack the tools and frameworks needed to translate this knowledge into concrete design decisions. This is exactly where IMASUS positions itself: as a bridge between academic research and practical application.

During the webinar, we present the structure and approach of the IMASUS training modules, which are built around four key design strategies:

Zero Waste Design: rethinking pattern cutting and construction to eliminate material waste from the outset
Design for Modularity: creating garments that can be adapted, transformed, and extended over time
Design for Longevity: focusing on durability, adaptability, and emotional attachment
Design for Recyclability: designing garments with their end-of-life in mind

Each module combines theoretical content, real-world case studies, and practical toolkits, supporting designers in moving from understanding to application.

Through examples ranging from historical garment systems to contemporary design practices, the webinar highlights how these approaches are not only possible, but already being implemented in innovative ways.

At the same time, it emphasizes an important point: there is no single solution to sustainable fashion design. These strategies are complementary, and the most interesting work happens at their intersection.

This webinar also serves as an introduction to the upcoming hands-on workshop on Design for Recyclability, which will take place at Lottozero in Prato. Participants will have the opportunity to apply the tools introduced in the modules and develop their own prototype concepts in a collaborative environment.

We hope you enjoy this webinar and that it offers a useful starting point for rethinking your own design process.

Stay tuned for more updates from the IMASUS project!

Webinar #1: Sustainable Textile Innovations and the IMASUS Material Database

2026-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

We are Nansi and Ariana from INMA, and we are very happy to share the first webinar in the IMASUS series.

In this session, we introduce the IMASUS Material Database and present part of the work we have been developing over the last few months around innovative and sustainable textile materials. The webinar includes images of several samples we have been studying, together with microscopy images that help reveal the structure and character of each material in more detail.

This first webinar is an invitation to explore how material research, observation, and documentation can support a more informed approach to sustainable textile design. It also reflects one of the core aims of IMASUS: making new material knowledge more accessible to students, educators, and practitioners in the fashion and textile sectors.

We were also lucky to be joined by three excellent speakers, and we would like to thank them for sharing their knowledge and perspectives:

Pilar Ureña. Instagram: @pilarurenaescariz
Ietje Klaver from Pyratex. Instagram: @pyratex_
Elisenda Jaquemot from Squeeze the Orange. Instagram: @squeezetheorange

We hope you enjoy this webinar as much as we enjoyed recording it. We will soon share more information about Webinar #2, where we will present more exciting details about the IMASUS project.

Watch the Full Webinar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGsA65LPQks

Repairing fashion from the ground up: notes from CSFW Madrid 2026

2026-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

On 23 April, we were part of the Circular Sustainable Fashion Week Madrid 2026, presenting IMASUS at the panel on new materials and regenerative textiles. The event took place at Universidad de Nebrija in Madrid’s Chamberí district, a campus that starts telling the story from the gate: a cloister with a central garden, surrounded by labs and studios, corridors full of textile pieces in progress, the productive noise of artistic education. It was a different register from the research institutions where most of this work usually lives, and it helped set the right tone.

The morning opened with a panel on territory and textile heritage, moderated by Jorge López Conde, an architect from Boltaña in the Pyrenees who divides his time between Madrid and his hometown, works closely with the New European Bauhaus ecosystem, and brings a dual perspective that is rare in these conversations: the economic and cultural logic of rural territories, from timber to wool, seen through the lens of someone who genuinely inhabits both worlds. The conversation that stayed with me most was about wool. Luis Antonio Calderón Nájera, mayor of Paredes de Nava in Palencia, brought a number to the room. According to the most recent livestock census from Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture, cited in specialist press, the country’s sheep population has fallen from approximately 15 million animals in 2021 to around 10 million in 2025.

15 million sheep in 2021. Around 10 million in 2025. Five million lost in four years.
–Luis Antonio Calderón Nájera, mayor of Paredes de Nava

His municipality is home to one of only three functioning wool washing facilities still operating in Spain, the others in Mota del Cuervo and a nearby village in northern Castile and León. The problem is structural. After shearing, raw wool must be washed before it can be spun, dyed, or woven. The washing process generates effluent heavily loaded with lanolin, the natural wax present in raw fleece, which at industrial scale poses serious eutrophication risks. Regulation has tightened, many facilities have closed, and Spain now exports much of its raw wool rather than processing it domestically.

