Corn to Couture? Lycra and Qore Team On Bio-Derived Spandex

Alexandra Harrell
·3 min read

Traditional spandex—made of mainly polyurethane—isn’t inherently sustainable, considering it’s essentially just petroleum. But The Lycra Company is working on a bio-derived solution made from corn, the fiber technology group said at Sourcing Journal’s annual Sustainability Summit.

In a panel dubbed “The Power of Partnership,” moderated by Fairchild Studios’ director Lauren Parker, Lycra’s director of sustainability, Jean Hegedus, and Qore’s director of technology and sustainability, Andrea Vanderhoff, discussed a renewable fiber made with Qira, a next-generation 1,4-Butanediol (BDO).

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The two companies first teamed up in 2022 to enable the world’s first large-scale commercial production of this bio-derived spandex using Qira as one of its main ingredients. This should result in 70 percent of the Lycra fiber content being derived from annually renewable feedstock, thus potentially reducing the carbon footprint of Lycra fiber by up to 44 percent, per data from a screening life cycle assessment (LCA).

Qore will be able to produce about 65,000 tons of BDO a year, with production starting at the end of this year or the beginning of 2025. Vanderhoff said that production will utilize nearly 100 percent renewable wind power.

Qira is 100 percent biobased, Vanderhoff said, with the feedstock coming from renewable dent corn, also known as industrial corn, which is not produced for human consumption. This corn is grown in a 100-mile radius of Qore’s facility in south central Iowa—the Corn Belt—sourced chiefly from individual farmers.

“With this corn being grown in Iowa, we have enough annual rainfall as well. Along with the soil composition and the regenerative farming practices, irrigation is not needed whatsoever in Iowa to grow our corn,” Vanderhoff said, noting that the farmers also use regenerative farming practices like crop rotation and cover crops.

The dent corn itself has four main fractionated components, so every part is used where it has the most value. Approximately 4 percent is corn oil, 15 percent moisture, roughly 19 percent protein and fiber and 62 percent starch. And that starch is what’s used in the production of Qira.

“When that corn plant is growing, it’s sequestering a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and that carbon dioxide portion is what goes into making that starch portion,” Vanderhoff said. “Then that starch portion is processed down into smaller molecules into usable glucose.” In a “novel production process,” that glucose is fermented by microorganisms before the BDO—Qira—is extracted.

To transform that BDO into microfiber, Hegedus explained, Lycra takes the BDO and converts it into another chemical called PTMEG. And that makes up about 70 percent of the total content of the raw fiber. However, the remaining 30 percent is still made with petroleum-based ingredients, though Lycra is “working on solutions” to change that.

“One thing people don’t realize is a big chunk of products that are made out of petroleum can be directly replaced with products that are made from corn,” Steve Kuiper, a fourth-generation farmer, said in a video the two companies showed during the panel. “I’m excited about our products being used in sustainable fashion; you can produce 4,000 different things out of corn. And if we can make life for our consumers better, I think that’s a win for everybody.”