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Clothes made from stinging nettles

Bob Crebas still introduces himself as “an old hippy.” But these days it is not recycled washing machines and bric-a-brac that the Dutchman trades in. He has swapped all this for fashion collections made from stinging nettles, designed and produced by his fast-growing business Brennels.nl.

Four years ago, Crebas and his business partner were selling second-hand wares through a trading website called Marktplaats.nl when they were approached by eBay, the hugely successful auction website, and made the kind of offer you can’t refuse. The American firm bought out Marktplaats.nl for €225m, instantly pushing Crebas and his partner halfway up the list of Holland’s 500 richest people. But Crebas had no interest in upgrading his home or car: “Suddenly, I was in a position to put my money where my mouth is and make real my vision of doing something that would have a positive impact on the environment.”

So, once the family celebration with pizza and beer was over, Crebas and his wife, Carla, started researching what practices were the most damaging to the environment. They found that the cultivation of the enormous quantities of cotton used by the fashion industry — much loved because it appears to be “pure and natural” - is responsible for 25 per cent of all insecticides and 11 per cent of pesticides used globally, causing massive pollution and the deaths of thousands of people who cultivate the crops without protection. Nor is growing enough organic cotton to satisfy the demands of the clothing industry a viable alternative, says Crebas; it cannot be done in enough quantity on the land available — and if more land is made available it leads to logging and the use of agricultural land.

As he mulled over this dilemma, he learned that stinging nettles had been used in medieval times and more recently in both world wars, when other crops were scarce, to make clothing, but had since long fallen out of favour.

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