A cooperative of women that revived a local tradition of making traditional woven belts, adapting the model toward more equitable and community-led production, was introduce by Álvaro Ferrer (mayor of Portell de Morella in Castellón). The town gained sixty new inhabitants as a result.

What both mayors described was a coordinated effort between local government and community organisations to keep small-scale textile industry alive, building on existing structures rather than importing external models.

The responses already in motion across both cases were varied:

filtration systems to manage the lanolin discharge
compressed wool bricks tested as thermal insulation in Utrillas (Vitrolan)
Mesa de la Lana a dialogue table bringing together rural representatives, industry, and government

For IMASUS, it was a live illustration of something we think about often: the challenge is not only the material or the technology. It is the full system around it, including the regulatory environment, infrastructure scale, and the economic conditions for small actors.

The design voices in the debate brought another dimension. Melina Salazar, from Peru, whose brand Metamorfosis produces garments from textile offcuts inside prison workshops, spoke about recovering a material her family had once been prohibited from using and eventually building a cooperative around it. Tatiana Teixeira, founder of AfroWema, a brand based in Kibera, Nairobi, that transforms recovered textiles into garments rooted in African cultural narratives, engaged directly with the wool problem: she drew connections to materials she works with and asked whether solutions found in one system could inform another.

Our panel, “Repair to Regenerate: the new language of textile materials” was moderated by Pepa González of R-evoluciona. Esther Pizarro, researcher at EcoBDLab and ECOMAT at Universidad Europea, presented what she calls a materioteca: a library of 100 materials she has developed from natural residues and biological sources, including fungi, bacteria, flowers, agricultural by-products, and combinations such as wool and spirulina. She brought two of her own publications and two material samples to the panel. The room spent time touching them, smelling them, reading their characterisation sheets. It was a reminder that the scientific and the sensory are not separate in this field, and that the way materials are communicated is itself an argument for them. I also spent time with Esther Pizarro and her colleague Silvia, learning about two projects currently in progress. The first is an artistic residency in Toledo, where participants collect plants from distinct micro-ecosystems across a specific landscape and extract pigments from each to build a palette of natural dyes inseparable from their territory of origin. The second is a collaboration with a coffee producer, using the dried husks from cacao processing to develop a semi-transparent woven textile, currently being explored in layered garment pieces with their students.

Then emerge the case for forest-based textiles: fibres derived from sustainably certified wood, long associated with high-pollution processing methods. Raquel López Labiano, Digital Strategy and Textile Programme Manager at PEFC España, explained how the chemistry has changed. Modern closed-loop systems use minimal water and recover solvents throughout the cycle. The resulting fibres have distinctive properties: a specific drape, breathability, fall. Several of the materials she described overlap with materials we have analysed within IMASUS. It was striking to hear them positioned, credibly and concretely, for mainstream adoption.

I presented IMASUS in that context: our focus on closing the knowledge gap between material science and fashion education, the database of bio-based and sustainable materials we have been building, and the micrographs that make those materials visible at a level of detail that informs real design decisions. The interest from practitioners was direct. The database and the micrographs generated more questions than I had anticipated. I also brought a sample of the hemp-straw fabric from Wear Us, a project we have covered before on this blog, and several people came to handle it and ask about it.

After the programme, conversations continued. We met Itziar Martín Aresti, founder of Añino Merina, a brand that transforms Merino wool, including the native black Extremaduran Merino variety, into high-quality textiles, shoes, and accessories with full biological certification and traceability. She made a point that stayed with me: working with natural materials also means rethinking the narratives around durability. Products made from natural fibres may have shorter life cycles than synthetic alternatives, and communicating that honestly, not as a flaw but as part of a different relationship with objects, is itself part of the work.

The backdrop for the panels was an exhibition of garments from the previous year’s competition. Juana Montoya from Argentina showed work in dialogue with the criollo cultural codes and indigenous weaving traditions of the Calchaquí Valleys. Elena de Frutos reinterpreted the bridal dress using rectangular cut patterns and near-zero material waste. The physical objects made the conversation more grounded, and more honest about what these choices actually look like.

