For her master’s degree at Central Saint Martins college in London, designer Jinghan Li turned fabric waste into edible candies.

The fashion industry is a very polluting one. It generates around 13 million tonnes of fabric waste every year, with 15 per cent wasted during pre-production. Sustainability debates around fashion usually focus on clothing being discarded, but scraps from the manufacturing process are an even deeper lying problem.

With her project called FabriCandy, Li turned scrap fabric into edible candy. The project “introduces a new way to think how scraps can be part of our body”. Using different bacterial enzymes, plant fibres can be decomposed into sugary glucose, an important source of energy for all organisms. This glucose in turn can be turned into candy, turning fabric waste into a new food and energy source.

Unfortunately, the process only works on natural fabrics, so fabrics blended with or made entirely of fossil-based resources cannot be converted. Though perhaps those can be turned into vanilla flavouring.

Photos: Jinghan Li