Canopy pilot shows wheat straw can replace wood pulp in lyocell

Canopy just put a sharper bet on the future of fashion fiber: wheat straw can step into the place of wood pulp in lyocell and viscose, and the result can still make credible cloth. In Project Latvus, launched in 2023 and completed in 2025, the group tested whether an ugly afterlife for crop waste could become a cleaner feedstock for man-made cellulosic fibres, at a moment when Canopy says more than 300 million trees are still cut down every year for those materials. The stakes are especially loud in India, where over 90 million tonnes of crop residue, mostly rice and wheat straw, are burned annually.

That is the hard pivot here. Canopy’s report, From Wheat Straw to Wardrobes: Fashioning a New Fibre Future, frames wheat straw not as a cute sustainability story, but as an industrial substitute that could reduce pressure on forests, cut the smoke from open burning, and build a more resilient supply chain. Canopy says residue burning is responsible for up to 40% of Delhi’s air pollution, while PM2.5 levels in Northern India have recently run 15 to 45 times above World Health Organization safety guidelines. If wheat straw can move from field waste to fiber feedstock, it is not just a cleaner material play. It is an air-quality and land-use play too.

The pilot was designed to prove the whole chain, not just one shiny lab step. Chempolis says the wheat straw was refined with its formico® biorefining technology into Bio2™Textile dissolving pulp, then traced with TextileGenesis from field to processing, yarn, fabrics and finished garments. Canopy says the project produced yarns and fabrics that met brand performance and technical standards across multiple product applications. The partner list reads like a real industry cross-section, with Fashion for Good, H&M Group, Reformation, C&A, Chempolis, TITK, Inovafil, Yee Chain, Shahi, Filpucci, DBL, Textile Genesis and A2P (Agri to Power) Energy all in the mix, backed by Laudes Foundation.

But this is where the romance ends and the supply-chain math begins. Chempolis says the pilot validated wheat-straw dissolving pulp as a drop-in replacement for wood-based pulp in staple lyocell production, while also flagging where scale-up and coordination still need work. That is the part brands will have to obsess over now: yield, contamination, and whether straw can be gathered cleanly from regional sourcing zones without the economics collapsing under transport, sorting and processing costs. A successful pilot can make a good sample. A scalable feedstock has to keep mills fed.

Canopy’s larger pitch is straightforward and hard to ignore. If brands pool demand for next-gen MMCFs, the sector can get closer to price parity and commercial scale faster, while leaving forests standing and giving rural growers a new revenue stream for material that is often burned. That is the kind of shift that can change a fiber wall, not just a mood board.