Low Carbon Industrial has partnered with Saitex, one of the world's largest denim manufacturers, to bring Stelapop to the architecture and design community. It is a circular textile panel made from reclaimed denim, available now.
Saitex has spent decades re-engineering how denim is made, with circularity built into every step of the process. Even so, cutting and finishing cloth leaves offcuts that can't be designed out, and a share of garments fail quality checks and can't be repaired. When producing over 20,000 pairs of jeans per day, even a tiny margin of error creates a significant waste stream. None of it was made to be used once and set aside.
These offcuts become Stelapop, turning reclaimed denim into a sheet material. Saitex manufactures the material, LCI designs the range, and we work together to improve the product and how it is made. Seventy per cent of each panel is this reclaimed denim. The rest is a water-based binder mixed with natural rubber, finished with matte lacquer for durability. One panel uses around 14kg of textile waste, roughly the equivalent of 35 pairs of jeans diverted from landfill.
The denim brings a depth of colour and pattern that shifts with the light. It comes in six colourways, from pale through to near-black, and the surface reads as the cloth it came from, with an almost mineral character.
At 5mm thickness, Stelapop is a versatile sheet material. It cuts, drills, and routes with the tools already in a joinery workshop, and scoring the reverse lets it form a curve, suiting it to interior wall panels, cladding, shelving, and furniture. It is not for worktops, wet areas, or outdoor use, and the cut edge needs sealing.
Stelapop is a material to be designed with. Versatile production methods allow the manufacture of products such as furniture, trays, and other small homewares. At the end of its life a panel is repaired and re-used first, and remade into a new panel only as a last resort.
Stelapop is available now in six colourways, with free samples for trade.
