Linen Basics

Flax Linen Fabric is an Eco-Friendly Choice

More and more of our customers are asking us about the environmental impact of linen, and more specifically, what we at Zhai/Santorini are doing to create a more eco-friendly product. We specialize in linen, which is made from flax. Flax is an incredibly useful plant—so much so that leading environmental site Treehugger.com has called flax one of its “optimal materials for America.” In addition to linen textiles such as ours, flax is used to make products ranging from heat insulation, paper, and soap, to linoleum flooring, which is made from flax seed oil. Flax seeds are even touted for their nutritional and medicinal properties, due to high levels of lignans and Omega-3 fatty acids.

Flax and the linen textiles made from it are environmentally friendly in a number of ways.

-Flax grows naturally and requires less water and fewer pesticides than cotton, making it a more eco-friendly fabric.Because it is a natural fibre flax linen is recyclable and biodegrade.
-Flax is gentle on the land and is easy to incorporate into modern crop rotation cycles, preventing soil depletion.
-Very little energy is required to process flax.
-Linen yarn is inherently strong, which reduces the need for starching during spinning and weaving.
-Linen fabrics can be recycled into paper and insulation materials for the car industry.
-Flax linen is many times stronger than cotton, which means clothing, window treatments and upholstery made from linen are made to last rather than wind up in a landfill.
-The whole flax plant can be used, leaving no waste.
-The industrial processes of spinning and weaving have very little to no impact on the environment. 
-With modest water requirements flax minimises its impact on freshwater  resources.