Days like this are rare. Finding a room where material researchers, rural mayors, policy officials, designers from four continents, and cooperative founders are talking about the same system from different positions is not easy. What the day confirmed for us is that the knowledge we are generating through IMASUS, about what bio-based materials exist, what they can do, and what stands between them and real adoption, is directly useful to the people working on this every day. The challenge is translation: between what is known in a laboratory and what is available in a pattern workshop; between what regulation now enables and what the market still needs; between a raw material disappearing from a rural landscape and a textile that could return it to value.

We have new samples from Hiblatech!

2026-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

We have new samples from Hiblatech and the opportunity to learn more about their work with pineapple leaf fiber, a material created from agricultural waste.

It is fascinating to see how this biomass is transformed into a strong and versatile fiber with multiple applications in textiles and design. Exploring material innovations like this helps us better understand how waste streams can be turned into valuable resources for a more sustainable industry.

Soon, we will be able to observe these materials under the microscope and continue discovering their structure in greater detail.

If you want to know more about their work, you can visit the Hiblatech website.

Eeden: Innovation in Textile Recycling

2026-04-07T00:00:00+02:00

We have received fibers from Eeden and had the opportunity to learn more about the company’s approach to textile recycling.

Eeden is a technology company based in Germany that is developing advanced solutions for the chemical recycling of cotton and polyester textiles. Its process makes it possible to separate and recover cellulose and PET monomers, which can then be transformed into virgin-quality fibers such as lyocell, viscose, and polyester.

This kind of innovation is especially relevant for a more circular textile industry, since it helps recover valuable resources from end-of-life textiles and return them to the production cycle in a high-quality form.

We are looking forward to exploring these fibers more closely and continuing to learn from emerging material solutions like this one.

If you want to know more about their work, you can visit their website Eeden.

Transforming Banana Production Waste

2026-03-27T00:00:00+01:00

We have been exploring fiber made from banana production waste and recently had the opportunity to learn more about this material, developed from agricultural residues in the Canary Islands.

It is particularly interesting to see how what would otherwise be discarded can become a valuable resource. The process is entirely manual and requires no water or energy consumption, resulting in a fiber that is strong, flexible, and very lightweight.

Its versatility allows it to be used in a wide range of textile techniques, including embroidery, crochet, knitting, and needle lace, opening new possibilities for sustainable fashion and material experimentation.

We are really looking forward to observing it under the microscope and better understanding its internal structure and potential.

If you would like to learn more, you can follow:

Instagram: @pilarurenaescariz
Instagram: @plataneralab

An Edible Material

2026-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

We are excited to share that we have received a new material from Risa Ueno: an edible and innovative sample unlike anything we have worked with before.

According to the creator, it is a knitted textile made from protein-based edible plastic yarn, opening new possibilities for sustainable and experimental fashion.

It is always inspiring to see people from different fields wanting to collaborate with us and bring fresh ideas into our projects. Encounters like this continue to expand the kinds of materials, processes, and perspectives we can explore together.

If you would like to learn more about Risa Ueno’s work, we recommend checking these channels:

Instagram: @ruru.16.ediblecat
Website

Innovative Materials Under the Microscope

2026-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

Last week we visited the LMA facilities to use the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and analyze several Pyratex textiles. Working at this scale allows us to observe structures that cannot be seen with the naked eye and helps us better understand how these innovative materials behave.

During the session, we took a closer look at fibers such as bamboo and banana-based textiles, documenting the details that make these materials so interesting for sustainable fashion research.

We are very happy to collaborate in this kind of work, which helps IMASUS move the project forward and continue exploring more sustainable and creative solutions for fashion.

Soon we will share some of the images from this session to show the surprising details hidden inside these textiles.

Discovering Pyratex Materials

2026-03-10T00:00:00+01:00

We had the opportunity to speak with Ietje, who introduced us to Pyratex’s work and gave us the chance to receive a selection of their material samples.

We are very happy to have these new samples in our hands. They are made from materials such as bamboo, recycled cotton, algae, and other innovative components, and many of them also come with quality certifications.

Soon, we will examine them using a SEM microscope, and we are excited to discover more about these materials at the micro scale.