How Making Wetlands Wet Again Can Help Change The Fashion Industry
We spent a day harvesting bulrush with Ponda and taking a closer look at their revolutionary biomaterial
At Parley, we’re always thinking about the future. What can the world look like? How can it be improved? How can we not just live in harmony with nature, but learn from it? We are aware that we cannot simply recycle our way out of the plastic crisis – we need to redesign the structures and systems that pollute our planet, along with the harmful materials that we’ve become addicted to. It’s why we’re calling for a Material Revolution – we have to change the way we make things in order to create the future. In this ongoing Parley series we meet the innovators, scientists and start-ups who are reshaping our material world.
As we move into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ll start to reopen our wardrobes and reach for those puffy, insulated jackets that have been tucked away during the summer months. For the most part, we might not think about the materials inside these items that are used to keep us warm – where they come from, how they could be harmful or the impact that the creation of these pieces of clothing may have on our planet. Often, goose down is used, a material that encourages systems that are harmful to animals, locking them into a repetitive life of having their feathers plucked, commonly in factory farm conditions despite regulations being introduced. The popular alternative to animal down is polyester, a material that relies on fossil fuels, leaks microplastics and doesn’t biodegrade. We might be staying warm, but at what cost?
Enter Ponda, and their BioPuff® material. Based in Bristol in the UK, Ponda describe themselves as “a biomaterials company developing novel textiles from truly regenerative fibres”. BioPuff® is an insulation that keeps you warm, while its production is connected to the regeneration of some of our planet’s most vital ecosystems. Ponda use a plant called bulrush, or cattail, long wetland reeds that have a fluffy, hot-dog shaped head containing around 200,000 seeds packed into clusters. It’s these clusters that Ponda harvest, while also promoting biodiversity and practising paludiculture, the term for growing crops suited to wetland conditions.
Wetlands are some of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth and vital ecosystems for its health. 40% of the world’s plants and animals rely on them, with around 200 new species discovered each year in these freshwater environments. However, like most ecosystems they’re under threat, forcing species native to them to the brink of extinction. Over the past 300 years, 87% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared and since 1970 alone a third have vanished. 80% of global wastewater is released into wetlands untreated. These are environments that need help and through Ponda’s work they’re getting it. Having taken charge of several sites, a recent trial showed that the presence of dragonflies and damselflies in the area had increased by around 400%. The fashion industry is proving receptive too – Stella McCartney used BioPuff® in their iconic Falabella bag, while Ponda have also collaborated with outdoors brand Berghaus. Ponda is also a part of the Parley Future Material network, with BioPuff® used in our capsule collection released in 2024 in collaboration with Sky High Farm Universe.
We met with Ponda at their wetlands in Somerset on a harvest day to get a close-up look at the source of their biomaterial and learn more about these vital ecosystems – speaking with Julian Ellis-Brown (CEO and cofounder), Neloufar Taheri (Chief Operations Officer) and Finlay Duncan (Chief Technology Officer).
Bulrush seed heads
Q&A
Finlay Duncan
Could you introduce Ponda and its mission?
Julian: Ponda is a next-generation textiles manufacturer on a mission to connect novel textiles for the fashion industry to regenerating wetlands, like the one I'm standing with you in today.
We’re surrounded by bulrush – can you explain how you’re using the plant?
Julian: We’re working with a plant that you might call cattails, bulrushes or Typha. These are perennial reeds (a long-lived grass that flourishes in wetlands) that have these huge fluffy seed heads which sit on the top of them. These are great for two purposes. Firstly, they make fantastic plants for regenerating wetlands. They clean water systems and sequester huge amounts of carbon. Secondly, we discovered that these fluffy seed clusters are also fantastic for creating insulation for jackets.
What's the problem that Ponda is aiming to be the solution to?
Julian: The fashion industry faces many challenges when it comes to using materials that come from damaging origins. In our case, the materials we're interested in replacing are those such as goose down or polyester insulation. The reason why these are so problematic is that they’re highly carbon-intensive and have major problems around welfare. BioPuff® comes from a regenerative origin, which is giving back to environments improving biodiversity and helping to sequester carbon. Wetlands are so important because they hold twice as much carbon as all of the trees in the world combined within about a tenth of the area. They're also amazing for biodiversity – over 50% of all species across Earth rely on them in some way for their survival. Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of these wetlands around the world have been drained, leading to huge amounts of carbon emissions and biodiversity being devastated. By connecting a new material source to the regeneration of these spaces, we're able to directly fund carbon sequestration and biodiversity uplift just by changing the material in our clothes.
