HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY, EDINBURGH, UK. A fashion student has just recently developed a cotton-free type of jeans which she claims could be the key to reducing the materials that the clothing industry is currently using to produce jeans. The new type of jeans she was able to developed uses denim made from sustainable wood pulp.

This wood pulp comes from the eucalyptus tree which grows rapidly and organically. That means it won’t need gene manipulation, artificial irrigation or even pesticides just to speed up the growth process of the tree. The wood pulp is spun into cotton-like yarn which they have marketed under Tencel, its official trade name.

To give the new type of jeans the stone-washed effect like the usual denims, they also used digital-printing technology for it. The best part about the entire process to create this new type of “wooden jeans” is that it uses only a fifth of the chemicals, energy and water as compared to its conventional counterpart.

Dawn Ellams is a Ph.D researcher at the School of Textiles and Design from the Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. She is the head researcher and the developer of this new type of jeans that could actually make huge waves in the clothing industry in the next few months once it is made commercially available.

Consumers would surely be more excited to know that this new type of jeans only costs roughly $42 to make. That means we could expect it to sell so much cheaper than the usual pair of jeans that we are used to. Aside from jeans, Dawn Ellams is also looking into creating an entire collection that consists of different types of clothes made out of eucalyptus wood pulp.