Our Fabrics

Eco-Friendly

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 World Linen are doing to create a more earth-friendly, green product. We're off to a good start in a lot of ways, and hopefully what follows will help you better understand the nature of our business, as well as the continuing direction in which we are moving.

Flax, Earth’s Finest Fabric Fiber

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.

Here are 10 examples:

The whole flax plant can be used, leaving no waste.

Flax grows naturally and requires less water and fewer pesticides than cotton, making it the more eco-friendly fabric. Because it’s a natural fiber, 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 industrial processes of spinning and weaving have very little to no impact on the environment. One of our main suppliers is constantly investing in new equipment and production methods, reducing the need for energy and water and eliminating or recycling most of the waste.
We always dye our linen locally, at a dyehouse just minutes away.
Our dyehouse uses low-impact dyes, and performs all services in-house, including finishing. Nearly all of their dyes are lead-free; the dyes that contain lead are composed of less than 5 parts per million, which is extremely low. Their dyes and processes are extremely low impact, and in an effort to conserve energy, they don't use high temperatures.