How much bulrush do you need per jacket?
Julian: It takes about 20 of these seed heads to fill a jacket like the one I'm wearing today, so one of the most critical parts of our yearly cycle is the harvest. Today, we are looking to harvest quite a few hundred kilos of these seed heads, so our teams will be moving around these fields, removing the seed heads whilst not damaging the land, upsetting that carbon sequestration or affecting the biodiversity which stays within these spaces.
“Our mission is to connect the restoration of wetlands with the creation of healthier materials and textiles for the fashion industry.”
Neloufar Taheri — Chief Operations Officer, Ponda
How receptive do you perceive the fashion industry to be changing harmful practices?
Nelly: I think overall the fashion industry is very receptive to wanting to shift towards more sustainable missions and practices – but one of the hardest things is figuring out where to start. One of the most important things that we try and do when we work with brands is really figure out what their targets are, what part of their supply chain they want to focus on, and educate them on the wider story of why precious ecosystems like this wetlands can make a huge impact in the fashion industry and the clothes we wear.
What's the process like when working with a major brand like Berghaus or Stella McCartney?
Nelly: The process can vary from brand to brand depending on their size or kind of what sector they sit in, but typically we try and work as collaboratively as possible. What we've found alongside with the brand partners that we work with is that if we're able to work across the entire company, with various departments in parallel, we're able to access more impact. So we try our best to start with the sampling process so that they can get a firsthand touch and feel of the material, and then we try to guide them through the entire integration testing, performance testing, wear trials, in order to ensure that it meets their standards. We work around how we might design or change the way we design to be able to integrate new next-gen materials that might require different kinds of construction or design methods to ensure that their customers understand what is actually going in the material and why these different things matter.
How does Ponda match up performance-wise to its environmentally destructive counterparts.
Nelly: It varies. It depends on what kind of performance metrics you're looking at. BioPuff® is naturally really warm, water repellent and fluffy, so it out-competes a lot of synthetic materials on the market. What we try to do with brands is figure out what the material’s actually being used for and try to be really selective about the products they're actually implementing BioPuff® into. Performance is one question, but to be able to understand what performance you need for what type of jacket I think is the other. So we may say to ourselves, ‘OK, well we know that we might need a goose down jacket for climbing a big mountain, but do we also need it for walking our dog or taking the train?’ What we try to do is try and match our performance to products rather than compare it to existing metrics that have been around for decades.
“Wetlands are so important because they hold twice as much carbon as all of the trees in the world combined within about a tenth of the area.”
Julian Ellis-Brown — Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Ponda
Could you tell me more about your mission to “make wetlands wet again”
Nelly: Our mission is to connect the restoration of wetlands with the creation of healthier materials and textiles for the fashion industry. We try to “make wetlands wet again” through our inherently healing supply chain and we want to see whether it's possible to support these really precious ecosystems that have been overlooked for centuries.
How did you discover that you could use these seed heads for clothing insulation while simultaneously regenerating wetlands?
Fin: We were interested in the idea that a lot of natural fibers are quite resource-intensive. Cotton, for example, takes a huge amount of water and resources to produce. We started looking at new feedstocks that we could introduce to the textile industry, and we started looking at various different plants. This plant had such interesting natural properties that we thought there was something here that we could use to make a textile, so that's really what drove the initial experimentation that we did. We then discovered that the plant thrives in wet conditions and that those conditions are actually something that we've lost a lot over the generations. Now, we're now trying to explore how we can rewet and restore wetlands in order to grow the crop and obtain this fiber, but also harness the environmental benefits alongside it – huge carbon benefits, flood protection, biodiversity, nutrient capture.
We've got a long way to go, and I think often it's easy to underestimate the scale of the fashion industry and the material demands that it has. However, there's a lot of amazing new solutions out there. Scaling those is going to be the next step, but getting them up to scratch and also meeting the performance of previous materials that are potentially more harmful is difficult and it will take time. But every day we’re demonstrating the value and benefit of these materials and also the supply chains that come alongside them.
Some of the Ponda team: Antonia Jara, Callum Leitch, Finlay Duncan, Julian Ellis-Brown, Neloufar Taheri, and Ella McMillan.
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