Lotus not waste anything

Aarushi Saxena visits a sustainable brand’s workshop in Cambodia, where lotus stem is turned into silk, leather, and packaging paper.

Largely lost through time, lotus silk weaving is indigenous to the Buddhist communities of old Myanmar (now Burma). Currently, few homegrown initiatives to revive the handicraft exist in Bao Loc in Vietnam and Manipur in India, and a commercially-scaled production in Cambodia, is dominating the market.

I had the chance to visit the same facility in Cambodia on a recent visit to Siem Reap, home to the 12th century Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia. Travelling on a bumpy road flanked by lotus fields, I crossed paths with its French founder Awen Deleval and got a chance to see the making of lotus silk fabric.

Women from the region surrounding Tonle Sap Lake in Siem Reap and Battambang form a bulk of Awen’s workforce at Samatoa, a brand he has been running since 2003. Over 150 of them have been upskilled to run the production of lotus silk and also vegan leather.

Precision key to good yarn

Lotus silk’s fine threads come from sticky fibres found in the plant’s stem. In the initial stage, women pluck lotus plants every morning and then clean the stems, removing thorns with an iron brush and washing off muddy residue. When the raw material is ready, it is handed over to another group. Seated on cane mats along a row of low tables, they take a few metre long lotus stems, making a shallow knife-cut in them. They then pull out thin, long filaments found inside and hand-roll them into a long fibre. This process is repeated until filaments have been extracted from all stems, and baskets full of fibre are ready to be turned into yarn.

These fibres are wrapped into skeins (a cylindrical ball of yarn), and then handspun onto micro-bobbins (tool onto which yarn is spun) using a spinning wheel. Lastly, the yarn is fed into a traditional loom where it is woven into lotus silk. Lotus silk is ranked as one of the most luxurious silks compared to other natural silks. “Though these fibres are fragile, once woven, they can be as durable as traditional silk. It has good elasticity, is crease resistant, absorbs moisture but dries fast. After testing at a laboratory, it was found that lotus fibre is an antibacterial fibre,” says Awen.

Precision is key to the process. The social entrepreneur says: “With any imperfections, the yarn will break during the spinning process and create faults in the fabric. To make one scarf, we create a yarn of 4,000 m over three weeks.”

Circularity in production

Samatoa is rooted in sustainability. It consciously capitalises on Cambodia’s natural resource — the lotus, which covers almost 30,000 acres of the country’s terrain, says Awen. With the lotus, the social enterprise is also beating land and water exploitation. Lotus plants grow on ponds and lakes and depend on rainfall – they do not compete with agricultural land. Furthermore, neither chemicals nor polluting energy sources like petroleum or electricity are used in the production.

Circular economy is also integral to the brand. During production, the lotus plant is engaged in its entirety — from stem to stamen. Fibres to make the silk yarn are sourced from the stems whereas the petals and floral components are used to make vegan leather, lotus tea and packaging.

Every year, Awen’s workshop transforms 3 lakh kilos of wasted lotus stems into textile. Pretty much the same amount of stem waste is left behind after extracting fibres from them. After 10 years of brainstorming and research, the company finally found a way to embrace circularity – generate biogas with the stem refuse.

Awen’s vision is: “We want to create 500 lotus harvesting jobs around the Tonle Sap Lake area, where a population with minimal access to amenities lives. By reaching the target, enough waste will be created to generate biogas. With biogas, we can provide electricity to 5,000 people who live around this region.”

Vegan leather 

While their biogas vision is still far from realisation, Samatoa’s ingenuity in finding other ways to utilise the stems and flowers is evident at their workshop. I saw rows of coloured translucent vegan leather sheets drying on clotheslines, paper pulp spread out on screens, and baskets filled with finely cut lotus petals.

The petals become tea. The paper pulp is a mixture of recycled paper, water and ground lotus stems, which is reused in packaging their silk merchandise. Their vegan leather is made by mixing lotus stem waste with oil, water and starch, then heating, spreading and drying the mixture into sheets. Kapok and banana fibres are also used in this vegan leather-making process. While most vegan leathers in the market have a fair percentage of plastic, Awen’s brand claims theirs is plastic-free and biodegradable. They add beeswax to create water-impermeability and durability. However, most vegan leathers are more durable due to the presence of plastic in their mixture.

Lotus leather has opened doors to new potential. Being easier to produce and scale, Samatoa can reach a broader market, beyond the luxury market its lotus silk caters to. Awen also hopes to enter into automotive interiors with this. Depending on the natural dyes added, the leather is available in shades of red, maroon, purple, orange, yellow, blues, greens, and pinks.