Yoga is all about finding inner peace, but what if you can’t stop wondering during your meditation what will happen with your yoga clothes when you’re done with them? Most brands use petrol-based materials, which will never biodegrade. Looking for a more sustainable alternative, to give you the peace of mind you aim for, the yoga gear brand Rumi X makes clothes from recycled PET bottles, coffee grounds, and soon crab shells!

Melissa Chu, founder of Rumi X, decided from the start that she didn’t want to use virgin materials for her clothes. Rather than using natural materials that were grown for that specific purpose, such as bamboo or organic cotton, she wanted to use materials that would otherwise end up on the landfill.

Rumi X collaborated with the Taiwanese company Singtex that uses a combination of coffee grounds and plastic bottles to create a fabric. The coffee grounds are collected from coffee shops and brought to a recycling facility. There, the oils are extracted from the ground, so that you don’t smell like a cuppa Joe all day. The coffee grounds are then mixed with polyester made from recycled PET bottles to spin into a yarn.

Coffee grounds have the advantage of offering odour control, UV protection and fast drying benefits. The fabric is 4-way stretch, very soft and breathable, all qualities you want from yoga pants.

Chu is currently working with the company Crabyon that makes fabric from waste crab shells. Crab shells consist of chitin, the most abundant bio-polymer in the world. The fabric of Crabyon is made of a composite fibre from chitin and cellulose, manufactured by uniformly blending the materials together. The fabric is soft, anti-bacterial and anti-microbial.

Knowing you have saved materials from the landfill, it’ll be much easier to become zen!

Photos: Rumi X